The town of Herringen, in central Germany, is home to a heap of sodium chloride (table salt) so massive that it has come to be known as Monte Kali. It is the world’s largest artificial salt mountain.

The origin of Monte Kali can be traced back to the year 1976, when potash salt started being extracted from mines around the town of Hessen. Back then, potash was used to make products like soap and glass, but today it is an important ingredient in several fertilizers, synthetic rubber, and even some medicines, so extraction intensified over the last few decades. The problem with potash is that mining it generates a lot of sodium chloride as a byproduct, so you need somewhere to store it. The company operating the mines started dumping all this salt a few miles from Herringen, and over the years it created a giant salt mountain locals named Monte Kali or Kalimanjaro (puns for Kalisalz, the German word for ‘potash’).

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Vibrant is a smart ingestible capsule that vibrates inside your intestines to mechanically stimulate the colon and increase the frequency of bowel movements without the use of drugs.

No one really likes talking about it, but chronic constipation is a serious health issue of our time. Either because of age-related issues, questionable lifestyle choices, diet, or just bad genes, constipation affects a large number of adults in the developed world. Things like exercise and fiber-rich foods can help, but for a significant number of people, they simply aren’t viable options. Chronic idiopathic constipation sufferers struggle to find relief even with strong laxative therapies and eventually have to undergo uncomfortable medical procedures to clear their colon. Luckily, they now have a drug-free alternative in the form of a vibrating capsule.

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The Indonesian city of Jakarta is home to one of the most unusual residential projects in the world – a suburb located atop a 10-storey shopping mall.

Over the past 20 years, Jakarta has become one of the world’s most crowded megacities. With over 10 million residents in its metropolitan area alone and up to three times that in the greater Jakarta area, the city is quickly running out of land to build on. While other crowded capitals, like Tokyo, are expanding vertically, Jakarta is expanding horizontally, with most residents preferring low-rise houses instead of apartments. With real-estate in increasingly short supply, developers have been forced to think outside the box, and that’s how urban oddities like Cosmo Park came to exist…

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In an attempt to explore the relationships people have with their modern accessories like smartphones and smartwatches, researchers recently created a smartwatch powered by a living organism.

Devices like smartphones, smartwatches, and laptops have become a part of our daily routine, and scientific experiments have shown that many people feel that they can’t function properly without them. Yet as a result of consumerism culture, most of us have no problem discarding our gadgets as soon as we can afford to buy new, more advanced ones, even if we don’t really need them. But what if there was a way to feel more attached to these gadgets, would that make us think twice before replacing them? Inspired by the Tamagochi, a Japanese toy that became an international phenomenon during the 1990s, scientists at Chicago University created a unique type of smartwatch that only functioned if the living organism inside of it was kept alive.

The Tamagochi was an egg-shaped device that allowed users to take care of a digital pet by feeding, training and disciplining it. If not given enough attention, the pet would die, and players would have to start over. It was immensely popular in the 1990s and early 2000s and is still available today. This toy was the original inspiration for a unique smartwatch where the digital pet was replaced by a living organism – a slime mold.

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Diana Caldarescu is a talented technical designer and fashion illustrator who specializes in chandelier-shaped earrings that actually light up.

Having miniature chandeliers hanging from your earlobes may sound kitsch, but if that’s the style you’re going for, you may as well go big with the amazing light-up chandelier earrings of Diana Caldarescu. The young New York-based artist creates these metal wonders out of brass, sterling silver, 14-karat gold, and glass crystals and adds a bit of magic in the form of LED-tipped candles that actually turn on thanks to power provided by a small battery pack hidden behind the wearer’s ear.

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A Missouri man can consider himself lucky to be alive after he ruptured a neck artery and suffered three strokes because of turning his head too quickly during a game of pickleball.

Joel Hentrich, a 35-year-old “super-fit” man from Festus, Missouri suffered the freak accident in November of last year. He and some friends were playing a game of pickleball, a racket sport similar to tennis, when he quickly turned his head to one side to track a ball. He felt and heard a strong pop in the back of his head, and immediately started experiencing symptoms that he had never felt before. Little did he know that that quick neck turn had set in motion a series of injuries that would leave him fighting for his life.

Moments after that violent neck pop, Joel experienced the worst vertigo in his life, and a couple of minutes later, he was being helped to the bench by his friends, because he couldn’t walk on his own.

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AI is everywhere these days, and the humble baby stroller industry is no exception. Canadian stroller maker Glüxkind is set to release the world’s most advanced AI-powered baby stroller.

Originally unveiled at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the Glüxkind Ella is a technological wonder compared to most other baby strollers. Calling it a stroller sounds a bit unfair, considering that it’s more of a high-tech many that can independently rock your baby to sleep, assist the user on uphill and downhill slopes, and constantly monitor surroundings via an array of sensors and cameras, among many other impressive functions. It may look like a regular stroller at first sight, but Ella is actually a small battery-powered vehicle powered by artificial intelligence.

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Smartwatch manufacturers are constantly trying to one-up each other with feature-rich devices, but one Japanese company prides itself on making the world’s dumbest smartwatch.

The Stone Watch is not a smartwatch, it’s just designed to look like one. Created by Japanese capsule toy maker Tama-Kyu, the low-tech accessory doesn’t even tell time, let alone feature advanced tech like heart rate measurement, or smartphone connectivity. It doesn’t even have a display, it’s just a glossy, black piece of plastic with a silicone band that does nothing but look nice on your wrist.

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Momotsuki, a 20-year-old artist from Japan, blends her love of gardening and fantasy into a unique art form she calls named “Fairy Dress“.

If you think about it, flowers make perfect dresses for fairies, but you need the skill and imagination to turn them into functional garments, and Momotsuki, the talented artist behind the ‘Fairy Dress’ brand, has plenty of both. A passionate gardener with over 14 years of experience, the 20-year-old woman had the brilliant idea to combine her passion for plants with her love of fantasy, fairies in particular. She uses flowers like pansies, morning glories, roses and carnations to create beautiful dresses that any fairy would call herself lucky to wear.

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According to NASA Earth Observatory satellites, the coldest place on Earth is a mountain ridge on the East Antarctic Plateau where temperatures can drop to -135.8 degrees Fahrenheit (-93.2 degrees Celsius).

For the past week, much of the US has been affected by an extreme winter storm that brought massive snowfalls, destructive winds, and freezing temperatures as low as -20 degrees Fahrenheit (-28 degrees Celsius). That’s low enough for the average person to suffer frostbite in just under 10 minutes of direct exposure, but it’s nowhere near as dangerous as the coldest place on Earth. NASA satellites recently a high mountain ridge on the East Antarctic Plateau where, on clear winter nights, temperatures drop to an abysmal -135.8 degrees Fahrenheit (-93.2 degrees Celsius).

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The AcryPhone is a rudimentary device designed to mimic the look and feel of a smartphone in order to help users conquer their handheld addiction.

As much as we try to deny it, most of us are addicted to smartphones. We try to limit the time we spend looking at them, but we constantly find ourselves instinctively reaching for them in search of that little dose of dopamine our brains crave. That’s just one of the many signs of an addiction that’s much more serious and difficult to overcome than we like to admit. Luckily, we will soon have an alternative that looks and feels just like a smartphone but has none of the features that got us hooked to it in the first place.

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Elito ‘Amangpintor’ Circa is a Filipino artist who rose to fame for using his own blood to create canvas paintings that have attracted both praise and criticism over the years.

Born in a poor family that couldn’t afford to buy improper art supplies, Elito Circa experimented with a variety of unusual mediums as a child, including plums and tomatoes, but it was when he accidentally scraped his hand that he discovered the art medium that would mark his artistic career – his own blood. He quickly realized that the blood not only made his paintings more durable, as it was harder to erase from the canvas, but that it also made his artworks his own in a way that he had never imagined before.

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Sergey Artemyev is a Russian artist who specializes in oil on canvas and pastel on canvas paintings, including some of the best optical illusions we’ve ever seen.

When creating painted replicas of real-life objects, depth and thickness are some of the toughest things to pull off, which makes sense, as creating painted renditions of three-dimensional objects is anything but easy. Still, we’ve some pretty impressive optical illusions in the past, so it’s definitely doable, but few can do it better than Sergey Artemyev. The Russian artist is so confident in his ability to paint hyperrealistic replicas of various objects that he places them right next to his artworks and you still can’t tell which one is real.

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Izumi is a young Japanese food artist who specializes in detailed cake icing artworks inspired by popular manga and anime characters.

We’ve featured some incredible cake artists over the last 12 years, from the super-talented Sarah Hardy, who can create edible replicas of just about anything, to Chinese patissier Zhou Yi, whose creations look more like porcelain dolls than sugar paste, but when it comes to anime-inspired cake art, Japanese artist Izumi is in a class of her own. One of her latest projects, an edible, three-dimensional rendition of Kaoru Hakaze from the Ensemble Stars! video game recently went viral, and that’s how most people discovered her impressive portfolio of cake decorations.

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A Pittsburgh-based robotics and engineering startup recently unveiled Moonwalkers, a pair of battery-powered shoes that it claims can boost walk speeds by up to 250%.

At first glance, Moonwalkers look like a pair of futuristic rollerskates, but there is actually a lot more to them than that. You’re actually meant to walk with them the way you would regular shoes or sneakers, letting the motorized wheels put a spring in your step. Powered by a state-of-the-art brushless DC motor, this ingenious contraption is actually a platform that can be attached to a wide variety of footwear to significantly increase your walking speed up to a reported 7mph/11kph. For comparison, humans’ average walking speed ranges from 2.5 to 4 mph. The sensation of walking with the world’s fastest shoes has been compared to that of walking on a ‘moving walkway’ in an airport.

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