India’s Richest Man Won’t Move into Billion-Dollar Home for Fear of Curse

The 27-storey, billion-dollar tower home in Mumbai, called Antilia, was completed a year ago but India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, and his family refuse to move in for fear of bad-luck curse.

Dubbed the most expensive home in the world, Antilia has been dominating the Mumbai skyline ever since it was completed last October, but Mukesh Ambani, who is ranked by Forbes as the ninth wealthiest person in the world with a fortune of $27billion, has been reluctant to move in. There’s been a lot of speculation around the subject, considering the chairman of Reliance Industries spent around $1 billion building the impressive tower home for him and his family, but according to reports cited by the Daily Mail, the reason is the building fails to conform with the ancient Indian architectural principles of vastu shastra.

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Stunning Landscapes Are Actually Built in a Fish Tank

They may look like some of the most beautiful places on Earth, but they are actually miniature topographies of fictitious environments, built in a large fish tank, by New-York-based artist Kim Keever.

The pictures below look a lot like traditional paintings, but the process in which they are created is anything but traditional. In a era when technology allows artists to create large-scale works with a few clicks of a mouse, Kim Keever chooses to construct his surreal landscapes by hand. Using hand-crafted plaster molds, various found objects, color pigments and lighting, he manages to create realistic worlds captured with a large-format camera. Keever places his dioramas inside a 200-gallon fish tank, fills it with water, arranges the lighting and adds pigments at just the right moment, before trying to take the perfect picture. Although he uses a digital darkroom to emphasize color and tone, his photographs are unaltered in the process.

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Swallowable Perfume Makes Your Sweat Smell Nice

Netherlands-based artist Lucy McCrae teamed up with a synthetic biologist to create a perfume pill that actually turns your sweat into a fragrance.

Swear has never been known for its nice odour, but that’s all going to change as soon as “Swallowable Parfum” becomes a reality. Australian artist Lucy McCrae is currently working on a revolutionary pill designed to deliver perfume directly into the body, turning the skin into an atomiser. ‘Swallowable Parfum is a digestible scented capsule that emits a unique odor through your own perspiration,’ McCrae writes on her website. The pill will essentially turn sweat into a fragrance that will have its own characteristic for every person, because we are genetically unique.

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Japanese Art Collective Turns Street Rats into Taxidermied Pikachus

Chim Pom, an art collective from japan, have found an ingenious way of dealing with Tokyo’s rat problem while attracting the attention of Pokemon fans; they caught some street rats and turned them into real-life taxidermied Pikachus.

But how does anyone come up with such a crazy idea? Well, it was all about the concept of “super rat”. The rats of Center-gai street, in Tokyo’s Shibuya ward got the nickname “super rats”because of their alleged immunity to human-made poison. They’re a real nuisance and aren’t afraid to come out of their hiding places even when people are walking by. Apparently there are thousands of giant rats lurking around the place, and this got the six members of Chim Pom about the famous anime character Pikachu, from the hit series Pokemon. they decided to catch some of these super street rats and turn them into real-life versions of the yellow, electrically-charged cartoon rat.

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World’s Biggest Carved Pumpkin Is a Tribute to Zombies

Life-size zombies crawling out of a 1,800-pound giant pumpkin? You have to face it, Halloween carved pumpkins don’t get a lot cooler than that.

A crowd of Halloween fans gathered at the New York Botanical Garden, the other day, to see pumpkin-carving master Ray Villafane work his magic on the world’s biggest pumpkin. Ray, an established artist known also for his incredible toy and sand sculptor, had something special in mind for this year’s event, and it’s safe to say zombie fans were pleased with his idea. He used two of the largest pumpkins from this year’s harvest, one of them a record-holder, to create a creepy scene featuring zombies covered in pumpkin guts crawling out of a giant squash. Ray spent hours painstakingly carving his undead work of art, but his efforts were generously rewarded with cheering and clapping.

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Babushka Artwork Takes Quilling to a Whole New Level

I’ve always found quilling a fascinating art form, but after seeing Yulia Brodskaya’s mind-blowing “Babushka” I feel there’s nothing a talented artist can’t do with just a few colorful strips of paper.

I discovered quilling a year ago, and since then I have posted a number of impressive works of art created using only strips of colorful paper, but I haven’t seen anything as impressive as Babushka since Susan Myers’ recreation of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. It takes a lot of skill to shape simple pieces of paper into a detailed artwork, but Yulia Brodskaya has definitely taken quilling to new heights, using light and shadow to create an awe-inspiring masterpiece that carries a powerful emotional message. The Russian-born artist says Babushka is “the first piece in the series of works which I consider a declaration of love to the material and the technique. It is also an attempt to raise a profile of this paper craft, which has been previously regarded with some disdain, and to bring this type of artwork on a new level in terms of its ability to convey meaning and emotions.” She’s definitely up to a great start and I can’t wait to see what she does next.

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Japan’s Ear-Cleaning Parlors Bring Back Childhood Memories

Japanese associate ear-cleaning with their childhood and many of them are willing to pay to return to those carefree days if only for just a few minutes. That’s what makes ear-cleaning salons one of the most popular businesses in Japan, right now.

Ever since Japan authorities decided to deregulate ear-cleaning as a medical profession, making it available without a medical license, hundreds of salons offering the service started popping up all over the country. The vast majority of clients are men looking to relax their minds after a stressful day, and travel back to the days when they used to rest their heads on their mothers’ laps for the occasional ear cleaning session. Three out of four clients claim it’s so relaxing they actually fall asleep while the kimono-wearing cleaners excavate the wax out of their ears. Some say their wives clean their ears at home, but it’s just not the same without the traditional Japanese style room and the tatami mats.

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Incredibly Realistic Pumpkin-Carved Portraits by Alex Wer

Alex Wer is an awesome artist who can take just about any image and turn it into a piece of everlasting art, by carving it into a craft pumpkin. His Halloween creations look so almost to good to be real.

Alex Wer, also known as “The Pumpkin Geek” first started exercising his awesome talent as a pumpkin carver two years ago, by accident. His wife asked him to carve a pumpkin for her office Open House, and since he had always enjoyed carving pumpkins, he thought it would be fun. He only has a few weeks until Halloween, so he had to decide between carving a real pumpkin that would spoil within a week, or go for a craft pumpkin that could theoretically last forever. He went for the second option, and although he only created a logo and some script, Alex’s pumpkin was a hit at his wife’s event. Before he knew it he had 35 orders for custom logos and children pictures, and his “Orange Empire” was born.

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Wacky Business Owner Runs Company via Robot Proxy

Richard Garriot, the owner of a Austin, Texas-based video-game development company, has found the perfect way to keep an eye on his employees when he’s out of office – a $15,000 robot called QB60.

Garriott, who founded Origin Systems back in the 1980s, a company best known for creating the Ultima franchise (which led to the popular MMO “Ultima Online”), first discovered his robot stand-in last year, when he and the woman of his dreams got married in a 500-year-old chateau in France. He wanted his mother to be by his side one one of the most important days in his life, but the wasn’t in the best shape for such a long flight, so he had to figure out a way to have her there, without having her fly. The solution came from a California company called Anybots Inc., which specializes in making avatar-like robots that can be controlled via computer. The futuristic gizmo looks a lot like a balancing segway, but it’s actually a lot more: an ever-present telepresence equipped with two cameras, a microphone and a speaker that can be operated from anywhere using a broadband Internet connection.

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Incredible Photographs Look Like Traditional Chinese Paintings

Using a style known as pictorialism, Chinese artist Dong Honh-Oai was able to create a series of amazing photographs that look like Chinese traditional paintings.

Born in 1929, in Guangzhou, China’s Guangdong province, Dong Hong-Oai left his home country when he was just 7, after the sudden death of his parents. The youngest of 24 siblings, he was sent to live within the Chinese community of Saigon, Vietnam. There he became an apprentice at a photography studio owned by Chinese immigrants and learned the basics of photography. During this time he became particularly interested in landscape photography, which he practiced in his spare time. At 21, after doing a series of odd jobs, he became a student at the Vietnam National Art University.

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Necomimi – Japan’s Wacky Cat Ears Controlled by Brainwaves

Japanese company Neurowear has invented an innovative and wacky set of furry cat ears that help you express a state of mind without having to say a word. It’s called Necomimi and it’s bound to become one of the world’s coolest gadgets/fashion accessories.

Just in case you were wondering what Japan will come up with next after a seemingly endless number of wacky and funny inventions (Botaoshi, Reptile Cafe, Yokai Monster Train, etc.), I’m here to provide an answer – Necomimi, a revolutionary headband that uses sensors to read your brainwaves. That’s doesn’t sound weird at all, on the contrary, it sounds groundbreaking, but the offbeat-loving Japanese designed the gadget to look like a wearable set of cat ears, probably hoping to capitalize on people’s fascination with cuteness and cutting-edge technology.

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10 Coolest Finds of the Week #14

Superhero Wages War on Dog Poo (Orange News)

Biggest.Crocodile.Ever (Twisted Sifter)

Light Paintings by Brian Hart (Wooster)

The Ancient Tradition of Fishing with Cormorants (Environmental Graffiti)

Real-Life Spider Woman Climbs 70ft Wall to Avoid Admission Fee (Daily Mail)

Japanese Anti-Aging Goggles Look Pretty Darn Uncomfortable (Book of Joe)

Dude Conquers Super Mario 64 with His Feet (Nerd Approved)

The Mother of All Hotwheels Tracks (Autoblog)

2-Year-Old Girl Brutally Run-Over Twice; 18 People Pass without Helping (Weird Asia News)

Storm Chaser Stares into the Eye of a Tornado (Environmental Graffiti)

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Panama’s El Valle de Anton – Where Trees Are Square

A few miles north of the Panama Canal Zone is the Valley of Square Trees a unique tourist attraction where trees of the cottonwood family have rectangular trunks.

Unique in the entire world, this group of square-shaped cottonwood trees grow in a valley created from the ashes of a giant volcano – El Valle de Anton. Featuring hard-right angles, the trunks of the square trees have baffled tourists and scientists alike, for several years. Experts from the University of Florida took saplings of the mysterious trees to see if they retain the same characteristics in a different environment, and concluded that their square shape must have something to do with conditions unique to the valley in which they grow. Evidence that the cause of this bizarre phenomenon is deep-seated is indicated by the fact that their tree rings, which represent its growth, are also square.

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101 Uses for My Ex-Wife’s Dress – The Hilarious Book of a Divorced Man

When his ex-wife, who left him after 12 years of marriage, told him he could do whatever he wished with her wedding dress, 38-year-old Kevin Cotter set out to prove a wedding dress isn’t as useless as you think, and became an Internet sensation in the process.

With the help of his brother Colin, box salesman Kevin Cotter managed to get over a painful divorce using what many would call an unorthodox therapy. Following his breakup and a family brainstorming session, the 38-year-old decided to try and find various uses for his ex’s wedding dress. Not the easiest of challenges, but the two brothers came up with 101 ways to reuse a wedding dress, started a successful site documenting their experiences and are now preparing to launch a book. MyExWifesWeddingDress.com became an Internet hit just three weeks after he started posing photos of ridiculous ways to repurpose a wedding dress, and letters of support started coming from all over the world. This inspired the Cotter brothers to come up with even more ridiculous dress uses. They discovered it made a great punching bag, yoga mat, shower curtain, snow camouflage, grill cover and even a Darth Vader scarecrow.

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Japan’s Anti-Groping Women-Only Train Cars

Groping on public transportation is an international problem, but Japanese railway companies have found an effective way to stop it by introducing women-only train and subway cars.

It’s a known fact that Tokyo is overcrowded and that is most obvious during rush hour, when professional pushers shove people into train cars so the doors can close properly. Unfortunately this is the kind of environment where perverts thrive. Usually most people mind their own business, reading a magazine, checking their email or talking on the phone, but some men prefer to talk dirty to the women next to them and groping them. This kind of molestation or “chikan” as the Japanese call it, happens every day in Japanese major cities, and lost of women choose to be quiet and bear it, because of the way male-dominated Japanese society functions. But ever since Japanese railway stations introduced the women-only train cars, they don’t have to, anymore.

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