Steven Magee, a 29-year-old hungry demolition man has become the first person to actually finish the giant breakfast plate offered by the Hungry Horse cafe, in Corby, England.

No matter how much you love English breakfasts, The Big One at Hungry Horse cafe is hard to swallow. But, where sixty other people before him failed, Steven Magee, a young Scott who says he usually only has cereal for breakfast, managed to become the first person to go through the whole thing. He needed 1 hour and 20 minutes, and six cups of tea to down three sausages, three burgers, three fried eggs, three bacon rashers, three black pudding slices, three square sausage slices and triple servings of beans and mushrooms. That sounds like enough, but he also had to go through triple helpings of potato waffles, potato scones, hash browns, fried bread portions and three rounds of bread and butter and toast.

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German model maker Robert Gülpen has built the most expensive car model in the world – a 1:8 scale replica of the Lamborghini Aventador made from carbon, platinum gold and decorated with precious stones.

52-year-old Gülpen, who describes his creation as a “high-tech work of art” said he wanted to create something unique that has never been done before. A former mechanical engineer, Gülpen started making miniature car models from precious metals in the late 1990s and eventually became a renown miniature car model maker. He decided the cutting edge Lamborghini Aventador LP 700-4 would be the perfect choice for his greatest masterpiece.  The body of the car is made from carbon, just like the original, and features around €2 million-worth of precious metals and stones. Metal was used for the detailed rims and diamonds were inserted into the seats, steering wheel and headlights.

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Sticking hundreds of small denomination coins into tree trunks is apparently a popular way of getting rid of illnesses.

At least that’s what the staff at a holiday attraction in Gwynedd discovered after investigating the story behind several coin-covered tree trunks in the vicinity of Italianate village Portmeirion. The first tree was cut down four years ago, in order to widen the path to the picturesque settlement founded in 1925, and within only a few months it was covered with 2p coins. Now there are seven such tree trunks in the area, so estate manager Meurig Jones started an investigation to uncover the origins of this unusual habit.

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Michael Carmichael, from Alexandria, Indiana has created the world’s largest ball of paint by covering a regulations baseball with tens of thousands of coats of colored paint, for more than 30 years.

The story of Michael’s unusual hobby began one day in the mid 1960s, when he was playing baseball for the Knox County Children’s Home. A baseball accidentally landed in some paint, and Michael was so intrigued by it that he decided to hold on to it as a keepsake. During the two years after that, he kept on dipping it in paint and painting it by hand, until it reached the size of a football. He donated his colorful creation to the Indiana Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Children’s Home Museum, where it’s still on display today. Later he tried to get it back so he could continue painting it, but they wouldn’t give it to him.

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One of the wackiest competitions in the world, the annual World Egg Throwing Championships held in Swaton, England feature a variety of events, all having to do with smashed eggs.

According to the World Egg Throwing Federation website, egg throwing is a local tradition inspired by historic events that occurred in the 14th century. It’s believed the ancient village of Swaton has stood on theses very grounds since before Roman times, but it wasn’t until 1322 that it became forever linked to egg throwing. The newly appointed Abbot was assigned to the Parish of Swaton  by royal decree, and found a rather ingenious way of increasing church attendance. As the only person in the settlement to own chickens, he provided one egg for each attendee to his sermons. But when the waters of the River Eau flooded, cutting off the church from the village, monks started throwing the eggs to the waiting locals. Legend has it when the gap became even wider, the monks used small trebuchets to make sure the eggs traveled the required distance.

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The Most Beautiful Sand Dunes on Earth (Environmental Graffiti)

Dog Has World’s Longest Ears (Orange News)

Real Starship Troopers Powered Suit Is as Badass as It Sounds (Dvice)

Fat Cat Photoshopped into Artistic Masterpieces (Geekosystem)

The Sick Collector and His 1,000 Pairs of Shoes (Asia Obscura)

10 Most Extreme Acrobatic Gymnastics (Oddee)

“Beauty Class” Chinese TV Show Teaches Women How to Be Perfect (China Smack)

The Abandones Cold War Listening Station Built on the Ruins of Nazi Berlin (Environmental Graffiti)

Pionen Data Center – The Internet as Provided by a James Bond Villain (Atlas Obscura)

Ben & Jerry’s unveils Schweddy Balls Ice-Cream (Topix)

Raincatch is a water purification raincoat that turns collected rain water into drinkable water the wearer can enjoy on the go.

Let’s just put it this way, wearing Raincatch in a rainy city like London means you’ll probably never be thirsty again. Sure, in some regions of the world rain water is still clean enough to be drunk as it falls from the sky, but in today’s polluted climate drinking it without purifying it first poses a real risk. But thanks to the invention of two CIID students, Hyeona Yang and Joshua Noble, you’ll be able to enjoy refreshing rain water on the go, without a care in the world.

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Now here’s something you don’t see every day – a skilled Taiwanese chef uses leftover lobster shells to create intriguing miniature motorcycles.

We’ve seen amazing miniature motorcycles made from computer parts, used wristwatches, and wood, but the ones crafted by chef Huang Mingbo are definitely something you don’t see everyday. Apparently he’s not a fan of throwing away lobster shells after preparing a delicious dinner, so he came up with an ingenious way of repurposing them. The food carving expert showcased his lobster shell motorcycles during a cooking art seminar in Fuzhou, southeast China, leaving attendants baffled.

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I’ve posted my share of impressive mosaics, throughout the years, but the keyboard key space shuttle created by Doug Powell has to be one of the coolest ever.

Known for his incredibly detailed puzzle-piece mosaics, Powell has now turned to a more modern medium – keyboard keys. For his latest project, a beautiful mosaic of a space shuttle, he spent 190 hours placing 5,951 keyboard pieces in just the right place to create a detailed image. Within the artwork created for Ripley’s Believe It or Not, the artist also included 14 hidden words for the viewers to discover. Head over to Ripley’s blog and see if you can find all 14.

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This is what you’d expect to see in the lavish Palace of Versailles built by Louis the XIVth, but it’s actually the inside of a pharmaceutical company in Harbin, northeast China.

Citizens of Harbin were outraged to see what the state-controlled Harbin Pharmaceutical Group spent their funding on rather than solving more pressing issues, like the factory’s sewage problems, but representatives of the company said the recently emerged photos are part of a smear campaign. They claim the photos show the museum, which takes up three floors in the same building as the factory, where the company showcases local art. Now I’m not an expert on Chinese art, but those gold-tinted walls and lavish chandeliers look pretty European, and some of those rooms look an awful lot like conference halls…In fact, photos of the museum on the company’s website showed white-painted walls, brown wooden floors and none of the opulence in the photos.

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We all have our small hobbies and passions, but for Heather Hems sewing has been a huge part of her life for the last 17 years. She has dedicated at least 10 -12 hours to sewing every day and has created a collection of embroidered artworks twice the size of the Bayeux Tapestry.

The 69-year-old pensioner claims she has dedicated over 70,000 hours to sewing, over the last 17 years, time in which she also managed to hold down a job as a typesetter, raise three children and do house chores. But how did she find time to do it all, you ask? Mrs. Hems says she worked all day, then took care of her kids, and finally sat down and sewed 10 to 12 hours every night. She only slept for two hours before doing it all over again. This amazing lady says she owes her ambitious mentality to her father who used to challenge her to do things as a child, and race to see who could collect various stuff faster.

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Every year, at the end of August, Latvians celebrate Milk, Bread and Honey Festival with a special race between boats made from thousands of empty milk cartons.

The milk carton boat regatta has become a very popular tradition since it first took place nine years ago. The wacky event always take place on the Lielupe River, in the Latvian town of Jelgava, and means to offer local audience a good time and popularize a healthy lifestyle through the consumption of organic dairy foods made in Latvia. Teams of locals eager of a good time, as well as some representing dairy processors and food producers enter the competition every year and fight for various titles, including the fastest boat, funniest crew and most original boat.

This year a record number of participants registered milk carton boat race – 36 teams showed up on the Lielupe River, on August 27, to prove their seafaring skills. There were only a few rules teams had to obey for this event: boats had to be made excursively of empty milk cartons and had to be guided to the finish line by human power alone. The size of the boat and number of rowers was not limited, provided the carton vessel remained afloat. The course was only 50 meters long, the shortest so far, but teams struggled to finish as they had to paddle against a strong wind. Some team members even jumped into the river to push their boats across the finish.

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In Yaopu village, Shanxi Province, Li Yanping is known as a one-person orphanages who has taken care of 80 abandoned children over a period of 22 years.

49-year-old Li Yanping lives in a modest 40-square-meter country house and barely survives on a meager income, but that hasn’t stopped her from taking care of dozens of abandoned children, most of them mentally or psychically handicapped.  Born in 1964, in Mu village, Li married at the young age of 21 and soon had her first baby. Her story as a modern-day Mother Theresa began in 1989, shortly after her natural child was born, when her husband found a toddler abandoned on their doorstep. After examining it more carefully, the two realized the child suffered from deformities, but they took it in, fed it and took care of it, despite their financial shortcomings. But they could only take care of two babies for a while, and when milk shortages and lack of money became too much too handle, they made a desperate decision to give their own healthy son up for adoption. They figured someone would adopt a healthy baby, whereas the disabled child had almost no chance of survival.

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Helsinki-based Miina Akkijyrkka has made a name for herself in the art world based almost exclusively on the image of the cow. Throughout her long career she has created various representations of the bovine that have managed to spun both interest and controversy.

Using the cow as inspiration for an art career may seem strange, but it makes a lot more sense once you take a look at her schooling history. She studied horses at the Equine College Ypäjä, then turned to studying dairy farming at the Dairy Farming School of North-Savo, before attending the School of Fine Arts of Finland. Miina is known as a protector of Finncattle, the native Finnish dairy breed, and even owns her own cows.

Asked about her relationship with cows, Miina Akkijyrkka told art21: My feelings for the cows are deeper than a mother’s feelings for her children, stronger than any feeling I have ever had for a lover, more than any other thing on earth; it’s like blood vessels. I share a placenta with cows. We share the same blood. I look at the world through a cow’s telescope. I have a tiny piece of macaroni through which I look at the world from a cow’s point of view. 

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A group of doctors at the Memorial Hospital in Instanbul, Turkey, have started using traditional Islamic music as complementary treatment for various illnesses.

Using music as therapy might sound strange in an age where medicine is relying more and more on science and technology, but the benefits of musical treatments have been known for almost 1,000 years. The makam, a musical mode unique to traditional Arabic and Turkish music, was used in Islamic medicine as early as the 9th century, when philosopher al-Farabi cataloged the effects of different musical modes on the human body and mind. Makam defines the pitches, patterns and development of a certain musical piece and the different tone scales must be largely played by ear.

Doctors at Istanbul’s Memorial Hospital are convinced different makams have positive  psychological and physiological effects on their patients. Dr. Eroll Can discovered musical therapy while working at a hospital in Sofia, Bulgaria, where they used a tape recorder and headphones, but after he immigrated to Turkey in 1996, he started using live instruments and noticed the effects were even more significant. Now he, along with professor Bingur Sonmez and Mehmet Susam are masters of traditional instruments like the ney (Turkish flute), yayli tan bur (Ottoman violin) and the guitar.

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