35-year-old Liu Bolin, from Shandong, China, manages to camouflage himself in any surroundings, no matter how difficult they might be.

Liu works on a single photo for up to 10 hours at a time, to make sure he gets it just right, but he achieves the right effect: sometimes passers-by don’t even realize he is there until he moves.

The talented Liu Bolin says his art is a protest against the actions of the Government, who shut down his art studio in 2005 and persecutes artists. It’s about not fitting into modern society. Despite problems with Chinese authorities, Liu’s works are appreciated at an international level.

Photos by CATERS NEWS and Liu Bolin

via Telegraph.co.uk

Already an accomplished, world-renown painter, 45-year-old Federico Uribe thought he’d try creating artworks from everyday objects like pencils, sneakers or mops.

For one of his exhibitions, Uribe used 1,500 pieces of footwear and 25,000 shoe laces to create a collection of animals, including a cow, a zebra and a swimming duck. He also managed to create a very realistic sheep out of cleaning mops. The artist  said he wanted to recreate nature from its own raw materials.

Federico Uribe also works with thousands of pencils and carefully ties them together with rubber bands, to create amazing works of art. The Colombian master uses up to 5,000 pencils to create his characters.

Uribe says 10-12 hours every day, six days a week, but, thanks to his skill, spends a lot less time working on his art, than people believe.

Photos by Federico Uribe/REX FEATURES

via Telegraph.co.uk

In her new jewelry collection, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, Alidra Alic showcases some of the weirdest rings I’ve ever seen.

But I mean that in the most positive way possible, the rings look very original, and even though you couldn’t wear on a day-to-day basis, Alidra Alic’s rings are perfect for a fantasy-themed party.

Photos by Dorte Krogh and Katrine Rohrberg

via  Cool Hunting

The Cloud Project has found the perfect way to get people more involved in the burning issues like cloud seeding and nanotechnology.

Normally, most people would be less than interested to discuss such problems, but when ice-cream is involved, they become a lot more communicative. Using an old ice-cream truck with an industrial water-spray mounted on top, Zoe Papadopoulou and Cat Kramer managed to attract quite a crowd. Their plan was to shoot out liquid nitrogen mixed with ice-cream flavors, thus creating ice-cream flavored clouds.

In reality cloud making is really not that simple, but the concept really attracted the public and made them more aware of the problems we are facing. Real ice-cream was handed out together with important information regarding nanotechnology and its use in our society.

via Like Cool

Looking at photos of the Zombie Parade that took place on July 18, in the streets of Frankfurt, Germany, I couldn’t stop thinking about the Resident Evil games I used to play when I was in high-school and how they scared the living crap out of me.

Luckily, the zombies in the photos don’t really want to eat your brain or hurt you in any other way. I have to say the make-up on these guys is simply amazing. I’m sure I would totally have a heart-attack if I walked into any of them in a dark alley, at night.

Zombie parades are becoming more and more common, as they are held in different countries around the world. The first zombie parade was organized back in 2003, in Toronto and, in 2005, there 80 zombie parades, attended mainly by horror movie lovers.

Photos by Johannes Eisele/ REUTERS

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This 103-years-old mansion in Rhode Island is built on a small, rocky island far away from any nosy neighbors. Just like this house, built close to Oslofjord Island, Norway, it offers total privacy.

Clingstone mansion was built in 1905, for a cost of roughly $36,000, by J.S. Lovering Wharton, a distant cousin of 79-year-old Henry Wood, the present owner of the house. He and his ex-wife bought it in 1961, for $3,600 and managed to bring it back to life after it had been abandoned for two decades.

Mr. Wood and his family found an ingenious way of preserving this 23-room architectural wonder: the Clingstone work weekend. Every year, around Memorial Day, the Wood family and up to 70 friends gather at Clingstone to clean the mansion and fix any of its problems. Practically, any volunteer workers are welcome.

In winter time the boats and floating dock are stored at the nearby Jamestown Boatyard, in exchange for a week’s stay at Clingstone, during the summer.

viabookofjoe

51-year-old David Reynolds, a dormer oil rig worker, spent 15 years of his life creating a matchstick replica of the Brent Bravo oil platform, from the North Sea.

The 21-foot-long, 12-foot-high wooden model weighs over half a ton and contains more than 4 million matchsticks, each of them polished and glued into place. David started working with matchsticks when his son bought him a matchstick train to build. He completed it in a few weeks, then started working on an oil rig.

He first built a smaller replica of an old platform he worked on for five years, before starting work on the big one. He calls them the Cathedrals of the Sea and spent up to 10 hours a day creating the finest details.

David Reynolds said he thought about destroying his masterpiece because he needed the space in his shed, but his wife convinced him to put it on display at the brickworks museum, in Southhampton. He also added he spent around 1600 British pounds buying matches from a wholesaler, buying them from a corner-shop would have put a 46,000 pound hole in his budget.

David’s matchstick oil platform is a worthy competitor for Patrick Anton’s matchstick Minas Tirith

via Telegraph.co.uk

Ok, so I’m not sure if it’s really the sweetest, since they have serious competition from the guys who cooked the world’s largest cheesecake, but it’s definitely up there with the sweetest.

Over 100,000 Palestinians gathered in the center of Nablus city, on the West Bank, to watch as the largest Kunafa cake was being made and hopefully, even grab a bite. 170 bakers, from 10 bakeries around Nablus, worked together to create the longest and heaviest Kunafa in history.

Kunafa is definitely one of the most delicious desserts in the Arab world, baked from semolina flour, hiding a delicious mozzarella-like cheese,  sweetened with a sugar syrup sprinkled with rose water and covered by a crunchy carpet of crushed nuts.

The giant Kunafa measured 74 meters in length and weighed 1765 kg, 400 kg more than it needed to break the old record. It cost around $15,000 to make and the ingredients include around 700 kilograms of semolina flour, the same amount of white cheese, 300 kilograms of sugar and six tons of cooking fat.

The record has been recorded and will be presented to the Guinness Book of Records for acknowledgment.

No, I’m not talking about the shortage of drinking water in third world countries around the world, that’s what the Dirty Water Campaign is for.

This time I’m talking about…let’s call it fun-water shortage. A massive heat-wave hit China these last few days, and temperatures soared to an alarming 40 degrees Celsius. So what were the poor Chinese people to do, under these circumstances? Find a place to cool of, of course, and what’s better than a swim at the local swimming pool, right?

Well, that’s just not the case for the people of Nanjing, who barely had enough room to tread water at this over-crowded swimming pool. The Daily Mail thinks this might just be the most crowded swimming pool in the world and I tend to agree. But then again, what do you expect in a country with a population of over one billion?

More swimming pools maybe? Just a thought…

And no, I’m not talking about the chest of an obese couch potato. These are true man-boobs obtained through a complicated medical procedure…

Well maybe not that complicated, basically all this guy did was fill his chest up with some saline solution, using a couple of needles. I’m sure it wasn’t very painful but…why would any guy do that???

Anyway, if you were wishing for your very own pair of man-boobs, but wasn’t fat enough and couldn’t afford a professional boob-job, now you know you can grow them in the comfort of your own home.

You may think crop circles are cool, but they nothing compared to the rice field murals found in villages like Inakadate, Japan.

Using purple and yellow-leafed rice, combined with the more traditional green variety, the villagers of Inakadate create true agricultural masterpieces. This all began in 1993, when people thought of doing something spectacular, to revitalize the area.

During the first nine years, people only created a rice representation of Mount Iwaki, but then started plating intricate models. Landowners in the area agreed to use their parcels to create a 15,000 square meters “canvas” and, using a computer to pinpoint where every rice seed would be planted, managed to create some extraordinary works of art.

This year, in the village of Inakadate, people could see Napoleon and a Sengoku warrior, both on horseback, coming to life in the rice fields. The artworks are invisible from ground level, so the curious have to climb the village’s mock castle tower to admire them.

More than 150,000 people visit Inakadate every year, to see its amazing rice field art. That’s an impressive number of people considering the village has a population of just 8,700.

via Daily Mail

That’s right, you read correctly, the world’s strongest vagina muscles belong to Tatiata Kozhevnikova, a 42-year-old woman from Novosibirsk, Russia.

She has been acknowledged by the Guinness Book of Records, as the woman with the strongest intimate muscles, after lifting a 14-kilograms-heavy ball, using only her vagina.

Tatiata said she noticed she had extremely weak vaginal muscles after giving birth, so she decided to do something about it. She read books on Dao and found out women have been confronting this problem for thousand of years.

But that didn’t scare her at all and she started practicing with custom-made balls. Tatiata advises all women to harden their vaginal muscles, to improve their sex lives.

Photos via KP.ru

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This unique vehicle is the Nunrunner, a 1962 Dodge Dart, converted into a custom limousine.

Apparently the Nunrunner was commissioned by the Vatican but was later sold to a Catholic Church in Kentucky. It might look old and rusty, but this Dodge is actually a pretty modern car. It has a V10 engine, borrowed from a Dodge Ram, and a T56 six-speed manual transmission. The chassis has been fortified and the suspension replaced with one from a 2004 CorvetteZ06, so you’re not likely to experience any technical problems.

The Nunrunner was auctioned on eBay and sold for a mere $3,350. I’d pay more only to be the owner of a unique vehicle.

via Autoblog

Located in Darmstadt, Germany, the Waldspirale apartment-building was designed by Austrian artist, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, and built during the 1990s.

There are other apartment buildings in Darmstadt, but the U-shaped Waldspirale is special. Its diagonal roof is covered with grass, shrubs and trees and the facade follows an irregular grid organization.

Waldspirale has over 1,000 windows, but no two are the same. The handles on the apartment doors and the windows are also unique.

Waldspirale was completed in 2000 and people actually live in it.

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Some people often refer to them as locusts, but cicadas have no relation whatsoever to the true, grasshopper-like locust. They are some of the best known insect in the world, and despite their large size, they pose no danger to humans.

Cicadas are considered a delicacy in some parts of the world, like China, Malaysia, Congo and Latin America, but after witnessing the grosse birth process of this insect, I bet you’ll think twice before putting a cicada in your mouth.

The cicada shell is used in Chinese traditional medicine.

via bbs.163.com