In the mid 90s, when Microsoft Windows 95 was launched, MS Paint was one of the operating system’s most fascinating tools. But creating truly impressive artworks with it required a lot of time and mountains of patience, so it came as no surprise that digital artists migrated to more advanced software like Adobe Photoshop as soon as they came out. Not all of them, though. Take amateur illustrator Pat Hines, who has been using MS Paint for over a decade, because he just couldn’t get the hang of modern editing software.

34-year-old Pat Hines discovered Microsoft Paint about 12 years ago, while working long overnights at a hospital reception desk, as a security guard. He didn’t really like Windows games like Solitaire or Free Cell, so he would kill time by practicing his artistic talents in the rudimentary digital editor. His early works weren’t more than simple doodles, but as time passed and he learned the ins and outs of the software, his illustrations got better, and he developed his own style. Hines claims that one of the most important things he learned while honing his MS Paint skills in his off time on the job was that a single pixel can make a notable difference in his artwork.

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In an effort to raise awareness of the growing rate of knife crime throughout the UK, artist Alfie Bradley has spent the last couple of years creating the Knife Angel, a 24-foot-tall sculpture made out of 100,000 knives confiscated by, or surrendered to police stations.

The Iron Throne imagined by George R.R. Martin and showcased on the HBO hit TV show Game of Thrones is supposed to be made out of 1,000 swords surrendered by a king’s enemies. It’s an impressive sight, but it doesn’t even come close to the Knife Angel created at the British Ironworks Centre, in Shropshire, England. For the past two years, artist Alfie Bradley has been literally piecing together the awe-inspiring sculpture out of 100,000 knives confiscated by 41 police stations across the United Kingdom.

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If you’ve ever been to Switzerland you already know that pretty much everything is expensive there, and the fresh mountain air is apparently no exception. Well, most of it is actually free, but if you want to order a liter of Swiss mountain air collected from a secret location in the Alps, you’ll have to cough up a whopping $167. This is not a joke!

John Green, a British expat living in Basel, Switzerland, is the brains behind “Genuine Mountain Air from Switzerland”, a fledgling online business that promises to ship fresh, high-quality Swiss air anywhere around the world, if you can afford it. Green claims to collect the air from a “secret location” near the town of Zermatt, then bottles it up in glass containers, labels it and ships it to buyers.

Described as “the ultimate present for the man or woman that has everything,” the bottled mountain air also comes with a certificate of authenticity and the exact GPS collection of the place it was collected from.

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Robert Bobroczky, a 7-foot-7, 16-year-old freshman at SPIRE Institute, a state-of-the-art international academy in Geneva, Ohio, is set to become the tallest player to ever play in the NBA and of the tallest in the history of the sport.

Bobroczky, a native of Romania, has been described as “so tall he doesn’t look real”. At age 12, he was already 7 feet tall, and although his growth rate has slowed down over the last four years, he is still on track to become the eighteenth person in medical history to reach or surpass eight feet in height. Unfortunately, his weight has been having trouble keeping up with his growth, and at 7-foot-7, he weighs only 190 pounds. Robert is honing is skills on the basketball court, but if he is to reach the NBA, the first priority is bulking up.

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Pizza has long been regarded as the food of the people; It’s cheap, easy to make and tastes amazing. But that doesn’t apply to all pizzas. For example, a restaurant in New York City serves a pizza that only the 1% can afford. It’s priced at $2,000 and comes covered in strips of edible 24K gold.

The Industry Kitchen restaurant in New York’s South Street Seaport was inspired by the nearby Financial District, which attracts the wealthy from all over the world, to create the “epitome of decadence” pizza. It’s officially called ‘the fance’za’, but epitome of decadence sounds much more appropriate. This outrageously expensive treat consists of a black pie made with squid ink, Stilton cheese imported from England, Foie Gras and truffles from France, Ossetra caviar harvested from the Caspian Sea, edible flowers, and lost of edible 24K gold strips and flakes from Ecuador.

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Ejiao, or donkey skin gelatin, is considered one of the three treasures of traditional Chinese medicine. It is used to treat a wide range of ailments from simple colds to insomnia and impotence, and demand in the Chinese market is soaring like never before. Millions of donkeys are slaughtered all around the world and their hides transported to China to be melted into the miracle gelatin that many believe will keep them looking youthful and even prolong their life.

Dong’e county, in northern China, is the epicenter of ejiao production. Here, over 100 factories melt thousands of donkey hides into gelatin, every week, and after running out of domestic stock, they are now relying on imports from developing countries to sustain the huge demand. China’s donkey population has dwindled from 11 million during the 1990s to just 6 million today, due to both industrialization and massive slaughtering for ejiao. With local stock of donkeys going dry at an alarming rate, some factories have opened their own farms to breed and kill up to 10,000 donkeys a year, but with some of them processing over 1 million donkey hides in the same period, it’s hardly a sustainable plan. Which is why many factories have turned their attention to the foreign market.

Various countries in Africa, Asia, South America and the Middle East are supplying millions of donkey skins for the Chinese ejiao market. With the price for donkeys having skyrocketed from around $65 a decade ago to $315 today, some livestock breeders are switching to donkeys exclusively, because the trade is so profitable. But some governments have already banned China from buying their donkeys because they realized that it would eventually decimate the animal population. In September, Nigeria announced a ban on the export of donkeys in September, after the trade increased three times in one year, mainly to Asian markets. “If the export continues the animals will be decimated,” Atte Issa, a Nigerian government official told the BBC.

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A former math teacher from Camden Town, England, claims betting shops won’t take his bets anymore after he devised a system that guarantees he wins every time without any risk of loss.

Richard Saul, who calls himself the “wizard of odds”, claims that he has bet tens of thousands of pounds on horse races over the last three years, but in the last few weeks, all but one bookmakers in Camden Town have stopped taking his bets. “They should take the bet, but they don’t because I keep winning. I don’t think your average punter would be able to work out how to do it. In Camden Town, only Jennings will take my bet now – and they will only let me do it once, that’s all,” Saul complains. “[Elsewhere] the staff go on the phone, then after two minutes they come back and say, ‘we can’t take this bet’. I’ve gone on accounts online, but they won’t take it there either.”

The math expert believes that his recent ban by bookmakers has to do with his guaranteed-win system. He came up with it when betting shops started introducing higher payouts for “each-way” horse racing bets. Usually, an each-way bet means that the fourth-placed horse pays a quarter of the horse’s odds of winning, but some high street bookies  expanded the offer to include a fifth-place horse, in order to attract punters. That’s when Saul figured out that by betting on every horse with different stakes, he could guarantee himself a win.

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When it comes to tasty food, nothing beats grandma’s cooking! Well, except maybe more grandmas cooking in the same kitchen, which is exactly what goes on at Staten Island’s Enoteca Maria, a charming restaurant that employs grandmas from various parts of the world, instead of professional chefs.

Enoteca Maria owner Jody Scaravella says that he came up with the idea of placing grandmothers in a restaurant kitchen about 12 years ago, after suffering a series of tragic losses. His grandmother, his mother and his sister had passed away within a few years of each other, and the idea of having an Italian grandmother in the kitchen just felt comforting to him. He got his first cooks by posting an ad in the paper seeking ‘Italian housewives to cook regional dishes’. “I was still building the restaurant then, so I asked them to come to my place to cook instead — I live in the neighborhood. And they came with dishes, and their husbands and a few grandchildren they were looking after for the day. The whole thing was like a Fellini movie,” Scaravella remembers.

But that was only the beginning. These days, the unique New York restaurant has a rotating staff of grandmothers from around 30 different places around the world, including Palestine, the Czech Republic, Argentina, Nigeria and Algeria. They are known as ‘nonnas’ – Italian for ‘grandmas’ – and take turns in cooking traditional recipes from their respective culture, offering patrons the chance to experience new and exciting dishes virtually every night.

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The Elysium chair relies on a carbon-fiber skeleton and a combination of electronic joints and bearings to create a sensation of weightlessness for the person sitting in it. This marvel of engineering is being hailed as the ultimate office chair, but it also comes with a hefty price tag of $26,000. Bearing the price tag of a decent car, the Elysium chair seems like the mother of all gimmicks, but if it actually works as described in a recently released promotional video and you really value comfort I’d say it might actually be worth it.

Elysium is the creation of Dr. David Wicket, a British inventor and furniture designer who also carries a PhD in bioengineering. During 10 years of research, he was able to develop an equation that defines posture and gravitational force, which later became the backbone of this innovative chair. According to the chair’s official website, there is a spot between lying and sitting up when your weight is evenly distributed and your body passes through zero gravity. “This results in sensory attenuation which is the principle of flotation therapy,” the website claims, which means it is the most comfortable point and puts the least strain on your back.

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Graham Smith, an engineer from Lancashire, England, was recently in the news for performing surgery on himself to remove eight millimeters of stitches left by surgeons inside his body years ago, after operations to correct it were cancelled twice.

Smith had underwent bowel surgery 15 years ago, and was left with stitches protruding through the skin on his abdomen. He first brought up the issue with the hospital where he had the original surgery in 2011, but he was put on a waiting list and an operation to fix the problem was cancelled twice. Rather than waiting for his turn and risk of dying of septicaemia, the crafty engineer decided to operate on himself, using modified titanium instruments he sourced from a dentist friend.

“I tried to do it through the normal channels… but I had septicaemia,” Mr. Smith told the BBC. “I didn’t make the decision lightly – I was desperate, but I had to take control of it and I was not prepared to sit and die on a waiting list.”

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Most people may think they’re barking mad, but that’s not stopping dramatic duo Alex Bailey and Krõõt Juurak from putting on theatrical shows aimed exclusively at pets.

Actors Alex Bailey and Krõõt Juurak use their own research as well as consultations with pet psychologists to put together artistic performances for their animal audience. They usually travel to a pet’s home and try to connect with it by using various techniques, including “non-human voice and body languages”. While their performances are not always interactive, the two admit that some animals, especially young ones, join them during their act. So far they have performed more than 80 times at the homes of pets in Zürich, Erlangen, Berlin and Vienna, and are currently promoting their unique services in Bristol, England, in the hopes of gaining new fans.

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Convinced that smartphones are ruining our social lives as well as the pub experience, the owner of a newly-opened bar in Brighton, England has decided to get people socializing the old-fashioned way by disabling their cellphone reception.

Instead of texting, checking emails or browsing the internet, patrons of the Gin Tub bar will have to pass the time by actually interacting with their friends, dates or even complete strangers. Owner Steve Tyler could have simply asked guests not to use their phones in his bar, but instead of banning them, he opted to disable them completely. The Gin Tub has a Faraday cage built into its ceiling, which makes getting a reception inside the venue impossible. He says it was the only exception in Britain’s 2006 Wireless Telegraphy Act that otherwise outlaws the use of signal blockers. So yes, it’s 100% legal.

“Mobile phones have killed pubs. When you go out socially, you don’t need social media,” Tyler says. “Rather than telling people they can’t use they phones we’ve basically disabled them.” He makes sure to clarify that the Faraday shield doesn’t jam phone signals, as that would be illegal. Instead the 19th-century device prevents the signal from getting inside.

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James Holt, from Bury, England, has so far spent £21,000 ($27,500) on cosmetic procedures in an effort to copy the most striking features of the Kardashian sisters and achieve a fake look.

22-year-old Holt says he has been planning to alter his body from a very young age, when he became obsessed with looking like the models on Page 3 of English tabloids. At age 17, he booked his first cosmetic procedures at a local salon – a bout of Botox shots to his forehead and some lip injections. He had just one milliliter of liquid injected into his lips, but after that failed to draw the attention of his colleagues when he went to school the next day he decided to go back for more.

“I went to college the next day expecting everyone to be amazed and to comment on my lips, but no one said anything,” he recalls. “I went back the next morning and had another 1.5ml put in, but still no one noticed. By the end of the week I had 6ml and everyone said it looked amazing. I loved my look. It was big and juicy and it was just what I wanted.” His joy didn’t last very long, as small bubbles soon appeared on his swollen upper lip, and when liquid started to leak out of it, James was rushed to a clinic in Bury to fix his damaged lips.

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Ira Saxena, a young girl from Colchester, England, can’t stop sneezing. From the moment she wakes up, she sneezes over 10 times per minute, and the unusual condition seems to be getting worse. Her mother is desperate to help, but doctors aren’t even sure what is causing the unusual sneezing bouts.

Ira’s mysterious condition kicked in one morning, three weeks ago, when Ira woke up and started sneezing. Her mother Priya says the sneezing wasn’t so bad at first, but it quickly progressed to a point where the girl wasn’t even able to attend school anymore. She now sneezes about 8,000 times per day, sometimes up to 10 times a minute, until she falls a sleep. “The one blessing is she sleeps fine, it is the only time when she is not sneezing and she can sleep right through the night,” her mother said.

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Computer geeks spend ridiculous amounts of money on high-end rigs all the time, but one digital electronics engineer from Cambridge, England, poured a small fortune into building a giant computer that he only uses to play Tetris.

James Newman’s supercomputer took five years to build, cost over $53,000 and takes up an entire room, yet it is a million times slower and has a million times less memory than a typical desktop. That’s because it’s actually just a mega microprocessor. “Computers are quite opaque, looking at them it’s impossible to see how they work. What I would like to do is get inside and see what’s going on,” Newman explains on the Megaprocessor project website. “Trouble is we can’t shrink down small enough to walk inside a silicon chip. But we can go the other way; we can build the thing big enough that we can walk inside it. Not only that we can also put LEDs on everything so we can actually SEE the data moving and the logic happening.” And that’s exactly what he spent the last five decades doing. As of June 22, the Megaprocessor is finally complete.

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