Rhiannon Brooksbank-Jones, a young student from Nottingham, England, underwent surgery to have her tongue lengthened after her dentist suggested it might be the reason she couldn’t pronounce certain Korean sounds.

Although she’s never been to South Korea, Rhiannon is really passionate about the language and culture of the Asian country, and dreams of living and working there later in her life. Her fascination with everything Korean started a few years back, after she listened to Korean pop and watched some television shows at a friend’s house. Pretty soon, all her free time was taken up by anything related to Korea, and she even began attending a Korean church in Nottingham.

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Vietnamese-born photographer and artist Huy Lam uses tiny 4 point type recurring words and phrases to create beautiful portraits of modern and historical icons.

The Toronto-based artist has always been fascinated with the concept of perception, and the way we form opinions based on what we perceive as real.  At a glance, his works look like they’ve been painted or drawn with pencil or charcoal, but as you approach them further, you realize they’re made with an entirely different medium – differently colored words.  Through his art, Huy Lam tries to convey the concept of perception, but he also hopes that these images created with words “will provoke thought, discussion and even laughter.” But the hours he spends actually placing thousands of 4 point type words in just the right spots to create detailed portraits is no laughing matter.

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Popular in many countries around the world, including the US, dyed chickens are often viewed as victims of animal cruelty people usually get rid of as soon as they’re not “awfully cute” anymore.

I don’t know what’s happening with the world, but it seems that things that were cute by default a few years ago, just aren’t cute enough today. People are dying their puppies to look like wild animals, fish have to be either tattooed or locked in tiny keychains, and chicks apparently have to be brightly colored to sell. Dyed chicks are sold by street vendors in countries like China, India, Malaysia, Morocco, Yemen and even the US, where they attract the attention of passers by with their unnatural colors. But what most people don’t know is these “cute” baby birds aren’t dyed after hatching, they are injected with the dye as embryos, inside the egg.

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Regular size origami is just impossible to me, so I guess that’s why I find these nano-paper-wonders created by Anja Markiewicz simply fascinating.

We’ve featured some pretty impressive examples of origami, including the paper miniatures of Mui-Ling Teh, and the miniatures Anja Markiewicz creates are a welcome addition to our collection. She painstakingly folds almost invisible pieces of paper into beautiful origami artworks only a few millimeters in size. The fragile animals born from her hands – horses, dogs, swans and others – can rest on her fingertips and require a magnifying glass in order to be fully appreciated.

Her vast portfolio of origami artworks includes animals, fairytale creatures, cars, snowflakes, flowers and lots more. I’ve posted a selection of her most beautiful works but you can check out her entire collection on Flickr.

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No matter how many birthing classes they attend or how many baby books they read, men can never truly experience pregnancy, right girls? Wrong! The Mommy Tummy suit simulates the whole nine months of weight gaining, breast enlargement and baby kicking.

Showcased at the SIGGRAPH 2011 interactive technology conference, the Mommy Tummy caused quite a stir among participants after it was announced it’s main function is to allow men to experience pregnancy. Designed by Takayuki Kosaka, from the Kanagawa Institute of Technology, in Atsugi, Japan, the pregnancy simulator looks a lot like the suits you put on when getting dental X-rays, but in reality it’s a lot more complex. It features a number of pouches that fill with liquid and actuators that simulate a kicking baby, in order to offer a faithful pregnancy experience for guys.

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On the Deadly Trail of Poachers in Congo’s Virunga National Park (Environmental Graffiti)

Batmobile Limousine: Stretching the Superhero Awesomeness (Bit Rebels)

France Introduces Baguette Vending Machine (The Australian)

Shanghai Subway Station Equipped with Punching Bags (Metro)

The Mocha Lisa and Other Coffee-Painted Masterpieces (Daily Mail)

French Farmer Advertises Against Advertisement (MSN)

Brazil Prison Uses Geese as Alarm System (Huffington Post)

Fried Butter on a Stick (Geekosystem)

Fraternals Envy Identicals at Twins Convention (WSJ)

A Robot That Can Learn, Think and Act on His Own (Geekologie)

Zheng Sheng, a 23-year-old college graduate from Shanghai, has fulfilled his dream of cycling across Eurasia, traveling 14,000 kilometers all the way to London.

When Zheng tried to convince sponsors to finance his daring dream, they all thought he was crazy, but he wasn’t about to let something as meaningless as money stand before him and his goal. With the help of his sister and a few friends, he managed to raise 13,000 yuan ($2,000), which he used to buy all the necessary gear for a bike ride from his home city of Shanghai to London. Before setting out on March 5, he posted on his microblog: “A journey 14,000 kilometers is the goal – here I go!”. He went though all kinds of challenges throughout the 136 days he spent cycling across 11 countries, but believe it or not, this ambitious young man reached his destination on July 18.

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Natumi Hayashi‘s blog featured all kinds of normal photos of herself, her pet cat, friends and Tokyo sights, but on September 16, 2010 she posted a photo entitled “Today’s Levitation”. The rest, as they say, is history…

Hayashi has become an Internet sensation after she began posting photos of herself levitating in all kinds of places around Tokyo. She told the Daily Mail it was an English idiom that inspired her to take the first photo of herself levitating – ‘to have one’s feet firmly planted on the ground’. Apparently they have the exact same phrase in Japan, but since she doesn’t consider herself a practical person she chose not to have her feet firmly on the ground in her self-portrait photos, to show how she really is. “In being free of gravity in the pictures, I am also not bound to societal conventions. I feel as though I am not tied to many things and able to be my true self.” the artist said in an interview. After taking her first levitation photo the frequency of “Today’s Levitation” gradually increased until she started posting a new photo every day.

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Most girls their age spend their time at malls, shopping for clothes, trying on make-up and flirting with boys, but these teenage graduates of Bob Larson’s school for exorcists are only interested in casting out demons.

While they may look like average teenagers, these girls are actually seasoned exorcists who have traveled all over the world casting out Satan and his minions. Savannah Schurkenback, Jess Shurkenback, Christina Massih, Melanie Massih and Brynne Larson, aged 15 to 19, decided to answer the call of evangelist Reverend Bob Larson of Spiritual Freedom Churches International, when he announced the number of possessed people was on the rise while the number of trained exorcists had fallen. They joined his exorcism school, where they study everything there is to know about fighting demons and dealing with the possessed.

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Just days after the Varyag, China’s first aircraft carrier was taken out for sea trials, a second carrier, the Kiev is stirring up interest as the first aircraft carrier hotel in China.

The Kiev, a retired former Soviet aircraft carrier was sold to a Chinese company back in 1996, and was used as part of a military theme park in the Tianjin Province, since 2004. But since the acquisition of a working carrier, the Varyag, people have begun looking at these mighty ships as symbols of their country’s military might, so the owners of the Binhai Aircraft Park decided to cash in on their interest. They spent over $15,5 million restoring the old attraction and converting it into a luxury hotel.

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Japanese balloon artist Rie Hosokai uses latex balloons to create unique dresses that can only be worn 24 hours before they deflate and change color in hot weather.

The latex balloons are inflated and hand-woven in different directions both vertically and horizontally, creating a texture similar to fabric. The amount of air that goes into each balloon is pretty hard to estimate when adjusting the size and volume of the dress, but the 35-year-old artist has been working with balloons for 10 years so she has everything pretty much figured out. She started  her career as a florist, before switching to balloon art and opening her very own studio, Daisy Balloon, where she creates all kinds of inflatable artworks.

Although her “fabric” is very inexpensive (just ¢0.09 cents a balloon), the dresses Rie Hosokai makes sell for thousands of dollars. They last only 24 hours before starting to seriously deflate, must be kept away from sharp objects and change color at high temperatures, yet these designer balloon dresses cost between ¥150,000 and ¥300,000 ($1,930 – $3,860). She has even sold a full set of balloon-made wedding dress, headpiece and bouquet for ¥1 million ($13,000).

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Art Orienté objet, a French artistic known for its exploration of trans-species relationships and questioning scientific methods and tools has staged one of the most shocking experiments ever – injecting a human being with horse plasma.

For this latest project, entitled Que le cheval vive en moi (May the horse live in me), Marion Laval Jeantet, one of the members of Art Orienté objet, was injected with horse blood, which made her feel “extra-human”. This shocking event took place in February, but Marion spent several months preparing her body, by injecting herself with small doses of horse immunoglobulins, the glycoproteins that flow through the blood and function as antibodies in immune response. The French artist called this process mithridatization, after Mithridates IV of Pontus, who is said to have developed an immunity to poisons by gradually ingesting small doses of them.

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For generations, the village women of Burma’s Chin Province have tattooed their faces as a symbol of strength and beauty, but this tradition is dying out as a result of globalization. Luckily, photographers have traveled to Burma to capture the beauty of these tattooed-face women before there aren’t any left.

According to Chin elders, the practice of tattooing women’s faces started a long time ago, to prevent women from being taken away by the Burmese kings, who had heard about the beauty of Chin women and teenagers. They would come to villages across the province and just pick out the girls they wanted to take away with them. With no other means to defend themselves, the village elders, who were also women, began tattooing the girls’ faces, thus taking away their beauty.

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Shinji Saito, the most competitive yo-yo player in the history of yo-yo competition put on quite a performance at the 2011 World Yo-Yo Championship, winning his 11th title.

At just 24 Shinji Saito is the most acclaimed yo-yo master in history, winning most of the contests he’s ever entered. He was a 2A yo-yo champion by the age of 13 and since 2002, he only came in second place once, in 2008, but reclaimed the top spot the following year, and hasn’t lost it since. At this year’s World Yo-Yo Championship, Shinji Saito showed everyone why he’s the best at what he does, putting on a memorable performance that make tricks like “walk the dog” look like child’s play.

For his 11th World Yo-Yo Champion title, Shinji won a $300 cash prize and the priceless reputation that comes with the territory.

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Elisa Strozyk, a young designer from Germany, is able to turn blocks of wood into delicate paper-like material. So far she has created wooden rugs, bed covers, table cloths and is working on a line of wooden clothes.

Most people are familiar with the feeling of walking on wooden floors, touching tree bark or wooden furniture, but young Elisa Strozyk wanted to take this hard material and turn into something completely new – wooden fabric. She spent months working on her original idea, experimenting with different types of wood, until she settled on wood veneer. The slices of wood she uses are about 0.6 mm thick and very flexible, an essential property for her wooden textiles. But not all types of wood can be used to make wood fabric; oak, for example, is too brittle, so she prefers to use cherry and maple.

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