Paper towel painting is a popular children’s learning activity, but American artist Ken Delmar is determined to turn it into a proper art form. For the last eight months, he has been using the flimsy kitchen disposables as canvases for detailed and vibrantly colored artworks.

71-year-old Ken Delmar has been painting most of his life, but he never imagined he would one day be exercising his artistic talents on paper towels instead of the linen canvas he normally used. The Connecticut-based artist had the epiphany one evening in early January of this year, while preparing to close his studio. He was using a paper towel to clean his brushes and knives when  he noticed the paint on the fragile paper looked more brilliant and energetic than the one he had spent so much time spreading on a regular canvas. He figured it was because the paint was being absorbed by the paper which gave it more depth and layers of richness, and started thinking of ways of ways to prevent the colors from blending into one another, or have them blend in an interesting way. He experimented with various paper towel brands and different consistency oil paints, until he found the perfect combination. The colors were astonishing and the unusual canvas made his works “edgy and different”.

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People unhappy with the way they look have been using plastic surgery to change their appearance for years, but now they can take their obsession to a whole new level by changing the color of their eyes through a controversial procedure known as artificial iris implant.

Pioneered by Dr. Kenneth Rosenthal, as a way to correct various eye defects (heterochromia, ocular albinism, etc.), the artificial iris implant procedure is now also being advertised as cosmetic surgery for people who want to permanently change the color of their eyes. The artificial iris is a thin, non-toxic prosthesis made of the same ophthalmic grade silicone used in intraocular lenses. Since the fake iris is very flexible, it can be folded and inserted into the eye through a peripheral corneal surgical incision about 2.8 mm long, and unfolded over the natural iris. According to the website of BrightOcular, the company behind the increasingly popular cosmetic eye surgery, the procedure is “short, safe, and painless”, taking about 15 minutes for each eye. The surgery has a purely cosmetic purpose, it does not fix vision defects, so patients will still need to wear refractive instruments to correct their vision. Unlike other laser-based procedures that remove a layer of melanin from the iris in order to permanently change its color, BrightOcular claims their iris implant can easily be removed in case of complications or if the patient so desires.

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For the past 12 years, Robert Darling, a 58-year old unemployed man from New jersey, has been traveling to Manhattan in search of a life companion. To make it easier for women to notice him, he carries a sandwich board which reads “Looking for a rich lady to be my wife”, along with his phone number and email.

Robert Darling has never had much luck with the ladies. He has never been in a serious relationship, and never realized he wanted someone to spend the rest of his life with until his middle age. And because he got such a late start in his quest for love, he decided extreme measures were necessary to find a suitable companion. Ever since 2001, Robert has been traveling to Manhattan twice a week to advertise himself to potential wives using a sandwich board. It might sound like a joke o a lot of people, but the lonely bachelor says that every time he leaves home he tells himself that could be the day he finally meets the woman he will settle down with. The sign is pretty clear about his intentions, but so far it hasn’t worked quite as well as he would have hoped. Many women have stopped to have a talk with Darling or have their picture taken with him, but he has been on a single date, and that was with a woman who actually wanted him to marry a friend of hers so she could get a green card.

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Two California couples, Jim and Mary Lambert of Carmichael, and Bob and Di Nelson of Fair Oaks, have spent the last three years making a life-size rhinoceros sculpture out of plywood, foam and 12,000 wine corks.

It all started one day, three years ago, when Mary told her husband Jim to take up a hobby. Instead of choosing a typical passtime like fishing or woodworking, Jim immediately thought of the thousands of wine corks he had been collecting for the past 20 years, and said ‘OK, I will build a giraffe out of corks.’ But then he realized giraffes are 20 feet tall and quickly changed his idea. “I said, ‘Mary, forget the giraffe, we’re going to build a rhinoceros,’ ” Lambert told the Sacramento Bee. Jim’s sole artistic experience was an art class he had taken back in college, but Bob Nelson and his wife Di, old friends of the Lamberts, were eager to jump on board as soon as they heard about the quirky project. They put up their garage as a work space, and Bob, who was an architect, started working on the frame of the artwork. Using an online photo of a rhinoceros as a guide for proportions and size, Nelson crafted the structural frame from plywood and added pieces of plastic foam to give it the appropriate shape. All that was left to do was cover the whole 12-foot-long sculpture with Jim’s wine corks.

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Mary Saba, a young Australian woman whose favorite hobby is creating funny costumes, challenged herself to wear a different one every day for a whole year. Since most of her costume were homemade, Mary only needed $440 to reach her goal.

Even before she started her original project, Mary’s friends called her “costume queen” for the time and passion she put into every one of her wacky outfits. She had always enjoyed creating funny attires and having people walk up to her just to say how cool they think she looks. “Most people have regular hobbies – reading, writing, dancing, playing sports – but I always received most enjoyment from creating a really funny costume,” Mary writes on her Theme-Me blog, where she documented her personal challenge. The idea to create and wear 365 different costumes came to her around Christmas, in 2011, when she decided to dress in a series of green and red outfits every day during the last week of work, as a way of getting into the festive spirit of the Holidays. One day, she overheard some of her colleagues discussing which ones of her costumes they liked most, and that’s when she realized just how much her dressing habit entertained those around her. Mary then thought of The Uniform Project, where a girl pledged to style a black dress differently everyday for 365 days as an exercise in sustainable fashion, and it all just came together in her head.

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Most people couldn’t imagine a day without their fancy smartphones, but a family in Guelph, Canada has decided to shun all post-1986 technology from their lives for a whole year, as part of a social experiment.

It all started last year when Blair McMillan asked his five-year old son if he wanted to come outside and play, only to realize that even on a perfect summer day the child preferred to stay indoors and play video games on an iPad. He started thinking about his own childhood and how today’s youth have become so dependent on modern technology like computers, mobile phones and the internet. The 26-year-old father-of-two talked to teens and young people in their 20’s, most of which confessed they couldn’t even picture their lives without all their different gadgets, and began questioning contemporary public service announcements that encourage parents to get their kids active outdoors for at least 30 minutes a day. He remembered that when he was a child, it was nearly impossible to keep kids siting quietly indoors for half an hour. And that’s when it hit him – what if he could go back in time and give his own children a taste of how life was back then? Since April, the McMillans have given up all modern-day technology, and went back to living in 1986 (the year Blair and his wife were born) with its bad hair, cassette tapes and most importantly, real social interaction.

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Children make all kinds of ridiculous requests, and sometimes parents agree to them, even if they don’t plan on keeping their promises. But not Nicholas L., a French father-of-three who in order not to let his kids down actually sent a couple of their toys into outer space.

Last December, Nicholas’ three children asked him to send their favorite toys into space. Without giving much thought to what he was getting himself into, the young father agreed. Later he realized he didn’t want to be the kind of parent who disappoints his kids by not keeping his word, so he embarked on an incredible project to fulfill their wish. In the beginning, the Frenchman had no idea how he was going to pull it off, but after spending four months researching online he had a list of necessary equipment to fly the toys into outer space and retrieve them, as per his kids request. He ordered a weather balloon from a US army surplus store, and had the parachute and GPS tracker shipped all he way from Hong Kong. He was ready for the big test, but he needed proof to show his kids he had actually sent their toys into outer space, so he installed two GoPro waterproof cameras on his DIY flying device to record the entire journey.

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Squeezing a slice of lime into a refreshing drink on a hot summer day isn’t as harmless as you may think. Fredrikke and Selma, two young Norwegian girls, found that out first hand after they suffered from severe Margarita Dermatitis during their vacation in Spain.

Fredrikke and Selma, both seven years old, were vacationing with their families in the Spanish resort of Marbella. One day, during an outdoor lunch, they spotted a lime tree and thought it would be fun to squeeze juice out of its fruits. They went at it for about an hour, enthusiastically squeezing dozens of limes, before going to the beach for a swim, one of the girls’ parents told Norwegian website, Klikk.  But when Fredrikke woke up the next morning, both her hands were swollen and the skin felt tender to the touch. Thinking it might be a reaction to mosquito bites, her mother, Kathryn, gave the girl an allergy pill. Only when they met up with Selma’s family and noticed she presented the exact same symptoms, it became clear that what ever was affecting them had something to do with the limes they had squeezed the other day. After a few hours, both Fredrikke and Selma started complaining of burning pain and their hands began to blister. On the morning of the third day, Fredrikke’s hands looked even worse and her parents knew they had to seek medical help as soon as possible. They jumped on the first plane home, gave the girl painkillers so she could sleep during the flight, and rushed her to the emergency room as soon as they landed in Oslo. Selma and her family had another week of vacation left so they went to the hospital in Marbella.

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30-year-old John Edward Doyle has the ability to squeeze his eyes out by up to 12 millimeters. He discovered his “talent” about two years ago while entertaining his friends, and for the past six months he has been using it to freak people out online under the alias “Mr. Zoom”.

John discovered his bizarre eye-popping ability while entertaining his friends at the local pub, in Rainhill, England, but he never dreamed it would one day make him an internet sensation. At one point he just decided to record himself pooping his eyes out to the popular Harlem Shake and upload the video on YouTube. He got a bigger reaction than he ever hoped, and soon he was getting emails, phone calls and TV show invitations. Mr. Zoom was on to something, so he kept doing it, each time choosing a popular song to squeeze his eyes out to. Six months after he started uploading his freaky act on YouTube, he has close to 600,000 views, he has been contacted by Ripley’s Believe It or Not and has flown to Japan and the US to appear on TV. It’s been a crazy ride, and with the media coverage he is getting these days, it’s far from over.

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For as long as he can remember, Kjetil Mathisen has been fascinated with flying machines. As a kid he spent most of his time playing with model airplanes, helicopters and virtual flight simulators, but as an adult he has taken his passion to a whole new level by building his very own scale replica of a Boeing 737 cockpit.

32-year-old Kjetil, from Norway, had been talking with his buddy Stian Alexander Hoddevik about building an airplane cockpit for a long time, until one day, about two years ago, when they finally decided to go through with it. At first they wanted to build a McDonnell Douglas MD88 but quickly gave up on their plan after realizing the necessary parts were hard to come by and they would have had to build most of them from scratch. The Boeing 737, on the other hand, was much more popular and they could easily get their hands on all kinds of hardware, for the right price. They worked in Kjetil’s home for a few hours every day, building the cockpit from scratch and later installing all the necessary equipment, but as their creation took shape, it became clear they needed more room. The day Mathisen had to move his wife’s coffee table out of the living room to work on his project was the day they were forced to set up shop somewhere else. Luckily, the two airplane enthusiasts found an empty space close to Norway’s main airport that proved to be the perfect home for their “baby”.

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Facebook, the world’s most popular social network, has just passed the 100 billion valuation mark, but thanks to a couple of business-savvy ice-cream makers from Croatia, anyone can have a slice of it for as little as 1 euro.

Brothers Admir and Ibi Adili run the Valentino ice cream shop in Tisnom, on Croatia’s Murter island. After noticing his 15-year-old daughter Bibi spent a lot of her free time on Facebook, Admir came up with the idea of creating a Facebook ice cream to attract other fans of the social network. All he had to do was make a plain white ice cream, decorate it with blue syrup, slap a “Facebook” sign on it and wait for the new business to roll in. Believe it or not, his plan actually worked. The treat has been a big hit with tourists this summer, and Adili told reporters it’s been going like crazy. His Facebook ice cream apparently tastes like chewing gum and candy, but it’s not the flavor that has customers begging for more, but the name and the trademark “Facebook” logo on the sign.

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Competitive eater Tim Janus wanted to make history by becoming the first person to get legally drunk on non-alcoholic beer. To reach his goal, Tim recently tried to chug 30 cans of non-alcoholic beer in one hour.

People have been asking if it’s possible to become intoxicated by drinking non-alcoholic beer for years. Theoretically, it’s possible, but one would have to consume large quantities of the stuff to make it happen. Tim “Eater X” Janus decided he, as a of the International Federation of Competitive Eating, definitely had the stomach to do it, so in April he contacted the Deadspin website to have the stunt documented by a reputable news outlet. Tim estimated he would have to chug around 30 cans of non-alcoholic beer in under an hour in order to reach the .08 alcohol level to be declared legally drunk. That’s over 2.5 gallons of liquid in a very short amount of time, enough to probably kill an ordinary person. But Tim’s stomach is anything but ordinary, as he has proven during the many competitive eating contests he has won throughout the years.

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Latte art has become very popular in recent years, with more and more talented baristas using the fragile milk foam as a miniature canvas for their artworks, but Japan’s Kohei Matsuno is already taking the delicate art form to a whole new level with his amazing 3D latte masterpieces.

Kohei Matsuno used to work in an Osaka restaurant where he used latte art to surprise his clients. However, he noticed people are not so easily impressed with the usual designs on their cups of caffeinated beverages anymore, so he decided to step up his game. He had become an expert at creating traditional Japanese landscapes, popular manga characters and realistic portraits on milk foam, but he still felt restricted by the flat surface of his delicious canvas. To make things really interested he began using large amounts of milk foam to design all kinds of cute shapes, decorating them with with a sharp utensil, usually a toothpick. This ingenious trick has made Kohei one of the most popular latte artists in Japan. Using the alias “Mattsun”, the young barista now spends his days taking ideas from his fans and turning them into delicious reality.

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Joseph Michael Liu Kai-Tsu Roqueni, a young engineer from Montreal, is planning to raise money for charity by running 19,000 kilometers, from Canada to Argentina, within 18 months, barefoot.

The self-described “Chexican” – because of his Chinese, Mexican and Canadian heritage – had been training for his epic barefoot run across the Americas for a year before he finally kicked off his official trek on July 2.  Joseph left from his hometown of Montreal and will cross 14 countries all the way down to Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, known as the southernmost city in the world. His feet will cover 19,000 kilometers (11,806 miles), a distance about 7,000 kilometers greater than the Earth’s diameter.  The 32-year-old engineer is not the first person in the world to run such a great distance, but he is the first who plans on doing it without proper running shoes. Roqueni has always tried to do things differently, and the biggest motivation for running to the end of the world barefoot was that “no one else had done it”. It’s also the cheaper alternative, because he won’t have to spend thousands of dollars on dozens of pairs, and he’ll be able to move faster without the extra baggage slowing him down.

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