To prove how easy it is to drive their new trucks, Swedish automaker Volvo transformed the steering wheel of one of their big rigs into a hamster wheel and let a tiny rodent steer the vehicle up a narrow quarry road.

Volvo’s new Dynamic Steering uses an electric motor to replace the driver’s muscle power, making even large trucks like the Volvo FMX a breeze to steer. Turning the wheel becomes an effortless affair, and in their latest advert, the automaker proved even a tiny hamster can do it. The now viral clip was shot on a steep and narrow quarry road at Los Tres Cunados, in north-west Spain, and shows Charlie the hamster steering a truck while guided by a precision driver holding a carrot. After training Charlie for weeks, the team placed the pint-sized rodent inside a hamster wheel installed on the steering wheel and let him take the truck all the way up the perilous road. Sitting in the driver’s seat was stunt driver Seon Rogers, who handled the pedals and guided Charlie in the right direction by baiting him with a fresh carrot. There were a few tense moments, like when the truck hit a big rock boulder sending it crashing down into the water below, but in the end Charlie managed to steer the large vehicle across the finish line.

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What do you get when you combine a winter pastime like snowshoe running with a summer sport like baseball. The answer would be snowshoe baseball, a unique sport played every year in Lake Tomahawk, Winsconsin.

With its beautiful lakes and gorgeous scenery, Lake Tomahawk has always been one of Wisconsin’s most popular tourist attractions, but in 1961, Town Chairman, Ray Sloan, decided to give summer tourists yet another source of entertainment. His idea was to cover the local baseball field with sawdust and woodchips, and invite other other area teams to challenge the hometown squad in a unique series of baseball games where the players had to wear snowshoes. Sloan strategy worked and the wacky games have become a local tradition that attracts spectators from all around the globe and earned Lake Tomahawk the title of “Snowshoe Baseball Capital of the World”. The rules of the game are very similar to baseball, but the snowshoes really make it interesting by forging players to waddle and scuffle rather than sprint to bases. There’s a lot of falling, especially early in the match, as everyone tries to get used to the snowshoes, but the sawdust and woodchips act as a soft mattress, so injuries are rare.

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He doesn’t look like your average junk-food addict, but 64-year-old Dennis Rosinlof says that he’s been hooked on McDonald’s Big Macs for the last three decades. During that time, the Utah man estimates he has consumed at least 12,000 burgers.

Dennis started eating Big Mac burgers when he started working as a salesman, 30 years ago, and has never stopped since. For the last two decades, the Vietnam War veteran says he has been eating at least 10 Big Macs a week, and he still can’t get enough of them. He has one on Monday, on his way home from work, two on Tuesday, one on the way to work, and one on the way home, one Big Mac for breakfast on Wednesday, two on Thursday and Friday, and always two of them on Saturday. He only takes a break from his favorite food on Saturday, when his wife cooks for the whole family. Dennis estimates he has spent around $60,000 on Big Mac meals ever since he first started eating them 30 years ago, but says that’s less than what he has spent on car fuel, and that doesn’t come with fries and a beverage.

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We recently learned women’s thighs can be used as premium ad space, but Boston-based film student Jodi Steel found a new intriguing use for her upper leg. She recently shot to internet fame after photos of her detailed thigh drawings went viral on popular news sharing site, Reddit.

Like many other bored students, Jodi Steel used to pass the time during boring school lectures by doodling, only instead of exercising her artistic talents on the back of her notebooks, she did it on her bare thighs. Despite having no kind of formal training as an illustrator, Jodi’s dermal masterpieces look like the work of a seasoned artist, a fact which she attributes to relentless practice, despite what everyone else may think. Her talents didn’t go unnoticed, and after seeing the artworks on her thigh one day, a teacher at Emerson College, in Boston, asked Jodi to draw the illustrations for a ‘steam punk’ book called Steaming into a Victorian Future: A Steampunk Anthology. She recently uploaded photos of her thigh drawings on Reddit, where some of them were actually mistaken for tattoos. Steel has since gotten multiple job offer from all around the world, but she doesn’t want to work full time as an illustrator, instead hoping to one day to concept art for films and paint on the side.

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Seattle-based designer Taras Lesko has spent the last few months building a nearly-life-size replica of the Lamborghini Aventador exclusively out of printing paper and cardboard.

We first featured Taras Lesko’s paper masterpieces back in 2010, shortly after he had completed his amazing 4-foot-tall Freedom Gundam. In 2011 he surprised us all again with an even more impressive 7-foot Gundam made with 1,250 distinct paper parts cut out of 720 pages. Taras took a two-year-long break after that, but he has recently unveiled his latest work of art, a stunning paper-and-cardboard replica of the Lamborghini Aventador sports car. Using his design skills, the Seattle-based artist created all the necessary parts in computer programs like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and AfterEffects, printed them on hundreds of sheets of paper and used a precise X-Acto knife to cut them loose. To make sure his paper Aventador was sturdy enough to move around, Lesko used thick chipboard as a frame for the ultra-light vehicle which weighs just 11.3 kilograms.

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Ossan Rental (or “Middle-Aged Guy Rental”) is the newest bizarre rental service in Japan. As the name suggests, it allows people to rent an average middle-aged Japanese guy for ¥1,000 ($10) an hour.

There are a lot of crazy people-renting services in the Land of the Rising Sun, from the now famous Soine-ya Prime rent-a handsome-boyfriend service, to simple rent-a-friend options and even a rent-a-bare-thigh advertising service. So we have hot young guys and girls for rent, but what about middle-aged folks, is no one interested in paying for their time? Surely there has to be a market out there for them, too, right? That’s probably what the masterminds before Ossan Rental thought when they decided to open the first rental service for middle-aged guys in Japan. The company currently offers only two options to choose from, either the 46-year old Takanobu Nishimoto, a college lecturer in fashion and styling from Osaka, or Mikio Sendou, a former baseball player and current sports commentator from Gifu Prefecture. They both seem like interesting dudes, and the company’s roster is only going to get bigger once the business gets off the ground.

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Richard Schaefer is a talented costume design major at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles, but he’s also a huge fan of Disney fairy-tale characters, so he spends a lot of his time creating real-life costumes of princes and princesses.

The young Disney costume maker is also quite androgynous, and he knows it. So in addition to creating the costumes, wigs and accessories of all his favorite characters, Richard is also very capable of showing them off on himself. In fact the popularity of Ariel’s Grotto, his Tumblr photo blog, went through the roof after photos of a prince to princess transformation starring Richard as the model were picked up by popular media outlets like Buzzfeed. He used a lot of makeup to slip into the skin of Disney princesses, but the result is nothing short of impressive. One could say he does a better job playing the princesses that he does the princes.

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Growing up, Phoenix-based Austin Coulson was always fascinated by all the cool automotive records he found in the yearly Guinness Book of Records, and dreamed of one day having his name mentioned in the famous publication. He recently got his wish, after building the world’s smallest roadworthy car.

29-year-old Austin Coulson says he developed a passion for tinkering with mechanical stuff very early in life. As a young boy, he used to  ride bicycles with his friends, and always fond some parts to add or remove. When he turned 16. Austin bought his first car, a Bronco with a blown transmission. So he bought a repair manual and learned from scratch how take the thing apart and put it back together. It wasn’t easy, but he got the hang of it and he’s been building custom cars ever since. Two years ago, he saw a small go-kart with a car body on it, that made it look like a real miniature roadworthy vehicle. It got him thinking whether someone could really build such a small car and make it street legal. It also reminded Austin about his life-long dream of having his name in the Guinness Book of Records, so he started searching to see if there was already a record for the world’s smallest street-legal car. A guy from England held the record, but after seeing his creation, Coulson thought to himself “I can beat that”.

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What do you get if you combine a skateboard, a jetski and an ATV? That would be the DTV Shredder, a new toy for power sports enthusiasts created by the guys at BPG Werks.

Designed to appeal to a variety of extreme sports fans, the Shredder is a personal vehicle unlike any other you’ve seen before. The steering is done via a skateboard-like platform mounted on top of two sturdy treads, by leaning into the direction you wish to go, while the handlebar offers much needed stability. The board is the only component that moves, while the rest of the machine stays fixed to your body. It has a 196 cc, 4-stroke gas engine, patented dual-CVT drive system that keeps you from having to shift gears, 13 horse-power and a top speed of 30 mph. The guys at BPG Werks say they limited the Shredder to 30 miles per hour because that’s the top speed most people feel comfortable at standing up. After that, it’s just plain scary. Weighing just 200 lbs, the DTV Shredder can be folded and fits in the trunk of a medium-size truck, which makes it more practical than motocross bikes or ATVs. It can be ridden all year long, on any kind of terrain, unlike most other power sport vehicles.

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Vietnamese artist Ben Tre uses his steady hands and a tiny dentist’s drill to carve detailed portraits and traditional landscapes on chicken eggshells. The exquisite artworks can be mounted on an LED-illuminated base and used as artistic lamps.

Ben Tre says he only started carving eggshells a year ago, yet each of his numerous works appear to have been executed by a seasoned master. He apparently experimented with a number of fine tools to get the desired effect, before borrowing a small electrical drill from a dentist friend, and has been using it ever since. Ben takes about a day to complete on of his amazing eggshell carvings, and specializes in both celebrity portraits and landscapes. The eggs aren’t chemically treated to harden the shell, which makes the artworks very vulnerable, but Ben offers interested clients the option of having the eggshell carvings encased in a glass globe for protection. An LED illuminated wooden base is also available to enhance the beauty of his fragile masterpieces.

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They say the secret to a successful career is doing what you love, but paying monthly bills when the thing you love most is playing video games all day has got to be pretty darn hard. Not for Moru-chan, a Japanese gamer who is currently earning  a decent $10,000 for basically spending three months of his life playing a video game and broadcasting his experience online.

If you enjoy spending your free time playing massive multiplayer online games (MMOs) like World of Warcraft of Guild Wars, Moru-chan’s arrangement must seem like a dream job. Truth be told, there are probably thousands of gamers out there who do the same thing for free, but he is one of the lucky few who are able to support their livelihood by killing monsters, upgrading their virtual character and performing quests in a fantasy online universe. A long-time fan of online role-playing games, Moru Chans was chosen by the development team of Japanese MMO ArchAge to be the recipient of a ¥1 million ($10,000) check for spending three whole months cooped up in a one-room apartment provided by the company playing the video game and streaming it to Japanese video-sharing site Niconico. He spends all night in front of the computer, playing the game, and his days sleeping on a mattress on the floor, cooking in his very small kitchenette and doing the laundry.

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What if you never had to waste precious time every day covering your face with layer upon layer of makeup, or even consider plastic surgery enhancements in a never-ending quest to adhere to society-set beauty standards? These are some of the ideas Chinese designer Zhuoying Li is tackling in her new project – the Uniface Mask.

Giant anime eyes, long eyelashes, a high nose bridge, narrow chin and cheeks, these are coveted facial features and they are all available in one simple package, the Uniface mask. The science team behind this unique beauty product has developed “bionic-skin” technology to produce a human-skin-like mask, which is extremely thin and breathable through its pores. With the included “Cell-Blending” glue, which seamlessly binds the mask to human skin, users can put on Uniface and not even feel they’re using it. And if you’re worried about its expressionless doll-like look, don’t be. Made only with FDA G.R.A.S.(generally recognized as safe) materials, Uniface provides the highest level of comfort, allowing you to talk, make facial expressions and even sleep with it on without feeling any difference in your life. If anything, you will have attained ideal beauty without losing countless hours in front of the mirror and wasting hard-earned money on makeup or plastic surgery.

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Using regular ballpoint pens, UK-based artist Gareth Edwards draws incredibly realistic portraits of celebrities like Audrey Hepburn, Walt Disney, Natalie Portman and Humphrey Bogart with Candy Toxton.

“I began working in ballpoint pen because I was to lazy to sharpen a pencil, or put away my paints at the end of the day,” Gareth Edwards explains the choice of his medium. “The simplicity of the ballpoint pen first appealed to me at school. The initial scribbles I did then, have since become an addiction in trying to create a drawing that is so realistic its deceives its audience into thinking such a detailed piece couldn’t have been created with such a humble source.” And indeed, some of his celebrity portraits look so life-like it’s almost impossible to believe they are more that just artistic black-and-white photographs.

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Joni Bakaradze died 18 years ago, at the age of 22, but instead of burying him in a cemetery, his family decided to keep his body preserved so that his son, who was just two at the time of his death, could see his father’s face.

For the first four years after Joni died, his mother, Tsiuri Kvaratskhelia, used embalming fluid to preserve his body, but after having a dream on night in which someone told her to use vodka instead, the woman from Bashi village, Georgia, switched to spirit liquid poultices. She has to use them every night, or the corpse will turn black. During the first ten years, Tsiuri changed her dead son’s clothes on his birthdays, but as she got older her illnesses prevented her from taking care of Joni the way she used too. She says the lack of care quickly becomes visible on his body, but as soon as she uses her alcohol-based embalming formula, his face turns white again. Read More »

Paul Koudounaris, a history professor from California, has spent the last three years visiting ancient ossuaries and churches around Europe and photographing their macabre treasures. Among these are the Catacomb Saints, a series of jewel-encrusted skeletons said to be the remains of Christian saints.

Decorated with hundreds of precious stones and several pounds of gold and silver, the Catacomb Saints photographed by Mr. Koudounaris for his new book, Empire of Death, are skeletons dug up from Roman catacombs in the 16th century and installed in churches around Germany, Austria and Switzerland on the orders of the Vatican, to replace the sacred relics destroyed during the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s. Although none of them qualified as saints, authorities from the Vatican signed certificates identifying the dug-up skeletons as martyrs. The bones were packed in boxes and sent from Rome to various monasteries around central Europe, where nuns decorated them with gold and silver jewelry encrusted with precious stones. Since the skeletons were believe to be Christian martyrs, their bones couldn’t be handled by anybody, but only by those who had taken a sacred vow to the Church.  Once the decorative work was finished, the bejeweled remains were sent to churches and cathedrals where they reminded people of the spiritual treasures of the afterlife and acted as symbols of the Christian Church’s power in previously Protestant areas.

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