The concept of bachelor pads isn’t unique to humans. Male bowerbirds are amazing architects, but they reserve theirs skills for just one purpose – finding a mate. They construct such elaborate and dazzling nests to impress females, perhaps they could teach our men a thing or two about home décor.

Male bowerbirds use embellishments such as coins, nails, leaves, shells, seeds, flowers and live insects to weave their nests, called bowers. Bowers are U-shaped nests built with twigs and grass, and carpeted with moss. Each bower is an architectural marvel that stretches out 5 or 6 yards across, complete with a thatched roof and supporting pillars.

Blue is a very important color in the construction process. Male bowerbirds use several blue objects – berries, flowers, bottle caps and string – to attract prospective mates. Research has proven that females are attracted to bowers with the most number of blue decorations. Because blue objects are rare in a bowerbird’s environment, a male who is able to acquire them and protect them is deemed superior.

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Melynda Moon, a 23-year-old Canadian model, has put herself through one of the most bizarre cosmetic surgeries I’ve heard of. While most people ask their surgeons to make their nose smaller or lips fuller, Moon aimed at making her ears pointier. Why? Because she wanted to look like an elf.

“I have always had fantasies about what it would be like to be something other than human,” Moon said. “So I decided to change my appearance to look supernatural.” In August 2011, she spent $400 on a painful surgery to have her ears modified.

To achieve the desired result, the tops of Moon’s ear cartilage were skinned. Pieces were cut from the tips to form points. Her ears were almost ‘carved’ into a triangular shape, reminiscent of the Elves from the Lord of the Rings.

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Alexey Kljatov is a photographer with a difference – he takes incredibly breathtaking shots of snowflakes with equipment that he developed at home, eliminating the need for cameras and lenses worth thousands of dollars.

It’s hard to believe that Moscow-based Kljatov is an amateur. Take a look at these close-up snowflake photographs and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. The amount of precision and clarity he has achieved with just a home-made rig is amazing.

Kljatov used parts from old cameras and attached them to wooden boards using a bunch of screws and some tape. Doesn’t sound like much, but this set-up is really working wonders for him. The close-up views of the snowflakes are enchanting.

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A true artist can create outstanding art from almost anything, even ugly, greasy oil. Who would have ever imagined that petroleum could be used to paint breathtaking images? Belarussian artist Ludmila Zhizhenko, that’s who.

Ludmila was a designer at a petroleum company for years before she invented this new technique of painting in 2009. She would use watercolors earlier, but petroleum is now her material of choice. Ludmila’s paintings have are elegant, with an old-world charm. They resemble vintage, yellowed photographs from the last century. Photo artist Sergei Kholodilin says, “This is a synthesis of photography and painting.”

For her paintings, Ludmila uses petroleum produced in the Gomel region. To make one ‘heavy oil’ painting, she needs about 10 grams of the stuff. And there are only two types of petroleum she can make use of. Ludmila lets us in on a few of her trade secrets: “It is important not to stop putting stroke after stroke. Otherwise, if the oil dries out,  it will be very difficult to fix something,” she says. Due to the chemical composition of petroleum, she mostly paints outdoors.

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The annual Eurovision song competition has had its share of controversial contestants over the years, like transgender singer Dana International, or monstrous-looking heavy metal band Lordi, but the Austrian Television’s decision to nominate Conchita Wurst, a bearded transvestite artist, as the country’s official contestant for next year’s event has caused more public outrage than ever before, in Austria.

Conchita Wurst sets herself apart from other other artists not only through her voice, but also by wearing women’s clothing, makeup and a full beard. The thick facial hair is the artist’s way of drawing attention to herself, because, well, the world responds to a woman with hair on her face. The beard of this “racy Colombian” is very real, for it belongs to the man behind the mask, 24-year-old Tom Neuwirth. He first appeared in the spotlight in 2006, when he came second in a televised talent show called Star Mania, but completely disappeared from the public life after that, until 2011 when he returned with a whole new look, under the name Conchita Wurst. She has become Tom’s alter-ego and he says there are now two hearts beating in his chest, one of an Austrian man and the other of a hot-blooded Colombian performer. After he puts on the makeup and women’s clothes, Tom really becomes Conchita and demands that he be addressed as such. He acts like a woman and even uses the ladies’ room, but once the performance is over, he goes back to being Tom. Asked if it’s not too confusing splitting his life in two, the artist said he actually recommends having an alter-ego because it’s great fun and it allows you to live out every fantasy you ever wanted.

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Scottish artist Douglas McDougall uses charcoal, sandpaper and scalpel blades to create his amazingly realistic portraits of friends and people he finds interesting.

Douglas McDougall learned how to draw as a child to pass the time while going in and out of hospitals with a blood disease. He spent countless hours in hospital wards trying to draw his surroundings, and the experience fueled his passion for art. In his younger years, the 50-year-old artist used to do a lot of pen and ink illustration work during the night, after coming home from his day job, but eventually settled on charcoal as his medium of choice. “The immediacy of applying that blackness and the way in which it’s sucked into a white ground /paper/ forever excited me with a glorious kick of absoluteness”, the artist says, and after getting his hands on Conté compressed charcoal for the first time and discovering its power there was no going back. Today he uses various kinds of charcoal along with unusual art tools like sandpaper and sharp blades to create some of the most detailed hyper-realistic portraits I have ever seen.

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This is the story of how a few dozen cats managed to save an entire community just by purring and looking pretty. Houtong was just another dilapidated mining town in the mountains of eastern New Taipei City, but everything changed when the felines came and livened up the place.

Houtong used to be one of Taiwan’s most important coal extraction sites, up until the 1970s. Then, oil and electricity took the place of coal, and the town suffered a steady decline. At one point it was reduced to a train stop along the Yilan line, one that most travelers ignored, and that forced many of its younger residents search for better opportunities elsewhere. The population of this defunct mining town dwindled from around six thousand inhabitants to a couple  of hundred, who struggled to survive. But their fortunes changed in 2008, when a cat lover who goes by the name “Palin88” organized a series of cat photography events in the mountain town. He and his friends posted the photos online, and got an overwhelming response from fellow feline enthusiasts. As they shared the photos on forums and social media sites, Houtong welcomed more and more tourists eager to photograph the cats themselves, or simply watch them roaming through the town. Nowadays, Houtong is known as the Cat Village, or Taiwan’s Cat Mecca.

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Excavated Neanderthal bones often had traces of pollen around them, indicating that even back then flowers were used to celebrate the deceased. Japanese artist Hideki Tokushige uses animal bones to recreate various flowers, thus honoring the longstanding connection between the two.

“We’ve been creating paintings and sculptures for over 70,000 years and our relationship to bones is just as old,” Tokushige explains. “Everything around us – clothes, nuclear power plants, internet – can be traced back to the structure of bones.” Inspired by the cycle of life and death and the relationship between flowers and death, the Japanese artist started creating stunningly detailed Honebana, or bone flowers. It all started one day, when Hideki Tokushige was coming home from work. He saw a dead raccoon in the middle of the street, and instead of simply ignoring it or throwing it in a waste bin, he took it home, removed the bones and used them as an art medium. Originally trained in photography, Hideki found a way to assemble the bones into intricate floral sculptures that are shockingly beautiful to look at.

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The gloves were on at the second ever Executive Fight Night, in Tokyo, last week, as 14 corporate executives from seven different countries went into the boxing ring for some good, clean fun and settling rivalries between companies.

“To usher in a new era of fitness amongst stressed-out Tokyo executives and stage a safe, professional and unprecedented, Vegas-style Boxing event that would become a regular hit on the annual Tokyo social calendar.” This is the mission of Ginja Ninjas, the offbeat company behind Executive Fight Night. It was founded by three corporate employees who after a stressful week at work got together and decided that enough was enough, executives needed a way to let off some steam, and what better release valve than boxing? Bringing a unique form of entertainment to the masses wasn’t enough for the “ninjas”, who decided to donate all the proceeds from the event to various charities. It also made it harder for corporate bosses to say no to a boxing invitation, but according to organizer Dave Thomas, the rivalry between Tokyo companies is enough to get people into the ring.

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American artist Joanne Arnett combines photography and embroidery into an amazing new art form. Using thread and steel wire, she is able to reproduce people’s mugshots in photo-like quality.

We’ve featured some impressive embroidered artworks on Oddity Central in the past, but Joanne Arnett’s masterpieces are in a class of their own. Living and working near the banks of the Cuyahoga River in Ohio, the talented artist hand-weaves every photo onto a canvas made of steel wire. According to The Jealous Curator, “she weaves large scale portraits with wire so the face is visible when light bounces off it. The images shift, like a giant daguerreotype from positive to negative depending on where the viewer stands, or sometimes they completely disappear into the plane of fabric.” It’s simply amazing how she can turn these embarrassing mugshots into something so beautiful, and the fact that she names every work of art after the subject’s sentence just adds to their charm. If you thought weaving and embroidery were just outdated crafts your grandmother used to practice, Joanne Arnett’s stunning artworks will definitely change your mind.

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The next time you look in the mirror and ask yourself “what am I?”, a correct answer could be: a living, breathing camera. Last year, two art students, Luke Evans and Joshua Lake, conducted an unusual experiment in which they swallowed several pieces of film to capture the digestive system at work. Their art project was aptly named “I Turn Myself Inside Out”.

At first glance, the artworks of Kingston University students Luke Evans and Joshua Lake look like a collection of specimens captured under a microscope, when in fact they are stills of their digestive systems doing what they do best, process stuff. The two young artists said “we wanted to bring our insides out” so they swallowed several piece of 35mm photographic film and let their bodies do the rest. They’re no doctors, so they didn’t know for sure if this would affect their health in any way, but as a precaution they put the film inside brightly colored capsules to avoid damage to their colons (those things have sharp edges). After eating the film, the two Graphic Design & Photography students waited for nature to take its course and hoped for the best. When the time came, they did their “business” in a bag, took it to a dark room and started looking for the capsules. Luckily, their bright color made them easy to spot. After retrieving the film strips, they scanned them with an electron microscope which revealed some interesting images of their insides.

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Have you ever dreamed of having a home in the middle of nowhere to escape to every now and then? I have. And this house built straight in the middle of the Drina River in Serbia fits the bill perfectly.

Standing on an exposed rock bang in the center of the river, near the town of Bajina Basta, this tiny house has been getting a lot of attention on the internet ever since it was captured on camera last year by Hungarian photographer Irene Becker. Her photo was published by National Geographic as one of the best ‘Photos of the Day’ in August 2012, and ever since then the mysterious and tranquil abode of Drina River has captured the imagination of millions. “I’m so glad that my picture makes this tiny house known to more and more people,” Becker said about her work. But in Serbia, the precariously placed house has been a popular tourist destination for decades, and a symbol of the picturesque Basta region. It was even nominated as one of the Seven Wonders of Serbia.

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New Zealand-based artist Bruce Mahalski collects animal bones and uses them to assemble creepy yet realistic-looking models of various firearms, including a Colt pistol and an AK-47 assault rifle.

Mahalski started collecting animal bones at a very young age. His parents were both scientists with collections of their own, and traveling all over the world gave them the opportunity to gather some very “interesting stuff”. In the early days of his artistic career, Mahalski experimented with a variety of mediums, from screen-printing, photography, painting and sculpture, but eventually returned to the thing that fascinated him the most – animal bones. In 2005 he created his first bone gun, and by 2010 he had already become an experienced bone artist. Most of Mahalski’s works reflect his interest in firearms and Pacific and African carving styles. They include bones from a variety of animals, birds and fish that the artist sources locally. His latest creation, a life-size AK-47 is made of rabbit, stoat, ferret, sheep, hawk, pheasant, wallaby,  snapper, snake, blackbird, tarakihi, hedgehog, broad-billed prion, shear water, thrush, seal ,cat and possum bones, plus a rare bone from a now-extinct moa the artist found in a cave. It was auctioned for $3,500.

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Things are not as they seem, when it comes to the mind-blowing artworks of London-based sculptor Ron Mueck. Seeing his larger-than-life sculptures of the human body for the first time, you’d be tempted to think you are looking at real-life giants.

Australian-born Ron Mueck is the so of two toy makers, so it’s really not very surprising that he opted for a somewhat similar career, making his very own toys, only on an infinitely more detailed level. He worked as a model-maker and puppeteer on children’s television shows for 15 years, and went on to create special effects makeup for movies like the 1996 fantasy “Labyrinth”, featuring David Bowie. In the 1990s, he started his own company, making models to be photographed for advertisements. Back then, most of his works were only partially completed, as they were meant to be photographed from just one angle, leaving a lot of loose material lurking around the areas captured by the camera lens. Ultimately, he decided photography destroys the physical presence of the original object, so he turned his attention to fine art and sculpture. A wise decision, as his hyper-realistic works of art have now won him international acclaim.

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You probably thought finger painting was just for kids, but Iris Scott is determined to prove you wrong. Wearing a pair of latex glove, the American artist dips her fingers in color paint and wiggles them on the canvas to create beautiful work of art.

“I see the world through ‘finger painted’ colored glasses,” Seattle-based Iris Scott says. “I paint what I see. Finger paintings are hiding everywhere, sometimes I catch them when I’m walking down the sidewalk, or lounging in a living room.  I search for color relationships, and intriguing forms.” The young artist discovered this ingenious painting technique while on a relaxing artistic retreat in Taiwan. She was exercising her painting techniques in an air-conditioned room, when she realized she needed to go clean her brushes before switching to bright colors. But that required leaving the room and facing the high temperatures outside, so Iris just put away her painting tools and started using her fingers. “I knew within 10 strokes that finger painting with oils was what I would spend the rest of my life doing,” the 28-year-old remembers about that very first finger-painting experience.

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