If you though excavating a basement was hard work, try doing it with R/C miniature construction machinery. One Canadian man has been doing it for 14 years and he’s still not done. Luckily, he’s in no hurry to finish.

Joe Murray, a farmer and radio-controlled construction machinery enthusiast from Saskatchewan, Canada, started excavating a basement under his house in June of 2005. In the beginning, he had a hands-on approach, using a pickaxe and an air chisel hammer, but then he started acquiring miniature radio-controlled digging machinery and he took a back seat, letting them do all the dirty work. By 2010, his fleet of trucks and excavators were already doing all the work, while he controlled them from a distance. But the problem with using miniature machinery to dig a life-size basement is that it takes a long time. And I mean a really long time.

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Bryanna ‘Bry” Marie is an Arizona-based artist who specializes in painting on coins, preferably pennies. She’s only been doing it for four years, but looking at the tiny details she’s able to reproduce on such tiny canvases, you’d think she’s been doing it her whole life.

Painting is the only thing Bry Marie has loved doing ever since she was a child, but she only started painting on coins four years ago, as a challenge she set for herself. She had always loved using oil paints on copper, but she wanted to see if she had the steady hand required to paint tiny details on a very small surface, so she chose the penny. After finishing her first miniature painting, she felt a sense of accomplishment she had never had with her previous works, so she decided to paint with oils on coins exclusively.

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Most people would never use a tissue that someone else sneezed in, let alone pay $80 for one, but one Los Angeles startup claims to have already sold close to a thousand sneeze-filled tissues to people who want to catch a cold virus now so they don’t get sick with the same cold later. Does that make any sense?

Vaev bills itself a “wellness brand” although technically it’s helping people get sick by selling them tissues that complete strangers sick with the cold have allegedly sneezed into. But who in their right mind would pay $79.99 on a germ-contaminated used tissue? Well, that would be “open-minded people” who appreciate the luxury of being able to get sick “on their own terms”. Vaev founder Oliver Niessen, 34, claims that these expensive used tissues should be viewed as alternatives to conventional medicine, in that they allow you to purposely catch a cold whenever you want, in order to decrease the risk of catching that same cold at a later date. It’s basically all about choice and getting “sick on your own terms”.

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Japanese design studio CWF has created the “Backpacker’s Closet”, a backpack so large it can literally be used a closet or even to carry a grown person around.

Measuring 100 cm in length by 68 cm in width, the Backpacker’s Closet features a maximum holding capacity of 180 liters (48 gallons), making it ideal for carrying a young adult. And if you’re worried about the shoulder straps snapping under the weight, don’t be, as this accessory is not only designed to withstand the advertised maximum weight, but also features padding and an extra middle strap to reduce stress on the wearer’s back and shoulders.

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Kanathip Nathip, a 53-year-old man from Phitsanulok, Thailand,  never has to worry about locking the door of his home whenever he goes out, as anyone foolish enough to try and rob it would get the surprise of a lifetime. The Thai man shares his house with a full grown crocodile that’s free to move around as he pleases and doesn’t take kindly to uninvited guests.

Nathip got the crocodile 20 years ago, as a pet for his two children. He had taken them to a crocodile farm in Nakorn Sawan and they loved the reptiles so much that he ended up buying not one but two of them. At first both Thong (Gold) and Ngern (Silver) lived in the family home, but as time went by, it became clear that Ngern wasn’t meant to be a house pet, so they built a small pond in the yard and moved him there. Thong, on the other hand, seemed much more comfortable in the house, so he’s been living there for the past two decades. Even though Nathip’s two sons have grown up and moved out of the house, the 53-year-old still has Thong, who he considers his third son.

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Food waste is one the greatest challenges of our time, and fruits and vegetables are particularly problematic, as an estimated 52% of harvests go bad before reaching consumers. But one Malaysian company claims to have come up with a simple and effective solution to this problem – a tiny sticker that keeps fruits from spoiling for up to two weeks.

You’ve probably seen stickers on fruits before, but not like the ones created by Stixfresh. Those common stickers are used solely to provide consumers with information about the grower and how the fruit was grown, but Stixfresh has a completely different purpose. It contains a special, all-natural formula that slows down the ripening process, keeping the fruit fresh and juicy for much longer.

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A Vietnamese businessman has been attracting a lot of attention on Asian social media sites for his obsession with gold. 36-year-old Tran Ngoc Phuc wears a total of 13kg of gold wherever he goes, and is always accompanied by at least 5 bodyguards who make sure that no one tries to steal it.

Phuc first started making headlines in Vietnam last week after a series of YouTube videos of him showing off his massive jewellery went viral,  getting several millions of views. Since then, photos and videos of him wearing his huge gold necklace, bracelets and rings have been doing the rounds on Vietnamese social media, and even on several websites in China and Thailand. While some people expressed their doubts that the jewels are real gold, most commenters wondered how he can stand walking around with so much extra weight. The businessman admitted that wearing the jewellery took some getting used to , but claimed that it was worth it as all the gold has boosted his good luck and prosperity.

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Ratchadapong Prasit, a 25-year-old man from Thailand, has been making headlines around Asia for the last couple of years after drastically altering his appearance with the help of plastic surgery. After undergoing 30 cosmetic procedures, Prasit now looks like a Korean K-pop star.

Comparing photos of Ratchadapong Prasit before and after he turned to plastic surgery, you’d swear they were two different people, but that just goes to show you what a difference a few nose jobs, some chin sculpting and eye reshaping procedures can make. Although, to be fair, Prasit had a lot more than that done to his face. He reportedly underwent at least 30 cosmetic procedures over the course of two years, for which he spent around 300,000 Thai Baht ($9,100). But he claims it was worth every penny as it allowed him to completely change his life around, going from a shoe seller to a successful cabaret dancer at a theater in Pattaya. The ladies seem to love his new look as well.

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The Amazon rainforest is home to many frightening creatures, like giant Anacondas, flesh-eating piranhas, just to name a couple, and now you can add a new one to the list, a species of wasp that lays its eggs on the abdomen of spiders and then hijacks their brain, essentially turning them into zombies.

The previously unknown wasp of the Zatypota genus was discovered by researchers with the University of British Columbia (UBC) working in the Ecuadorian Amazon basin. They documented its symbiotic relationship with a species of so called “social spiders” and recently published some truly terrifying findings in the Ecological Entomology scientific journal. This newly discovered wasp is apparently able to hijack the nervous system of its host, forcing it to leave its colony, which it otherwise rarely does, protect the wasps larva and ultimately get eaten alive. It essentially turns the social spider into a zombie-like drone that then does the wasp’s bidding.

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Researchers have long been looking for ways to communicate with animals, but one ‘pet psychic’ from upstate New York claims she’s been doing just that for around 15 years. For a fee, she can tell pet owners what their animals are thinking, what they like and dislike, regardless of whether they’re alive or dead.

One of the most interesting things about Shira Plotzker’s career as a pet psychic is how it began a decade and a half ago. She was already working as a psychic and medium for humans, and was also well versed in tarot card reading and numerology, but while watching pet psychic Sonya Fitzpatrick display her talents during a TV show on Animal Planet, Shira realized that she too could hear what the animal was thinking. Imagine that… Since then, telepathic communication with pets – both alive and dead – has become a lucrative side business for Plotzker, who claims that there are plenty of pet owners who would gladly pay her fee of $100 per 30-minute session to hear what their animals have to say.

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A 23-year-old man has filed a criminal complaint against his ex-boss for dunking his face into a scalding hotpot at an office party, as a joke, causing severe burns to his face that required over a month to heal.

The shocking event reportedly took place at a company party on December 20, 2015, but was made public just last week, after a couple of videos recorded on mobile phones went viral online. One of the clips shows a group of people sitting around a table in a Japanese-style restaurant. In the center of the table is a “nabe”, a pot of boiling water used for cooking meat and vegetables over an open flame. At one point, a man whose face is not shown in the video grabs the one of the people around the table by the back of his head and dunks his face into the nabe, holding him down for a couple of seconds before he manages to wrestle free, knocking over the pot.

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From giant wheels of parmesan cheese to watermelons and even truffles, it seems that there’s no solid food that talented artist Valeriano Fatica cannot sculpt into an incredibly detailed artwork.

Valeriano Fatica developed an interest in the arts from a very young age, but spent most of his time helping at his family’s restaurant in Oratino, Italy, so he didn’t have time to experiment with traditional mediums. Instead, he started expressing his artistic talent with what he had on hand, fruits and vegetables. Today, Fatica is considered one of the world’s best food artists, and has several achievements to his name, like becoming the world’s first and only truffle sculptor and creating the world’s largest watermelon carving.

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Looking at the new running shoes unveiled by Spanish start-up FBR you would be forgiven for thinking it incomplete, but the missing heel in the sole is actually by design.

Athletic trainer Franc Beneyto came up with the idea for a heelless running shoe five years ago, after reading the book “Running with the Kenyans”, by Adharanand Finn, a journalist and amateur runner who lived for a few months in Kenya with athletes and coaches to investigate why they were able to run more, faster and get injured less frequently than others. In the book, Finn wrote that Kenyans had refined a natural running technique that didn’t require the support of the heel, but instead relied on the Achilles tendon, plantar arch, soleus and calf muscle. That got him thinking, and one day he just cut off the heel of a running shoe to see what running in it would feel like.

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China’s state news agency Xinhua unveiled two very realistic looking AI news anchors that can “tirelessly” report the news 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, from anywhere in the world.

We’ve known that robots and artificial intelligence were coming for our jobs, but somehow I never thought news anchors would be among the first to be replaced. However, if the two AI broadcasters who made their debut last week during China’s annual World Internet Conference are anything to go by, the future of human news anchors looks very bleak. The newest additions to Xinhua’s team of broadcasters not only look disturbingly realistic, but they can also move their mouths to match the audio, blink, nod their head in emphasis, or raise their eyebrows. But their most important quality is that they can work 24/7, both on the agency’s website and on social media platforms, greatly “reducing news production costs and improving efficiency”.

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Looking at these incredible photos, you’d be forgiven for thinking that they’ve been edited to make the body of a spider look like a black dog’s head, but this is what the tiny Bunny Harvestman actually looks like.

Independent scientist Andreas Kay took these incredible photographs of a Bunny Harvestman in the Amazonian forests of Ecuador back in 2017, but they only recently went viral online, and for good reason. They show the bizarrely-shaped body of the tiny arachnid in such great detail that it’s hard to believe that this is a real creature and not the work of Photoshop.

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