Holly Lentz, an artist in Florida, specializes in metal sculptures of the human torso, such as this lovely piece made of carefully polished and welded washers. She makes others from ammunition cartridge casings. I'm especially enamored of her sculptures that bear angelic wings.

Yes, that's real ramen. He even used the flavor packets to create a broth-like tint to the body. YouTube user ArtMayer sculpted this amazing and completely functional work of art using 36 ramen bricks and 5 pounds of polyester resin. It looks and sounds delicious! I've never seen a more elegant use of cheap ramen.

You can see more of his custom guitars on Instagram.

-via Technabob

One day in 2013, Jimmy Griffin, the owner of Griffin's Bakery in Galway, Ireland, was scuba diving. He was suddenly bitten in the face by a conger eel. This vicious predator can reach six feet long and has a mouthful of razor-sharp teeth.

Those teeth hurt Griffin badly. As he recovered, he thought of a way to get back at the eel. So he decided to bake a sourdough bread loaf the same size as the eel. He does that every morning and sells it by the slice throughout the day. Atlas Obscura explains:

In addition to 20 stitches and plastic surgery, Griffin healed another way: by baking. He started making a loaf of sourdough that had the same dimensions as the six-foot eel that bit him. Today, the bakery makes at least one loaf of the bread every day. Visitors who want to see the loaf in its entirety should arrive early, since fresh slices are sold off or added to the bakery’s sandwiches.

Journalist Valerie Schremp Hahn reports that her 9-year old daughter has developed a life-changing invention. She took an empty lip balm stick and filled it with cheese so that she can eat it during class.

And with that, the whole human race has taken a step forward. We don't really need flying cars, but we do need this future.

-via Aaron Starmer

Nirvana's 1991 album Nevermind brought fame to the band and grunge music to the world. The cover image immediately captivated the public eye. It shows a baby, representing the human race, in instinctive and lifelong covetousness.

The photo was a challenging one for Kirk Weddle. To execute his premise, he called up a friend who was the father of a 4-month old baby. He had about 15 seconds to capture the baby before he started bawling. Flashbak describes the shoot:

“A 4-month-old baby was cast and I conducted the shoot with just his parents and a lifeguard present. I placed a camera with a motor drive , in an underwater housing, mounted on a tripod at the bottom of a pool. Since kids are always an unknown at shoots, I did several prelight and prefocus passes with a doll. Once I felt I had the framing, light, and exposure dialed in; the parents slipped the child into the water. I took seven frames on the first pass and four frames on the second. As expected, the baby started to cry, this had been the babies first time underwater, and we wrapped the shoot. The dollar bill and the fishhook were stripped in in post. The result was one of the most iconic album covers in the last 25 years. The music inside wasn’t too bad either; to date it has sold over 30 million copies.”

Alex Trebek of Jeopardy! is of French Canadian origin. He's a native French speaker and can switch between French and English easily.

So when he pronounces a French word or an English loanword from French, he very carefully uses a French accent. "Genre" comes up a lot on Jeopardy! Here is a compilation of him saying it so deliciously on that show.

-via AV Club

Artist Gwen Murphy calls her series "Foot Fetish." Within a pair of old shoes, she can see expressive personalities. She adds those animistic personas with clay ash and acrylic paint. Since 2005, she's made about 150 of them.

Let's say that you need a particular course to graduate. But it's too late for you to enroll for that class and you've been put on the waitlist. What do you do?

One enterprising solution is to pay other students who are enrolled to drop the class so that you can enroll in their place. According to The Daily Californian, that's what's now happening at the University of California at Berkeley:

Campus sophomore David Wang reposted a screenshot on the Overheard at UC Berkeley Facebook page showing a post by a Haas senior in their final semester before going abroad offering to pay $100 to the first five students to drop UGBA 102B, “Introduction to Managerial Accounting.” The student in question needed the class to graduate, and claimed that the “advising office was no help, so I’m taking matters into my own hands.”

A possible source of profit for some clever students might be to enroll early in classes that are popular but non-essential, then offer to drop out on behalf of waitlisted students. Timing, correct information, and an easy way of identifying potential customers would be essential to this hustle.

-via Marginal Revolution | Photo: Berkeley Center for New Media

Alex Cornell meant it as a joke. But his song, "I'm on Hold," is often used as background music by call centers queuing up customers. It's appropriate because Cornell is the co-founder of a conference call service, so he knows the industry very well. Good hold music is something that that industry takes seriously, as NPR reports. When properly designed, hold music encourages patience and calmness:

David Green is the board chair of the Experience Marketing Association, and has been focused on hold music for more than two decades. (Formerly called the On Hold Messaging Association, the group gives out awards each year for the best on-hold experiences.) Green enumerated some things that can lead to a hold gone wrong: "Small loops of music that repeat over and over at short intervals might subliminally or consciously make you count the intervals, and make you aggravated that you've heard it three or four or five times," he says. Jingles on repeat are understandably irritating, as are some advertising messages. Auto dealers, he says, often play their radio ads over the phone, which is a mistake, because most customers call for repairs rather than sales. "Can you listen in your mind for a minute and imagine the typical car commercial on the radio?" he says. "Now imagine listening to that when you're placed on hold, not particularly happy that your car will cost $500 to repair."

-via Nag on the Lake

A shopping cart corral isn't a terrible place to park. It's close to the store and covered from the heat of the sun.

Perhaps that's what the driver of this Peugeot thought when he parked amidst the shopping carts at a Coto store in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Infuriated employees retaliated by lining up carts from the actual parking lot, surrounding the car.

Another shopper, Arnold Angelini, photographed the trapped car and said on Facebook:

“The truth is someone has to be a moron to have parked in the section for ‘shopping charts’,” Angelini said in a Facebook post. “You can’t be such an SOB and leave it anywhere. You can tell that no one respects nothing much less an undue place.”

He added: “Applause to the employees who left the vehicle closed off.”

-via Dave Barry

I can find little information about Ukrainian artist Diana Yevtukh. But I'm deeply struck by the mysticism within her embroidered works. This one is captioned "Multitudes of life, hidden in plain sight."

Researchers who discovered the eel species in the Amazon say that it's "the strongest bioelectricity generator known." It can deliver 860 volts, which is well over the current record of 650 volts.

They've named it Electrophorus voltai after the Italian scientist Alessandro Volta, who invented the electric battery. It's one of three Amazonian electric eel species that this research team cataloged. The Guardian reports:

The findings, published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, theorise that the three species evolved from a shared ancestor millions of years ago. [...]

And they suggest that the particularly strong electric shock that E. voltai can produce could be an adaptation to life in highland waters, where conductivity is reduced.

Electric eels use their shock tactics for a variety of reasons, including hunting prey, self-defence, and navigation. They generate electricity from three specialised electric organs that can emit charges of varying strengths for different purposes.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Leandro Sousa/Getty

Is it possible to make a functional knife blade out of human poop? Researchers at Kent State University tried their best.

They actually had a not ridiculous reason: they were testing a story of an Inuit man who used his own poop, once it had frozen, to butcher a dog. The story has been passed around ethnographic circles for a long time. But until these researchers tried it, none had been so bold as to see if it could be done.

And that's what science should do. So one of the researchers went on a high-fat diet similar to what an Inuit person might eat. S/he collected his poop and offered it to his/her colleagues. Those researchers then used knife molds and their hands to shape the poop into blades. After freezing the poop blades, the researchers tried to cut pig flesh, as you can see in the photo above.

They were unsuccessful, as their article in the Journal of Archaeological Science Reports explains:

We began our cutting experiments with the hide, reasoning that if our knives could not cut hide, then subsequent attempts with muscle and tendons would be futile.

Neither the “knife mold” samples, nor the “hand-shaped knives” could cut through hide (Figs. S5–S6). Despite the hide being cold from refrigeration, instead of slicing through it the knife-edge simply melted upon contact, leaving streaks of fecal matter (Fig. S4).

We repeated the experiment using the fecal samples of another team member (M.R.B.), whose diet was more traditionally Western (see supplementary online materials). The “hand-shaped knives” were subject to the same procedures and temperatures as the first set of knives (Figs. S7–S8). However, these knives also did not cut through the hide. For curiosity's sake, we tried to cut the subcutaneous fat on the underside of the hide. With some difficulty, only the shallowest of slices could be produced, and the knife-edge still quickly melted and deteriorated (Fig. S9).

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Journal of Archaeological Science Reports

Matthew Carver is on a patriotic mission to revive the British cheese industry, which has been in decline for a century. He began with a food truck which distributed British cheeses at festivals and other public events, then founded The Cheese Bar, a cheese-focused restaurant in London.

Now The Cheese Bar features a conveyor belt which brings cheeses around before the eyes and noses of hungry diners. Carver calls it the "Pick & Cheese." 40 meters of belt rotate, offering 25 different British cheeses. Food & Wine magazine describes how it works:

Cheese novices can choose a pre-selected cheese flight, while connoisseurs and more adventurous eaters can help themselves to a stoneware plate or two (or six, or 10) from the conveyor belt. Each plate is color-coded according to its price, which ranges from a £2.95 ($3.64) cream plate to a £6.10 ($7.54) yellow plate. (There's also an Off-Belt menu that includes the owner's signature Four Cheese Grilled Cheese Sandwich and pan-fried 'Angloumi,' their all-English take on Cypriot halloumi.)

-via Nag on the Lake | Photo: The Cheese Bar

Do you want to wear skinny jeans or bell bottoms? Now you now longer have to choose. For a mere $462, you can own a pair of jeans that goes half and half. Fashion brand Ksenia Schnaider lets you keep one foot in the 70s and one in 10s.

A crazy theory of mine: the manufacturer accidentally made a batch of defective jeans and convinced a retailer that it intentionally made pants to look like this.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Neiman Marcus