This is a pretty amazing photo showing elephants painting a picture. Apparently there are 8 elephant painters at a camp in Thailand (is this the same camp where they use the elephant toilet?). The elephants have been taking art lessons for 4 years according to the article. The painting in the picture was sold for $39,000 dollars to someone in the US. Apparently human artists drafted the painting first and then the elephants do the painting. Do they just fill in the lines with the color of their choice or do they look at a picture/painting and then copy it? The article doesn't really say.

Check out the full article about the elephants painting pictures in Thailand and view the higher resolution photo of the elephant painters.

Source: Yahoo

Over on Yahoo they have an offbeat photo of an elephant using a giant elephant sized toilet. The accompanying article goes on to say that the elephants are in Thailand and were rescued from people in Bangkok who were using them to get money from tourists. The elephants apparently are now in an "elephant camp" next to a zoo. The handlers of the elephants have taught them to paint, dance, play music, and now toilet training. The poor tourists couldn't handle all the giant elephant dung all over the place.

Check out a bigger picture of the elephant toilet.

Source: Yahoo

In the image at the right the square that is labeled A is the same color as the square that is labeled B. I checked this in an image program and they have an RGB hex value of #787878. The website for this illusion photo explains this as follows: "In the figure, the light check in shadow is surrounded by darker checks. Thus, even though the check is physically dark, it is light when compared to its neighbors. The dark checks outside the shadow, conversely, are surrounded by lighter checks, so they look dark by comparison." So I guess this means don't always believe what your eyes tell you.

Head over and view a larger photo of the illusion and the full explaination.

Are you ready for corporate logos on fruit as a marketing gimmick? I was surfing around the net and came across an article about creating images on the skin of an apple. The process, which is rather like lithography, involves placing a bag over each apple early in the growing season to keep it from ripening. About two weeks before picking the apples they would remove the bag and place a transparent sticker on the apple. The sticker would also have some type of logo printed on it (for example a Jack-O-Lantern like in the picture). The apple would ripen normally and the area under the logo would stay lighter than the rest of the apple. The article says that a supermarket in the UK sold apples like the one pictured for Halloween. The process seems somewhat cost prohibitive but there might be other ways to do the same kind of thing (with a laser or water-soluble edible ink).

Read the whole Halloween Apple article.

Source: Grand-illusions.com