At 91 years of age, LC “Buckshot” Smith may just be the world’s oldest serving police officer, but he says he has no plans to retire just yet.

Buckshot doesn’t move around as fast as he used to, but that hasn’t been stopping him from patrolling the street of his home town, Camden, in Arkansas, four days a week. After serving for 46 years as a deputy, he retired, but he couldn’t stay away from the job for more than five months. He doesn’t hunt, doesn’t fish, all he ever enjoyed doing was being a police officer, so he went back to work in his 80s, as a rookie cop. He loves serving his community and only plans to retire for good “when the good Lord tells him to”.

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Once called a madman and laughed at by members of his community, an Indonesian man is now being hailed as a hero after spending a quarter of a century covering 250 hectares of barren hillsides around his home with banyan and ficus trees.

The story of Sadiman, the Indonesian man who singlehandedly brought a forest back to life, began in the early 1990s, but the problem he helped fix can be traced back to the 1960s. It was then that great forest fires ravaged the forests on the southern slope of Lawu Mountain, in Central Java, turning hundreds of hectares state-owned pine forest to ash and leaving barren hills in their place. For decades dozens of villages in the Regency of Wonogiri battled draughts and famine, until an unlikely hero took it upon himself to bring back the forest and create a better life for him and his community.

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An Indian man who started planting trees in a barren, sand-filled field 15 years ago is now being praised for transforming the wasteland into a 10,000-tree orchard.

Satyendra Gautam Manjhi, a simple man from the small village of Imaliyachak, in the Indian state of Bihar, claims he was inspired to start planting trees after being visited by Dashrath Manjhi, known as “the man who moved a mountain“. The story of how he spent over 20 years chiseling away at a mountain to make a road to his village has inspired a generation, including the protagonist of this story. Satyendrav says that Dashrath himself told him to start planting an orchard, and that’s exactly what he did.

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Rory van Ulft, a 7-year-old Canadian gymnast, has been raising eyebrows with her weightlifting achievements, recently becoming the youngest under-11 and under-13s US Youth National Champion in history.

Rory took up weightlifting about two years ago, as a way of becoming stronger. She had started doing gymnastics but learned that she could get injured doing certain things, if she wasn’t strong enough. She started lifting weights in the the snatch and the clean and jerk styles, under the careful supervision of a trainer, and gradually developed her strength to the point that she now lifts weights that some adults would probably struggle with. She can snatch 32kg, clean and jerk 42kg, as well as squat 61kg, and deadlift 80kg using an Olympic women’s bar.

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Wen Junhong, a 68-year-old woman from China, has been adopting stray animals for over two decades, and now shares her home with 1,300 canines, 100 cats and four horses.

When Wen Junhong adopted her first stray dog, twenty years ago, she had no idea that she would one day be taking care of over 1,000 dogs, but today she has over 1,300 canines in her care, and plans to take in even more of them. The dedicated animal lover gets up at 4 am every morning, cleans up the pens of about 20 to 30 barrels of waste, cooks over 500 kg or rice, vegetables and meat for the animals, and makes sure her “pets” are in good health and not fighting among each other.

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Galina Chuvina, a retired woman from the small Russian town of Sasovo, took up knife throwing as a hobby and ended up becoming an eight time national champion, European champion and even world champion.

Chuvina was 56 years old when she discovered knife throwing, back in 2007. The pensioner had landed a simple job in the coat check section of the local pool, taking people’s clothes and handing out numbers. One day, two young people came by to discuss the possibility of opening a knife throwing club on the premises, and Galina became one of the first people to enroll for knife throwing training. Just a month and a half into her training, the pensioner learned that her home town would soon host a knife throwing competition with around 50 participants, including special forces soldiers, professional knife throwers, as well as amateurs like her. She signed up, and shocked the audience by wining first place.

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Laungi Bhuiyan, a pensioner from the Indian state of Bihar, has become known as “Canal Man” after it was revealed that he spent 30 years of his life digging a 3-kilometer-long water canal, all by himself, using hand tools.

The remote village of Kothilawa, in the Lahthua area of Gaya district, had always suffered water shortages, with most of the rainwater falling in the nearby hills flowing into the river, instead of towards the village. This was one of the reason that some residents decided to move away and start anew, but one man decided to stay behind and fix the problem instead of running away from it. 30 years ago, local man Laungi Bhuiyan decided to take matters into his own hands and dig a canal to bring the water from the hills to a pond near his village. No one offered to help, so for three long decades he dug the 4-feet wide and 3-feet deep canal himself, using only whatever hand tools he had available.

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For the last two decades, Indian wildlife photographer and conservationist Aditya Singh and his wife have been buying land adjacent the famous Ranthambore Tiger Reserve in Rajasthan, and simply letting the forest grow back as a refuge for big cats and other wildlife.

In 1998, Aditya Singh left his comfortable job with Indian civil services in Delhi and moved to a remote part of Rajasthan, in the vicinity of the Ranthambore Tiger Reserve, to be closer to nature. He took up photography and together with his wife, artist Poonam Singh, opened a tourist resort to earn a living. They had been able to buy a piece of land, because farmers were eager to sell due to the danger of tigers from the nearby reserve venturing onto their properties. Over the year, the couple bought up more land, but instead of planting crops, they just let nature slowly reclaim it. Over the last 20 years, their 35 acres of land has transformed into a green forest patch where lions from the tiger reserve as well as wild boars and other animals come all year round.

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When it comes to hyper-realistic drawing, cats and other felines must be among the most difficult things to pull odd due to their fur. Getting every strand just right requires a steady hand and mountains of patience, and that’s what makes Yuki Kudo’s artworks so damn special.

Over the past decade, we’ve posted some pretty impressive hyper-realistic artworks on this website, so it takes some thing special to catch our attention. However, the first time I laid eyes on the color pencil drawings of Japanese artist Yuki Kudo, they took my breath away. I still find myself staring at some of his masterpieces, looking for clues that it’s just a drawing and not some digitally enhanced photo or CGI graphic. Oh, and did I mention he is only 18 years old?

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Rhea Ballos, an 11-year-old student of Salvacion Elementary School in Balasan, the Philippines, has become an overnight sensation after winning three gold medals in a provincial sports event, despite not having proper running shoes.

The young athlete managed to win the 400-meter dash, the 800-meter run and the 1,500-meter run in the girls’ categories while wearing strips of bandage over her feet instead of proper running shoes. Rhea basically ran barefoot, with the thin bandage offering minimal protection against the running track, but that didn’t stop her from beating all the other girls, all of whom were wearing running shoes, and taking home the gold at the inter-school sporting event held in Iloilo, central Philippines. Photos of the girl’s makeshift shoes, complete with a hand drawn swoosh logo, and the “Nike” brand scribbled on the side quickly went viral, wining her praises from all around the world.

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Outside of school, Laurent Simons is your typical 9-year-old child. The Belgian boy plays video games like Fortnite and Minecraft, spends time on social media, and loves to travel. But when it comes to studying, he puts students a decade his seniors to shame, graduating from university at age nine.

If all goes well and Laurent Simons completes his final project at Eindhoven University of Technology, in the Netherlands, he will graduate with a degree in electrical engineering in December. Most people take three years to graduate from the very same program, but Laurent entered just last year, and he is set to complete in just 10 months. That’s thanks to his superior intellect and his remarkable capacity to take in lots of information in very little time, which allows professors to go through the curriculum at a much faster pace.

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When Sasha Pesic rescued a litter of abandoned puppies in 2008, he had no idea that in little over a decade he would have rescued about 1,200 canines and still be caring for over 750 of them.

Sasha Pesic became known to the world in 2015, when a video of him acrobatically dropping down to the foot of a bridge to rescue a stranded puppy went viral on social media, getting over 63 million views on Facebook alone. No one outside of Serbia, or more precisely outside his home city of Nis, really knew who he was, or that he had hundreds of dogs in his care. Ever since rescuing a few abandoned puppies more than a decade ago, Pesic has dedicated his life to taking in abandoned dogs and looking after them. He has taken around 1,200 canines off the streets of Nis, over 400 of which have been adopted by people all over the world, but he still has over 750 of them in his care, and he needs all the help he can get.

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Most female fashion models start their careers in their late teens and retire in their early 30’s, but 96-year-old Alice Pang is not your ordinary fashion model. She started modelling at 93, so you could say she’s still a beginner.

A resident of Hong Kong, Alice always liked dressing well and looking elegant, but never actually considered a career in modelling. But her granddaughter always thought she had it in her, so when she saw an online ad for senior models of 65, she sent in Alice’s pictures and she was chosen for a photo shoot. Never one to back away from a challenge, Pang decided to give it a shot and even though she knew noting about modelling, she had all the natural qualities to succeed at it. Today, she is recognized as one of the best senior models in Asia, as well as the oldest.

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After spending months looking for his lost pet Chihuahua, a desperate Tucson man has announced that he is offering his one bedroom home and the plot of land that comes with it to whoever brings his dog back to him.

Eddie Collins lost his beloved pet, Jenny, back in April and he has spent every day since trying to find her. After searching every place he could think of, plastering posters all over Tucson and visiting dog shelters every day, he decided to increase his chances of finding Jenny by offering his most prized material possession as a reward. Whoever finds Jenny and brings her back, will receive Eddie’s one-bedroom apartment, his workshop and a plot of land in return.

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Kong Zhenlan, a 71-year-old woman from China’s Shanxi Province, has dedicated the last four decades of her life to adopting and raising orphaned children, making sure that they had food on the table and got access to education.

Even though she could barely afford to support herself on a modest income, Kong Zhenlan couldn’t bear to walk by the orphanage in Jixian County every day and see so many children struggling in abhorrent poverty. One day, she stopped by and picked one of the orphans in her arms; that’s when she knew she had to to something to make their life better. The modest woman started adopting these abandoned children and raising them as her own. Over the last 47 years, she has adopted 45 orphans, some of whom grew up to become doctors and lawyers.

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