Young Brothers Survive Almost a Month Alone in the Amazon Jungle

Two young brothers, ages six and eight, were recently rescued after miraculously surviving almost four weeks alone in Brazil’s Amazon jungle.

Glauco and Gleison Ferreira left the family home near Manicoré, in Brazil’s Amazonas state, on February 18. They went into the nearby jungle to catch and hunt small birds but never came back. Around 260 people, including locals and professional rescuers, searched for them for over a week, but with the rainy season making the jungle even more inaccessible than usual, all efforts were unsuccessful. Still, even after the search was officially called off on February 26, locals kept searching for the boys through the vast wilderness, and their family never lost hope that they would be found alive. Luckily, after 27 days of pure agony, they received the news that they had been praying for.

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Khecarī Mudrā – The Controversial Yoga Practice of Sticking the Tongue into the Nasal Cavity

Khecarī Mudrā is an obscure and somewhat controversial yoga practice that involves gradually severing parts of the tongue and then curling it back until it enters the nasal cavity.

Can you even imagine pulling your tongue back enough for the tip to slide into the nose through the mouth? It sounds impossible, and even if you could do it, wouldn’t that pose a risk of choking? Well, diehard hatha yoga practitioners must not worry about that too much, because that’s exactly what the advanced stages of a practice called “khecarī mudrā” require. Well, that, and gradually cutting the frenulum, the small piece of skin connecting the tongue to the floor of the mouth…

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World’s Luckiest Man Collects Thousands of Four-Leafed Clovers

Julio, a 30-year-old Swiss educator has an impressive collection of four, five, six and even seven-leafed clovers, which just might make him the world’s luckiest man.

Clovers with more than three leaves are considered lucky charms in many cultures, and if a person’s luck would be measured in the sheer number of such clovers in their possession, a Swiss collector of rare clovers would almost undoubtedly be the world’s luckiest man. 30-year-old Julio has been collecting lucky clovers since he was only nine, and has since amassed an enviable collection of 3,467 four, five, six and even seven-leafed clovers laminated to protect them from the elements.

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UK-Based Company Creates Functional Invisibility Shields

Inspired by Harry Potter’s iconic invisibility cloak, these real-life invisibility shields can make anyone who hides behind them disappear into thin air.

Invisibility Shield Co. is a UK-based startup that has been working on an affordable invisibility mechanism for over two years. The company recently revealed a line of invisibility shields that rely on surprisingly simple technology to make users invisible to the naked eye. Apparently, the shield uses a “precision-engineered lens array” to deflect light from the subject sitting behind the shield away from the observer. The lenses are oriented vertically to allow light from the subject to diffuse when it passes through the shield. The light from the subject’s background is refracted towards the observer who cannot see the subject hiding behind the shield.

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Cliff Young – The Legendary 61-Year-Old Farmer Who Won a 550-Mile Ultra-Marathon

Cliff Young is a legend among ultra-marathon runners, and for good reason – at age 61, the Australian potato farmer became the unlikely winner of the grueling Westfield Sydney-Melbourne Ultra Marathon.

Every year, thousands of seasoned runners from all over the world gather in Australia to take part in one of the most difficult ultra-marathons on the planet. As the name suggests, the Westfield Sydney-Melbourne Ultra Marathon has competitors running from Sydney to Melbourne, a distance of 543.7-miles (875 kilometers). The first man to win this endurance race remains its most famous participant to date – a 61-year-old potato farmer who ran the whole thing wearing overalls and work boots, and beat the runner up by 10 hours.

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Japanese Factory Lets You Knit Your Own Socks by Riding a Bicycle

Souki Socks, a small sock factory in Japan’s Nara Prefecture, has devised a machine that allows people to knit their own socks by pedaling on a stationary bicycle.

Unless you’re a fan of knitting, making socks doesn’t exactly sound like a fun experience. This was the reality that the brilliant minds Souki Socks were confronted with when they set out to make sock-making exciting for the masses. Luckily, despite having the odds stacked against them, they managed to come up with an ingenious contraption that combined a mechanical sock knitting machine and a bicycle to allow virtually anyone to knit their own socks just by pedaling. Named “Charix,” the machine has been very popular with tourists ever since it was inaugurated in 2017.

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Meet Ragnar Kavurson, the Bosnian “Vikings” Fan Who Lives Like a Northman

Stipe Petic, a 57-year-old Bosnian man with no nordic background, was so impressed by the ‘Vikings’ TV series that he started calling himself Ragnar Kavurson and making axes for a living.

The Bosnian Ragnar claims that his fascination with Viking culture started with a binge-watching session of History’s hit series, ‘Vikings’. Coming back to his hometown of Tomislavgrad in southern Bosnia after ten years of working on construction sites in Germany, he became fascinated by the saga of the legendary hero Ragnar Lothbrok and his wife Lagertha. After changing his look to mimic that of a nordic warrior of legend, and borrowing the name of his favorite Viking character, Ragnar, the “Bosnian Viking” started making intricately decorated Viking axes and shields.

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Dentist Boosted Profits by Damaging Patients’ Teeth So He Could Fix Them

A Wisconsin dentist was recently found guilty of intentionally damaging his patients’ teeth so he could charge them more after fixing them.

61-year-old Scott Chamolli faces up to 10 years for each of his five healthcare fraud charges, and a maximum of five years for two other charges. The experienced dentist allegedly made millions by purposely drilling or breaking his clients’ teeth and then charging them extra to fix the damage. According to prosecutors, after causing the unnecessary damage, Chamoli would pressure his patients into unnecessary procedures just to boost his profit. Even though many of the victims thought their teeth were fine, they trusted him as the professional and paid for the unnecessary procedures.

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India’s ‘Living Dead’ and the Man Who Spent 18 Years Proving That He Was Alive

Lal Bihari is probably India’s most famous living dead, one of many people killed off in official records so that relatives can claim their possessions for themselves.

Killing off somebody on paper is apparently not that hard to do in India. All you need is some bribe money and local officials willing to do some dirty work in exchange for that money. Victims are usually people who have been away from their birthplace for a long time, and the culprits are greedy relatives trying to claim their land or their family homes. But once you’re dead in official records, proving that you’re actually alive is a much more difficult endeavor, especially when the people you are trying to convince are the very same who were paid to kill you off in the first place.

Lal Bihari’s story is probably the most famous example of a “dead man’s” struggle in India. His woes began in 1976, when he returned to his birthplace, the village of Khalilabad, in Uttar Pradesh, for residence, income and caste certificates, needed to secure a loan for his heirloom business. When the clerk first looked up at him and told him that Lal Bihari was dead, he smiled, but the clerk didn’t smile back…

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The World’s Toughest Bacterium Can Withstand Anything From Radiation to Life in Outer Space

Deinococcus radiodurans is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as “the world’s toughest bacterium,” and it is fully deserving of that title.

Scientists discovered the red, spherical bacterium that later came to be known as deinococcus radiodurans about 70 years ago, when examining a can of ground meat that had spoiled despite having been sterilized by exposure to doses of radiation in the megarad range. Research would later show that this lowly bacterium can withstand 10,000 times the amount of radiation that would normally kill a human being, thanks to a miraculous ability to repair numerous DNA double-strand breaks in a matter of hours.

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Self-Proclaimed ‘World’ Happiest Man’ Has Been Living on Cruise Ships for Over 20 Years

Most people go on cruise ships for vacations, but for Mario Salcedo, cruise ships have been his home for the last 23 years, and this continuous life on the water has made him “the world’s happiest man”.

Calling Mario Salcedo a “super cruiser” would probably be an understatement. The retired financier has been on hundreds of cruises in the last 23 years, and with the exception of a recent 1.5-year break due to the Covid pandemic, he has rarely spent more than a day or two on dry land. A native of Miami, Florida, Salcedo spent much of his life working for a number of large finance companies, including Federal Express, traveling the world and seeing other people have fun. Then, one day, he decided it was his time to have fun, so in 1997 he quit his job.

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Residents of Afghanistan’s ‘One Kidney Village’ Sell Their Organs to Survive

Shenshayba Bazaar, an Afghan village near the city of Herat, has become known as Afghanistan’s ‘one kidney village’, because of the large number of residents who have sold one of their kidneys in order to make ends meet.

Afghanistan wasn’t doing too well economically before the Taliban came to power last year, but the brutal takeover caused the economy of the Asian country to collapse and left many struggling to put food on the table for their families. In some cases, things got so bad that people decided to sell one of their kidneys in order to pay their debts and buy food. One small village in Herat Province has become known as the ‘one kidney village’, because of the large number of residents who sold one of their kidneys on the black market.

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‘Door Head Ants’ Use Their Large Flat Heads as Doors to Shut Down Their Nests

The workers of several ant species have large, flattened, and slightly concave heads that they use as plugs to block entrance to their colonies’ nests.

The so-called ‘door head ants’ are soldier ants with armored heads that match both the size and the shape of the entrance to their colonies’ nests almost to perfection. They function as living doors, using their heads to plug shut the nest and only allow access to other members of the colony while keeping unwanted guests out. Door head ants can be found in several ant genera, including Cephalotes and Carebara. How these species developed the exact size and shape as the entries to their nests is the result of millions of years of evolution.

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Bachelor Tries to Find a Wife With Witty Subway Advertising Banners

A London bachelor is taking extreme measures to increase his chances of finding a wife – renting subway advertising banners in the English capital to get as much exposure as possible.

If you’ve passed through the Oxford Circus subway station in London during the last few days, you’ve probably seen a couple of unusual advertising banners plastered on the walls. They show a man in a pink suit who is apparently looking for a suitable wife. That man is 31-year-old Jeevan Bhachu and he wants everyone to know that he is not kidding. He really is looking to get hitched, and since the pandemic has made conventional dating problematic, he decided to go for a more straightforward approach.

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Man Vividly Remembers Past Life as WWI Pilot

A UK man claims that a hypnosis session triggered vivid memories of his past life as an airplane photographer and gunner during World War One.

Steve Mulligan was born in 1961, in the city of Manchester, but also has very clear memories of growing up in Llandudno, Wales, in the beginning of the 20th century. He claims that he grew up as Sydney Sutcliffe, and died at the age of 24, after his plane was shut down on the Western Front during WWI. He always had these strange memories that played out in black and white, of him looking down from high up in the sky, but he could never really make sense of them. And then he went in for a hypnosis session and discovered that he was remembering his past life.

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