John Sevier Austin, a video editor from North Carolina, has a very unusual superpower – his brain allows him to speak and sing backwards, and is fluent in the unique “language”.

Ever since he was a young boy, Austin knew that he was a bit different than most children his age. Try as he might, he never fit in with the other kids, he could never be on the same page with them, and that really messed with his head growing up. It wasn’t until a few years ago that he found out he had Asperger’s syndrome, a neurodevelopmental disorder on the autism spectrum, which explained both his social awkwardness and his strange superpower – the ability to speak and sing backwards.

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Haji Kalimullah Khan, aka Mango Man, is a world renowned horticulturist and fruit breeder known for his accomplishments in breeding mangoes, and especially for his crowning achievement, a mango tree that produces 300 different varieties.

When Haji Kalimullah Khan dropped out of school at the age of 15 to make growing and breeding mangoes his life’s work, his family, like most farmers in Malihabad, Northern India, was growing only two varieties of the delicious tropical fruit. But one day, after seeing a rose plant that produced flowers of different colors in a friend’s flower garden, Khan learned about plant crossbreeding, and started wondering if the same principles didn’t apply to fruit trees. This was the beginning of a career that would eventually see him crowned as one of the world’s leading horticulturists and fruit breeders, and earn him the affectionate nickname “Mango Man”.

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Luca Yupanqui, was still in her mother’s uterus when she started recording her first music album. Now she is getting ready to release the world’s first ever LP with sounds from inside the womb.

The daughter of Elizabeth Hart, a member of psych-rock band Psychic Ills, and musician Iván Diaz Mathé, young Luca is all set to follow in her parents’ footsteps, with her debut LP expected to launch on April 24, this year. The ten-track album was produced with the help of Biosonic MIDI technology;  electrodes were placed on Hart’s abdomen, and the vibrations of the fetus were translated into sound using synthesizers. Five hours-worth of recording were edited into the upcoming LP, named Sounds of the Unborn.

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Respected Indian herpetologist Neelam Kumar Khaire has a very interesting record to his name. In his youth, this reptile lover spent 72 hours in an enclosure with 72 venomous snakes for company. He proved that the snakes only bite when provoked, and set a Guinness record in the process.

Khaire’s legendary feat dates back to 1980, when the then 28-year-old receptionist at a hotel in Pune decided to challenge the record set by South African Peter Snyemaris, a year before. Snyemaris had spent 50 hours with 18 venomous and six semi-poisonous snakes in Johannesburg, South Africa, but Neelam believed that an Indian deserved the world record more, seeing as India was known as a land of snakes. Despite opposition from local authorities like the police, which would neither take him seriously nor permit him to go ahead with his plan, on January 20, 1980, Neelam Kumar Khaire stepped in a glass enclosure with 72 venomous snakes.

Neelam Kumar Khaire fell in love with snakes in his early 20s, while working as the manager of a holiday home at Matheran, near Bombay. Snakes were frequent visitors of that place, and even though the other members of the staff simply killed them on sight, he could never do the same.

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Benny Harlem is not only one of the most successful hair influencers on Instagram, but he’s also a Guinness Record holder, for the world’s tallest high-top fade.

California-based male model and artist Benny Harlem rose to fame in 2016, when photos of his impressive afro hairstyle went viral on social media. The fact that his daughter Jaxyn, who obviously inherited his hair genes, also featured in most of these photos only made them more popular. Harlem has always been a promoter of natural hairstyles and he has instilled the same kind of love in his daughter from a very young age. To maintain their regal locks looking fresh, Benny says that he and Jaxyn only use natural shampoo that they make at home, using natural ingredients.

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At just 27 years old, Li Jiaqi is already one of the most successful online personalities in China. He specializes in selling makeup, particularly luxury brand lipsticks, which has earned him crazy nicknames “King of Lipstick” or “Iron Lips”.

With over 40 million fans on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, and millions others on various other social networks, Li Jiaqi is perhaps the most sought after beauty vlogger in all of China. Whatever product he chooses to promote turns into an instant hit, and companies are desperate to work with him, but he remains mostly focused on makeup, lipstick in particular. It’s not really the kind of career you would expect a young man to venture into, especially in a traditionalist country like China, but his success is proof that unconventionality can be an advantage. That’s how Li Jiaqi looks at it, anyway. He says that most people doubted him at first, saying that he could never sell to a female audience, but he had always been confident that he had an advantage over female beauty vloggers – stamina.

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An Indian businessman who allegedly staged a stupid plane hijacking hoax to get his wife fired by the airline so they could spend more time together was recently sentenced to life in prison.

Birju Salla, the 38-year-old scion of a wealthy family of jewellers based in Mumbai, became the first person to be sentenced under India’s strict Anti-Hijacking Act of 2016. The funny thing is that he never actually intended to hijack a plane, all he wanted was to get his beloved  fire so they could spend more time together. He told the court that by printing a hijacking threat and planting it in the toilet of a Jet Airways plane, the airline would close its Delhi operation and fire his younger wife, so she would be forced to return to Mumbai where they could be together more. Things didn’t work out quite as planned…

Birju Salla’s troubles began when, during his frequent flights from Mumbai to Delhi, he fell in love with a Jet Airways customer care executive. They began having an affair in 2017, but the businessman quickly became frustrated with how little time they spent together. He felt that her job was always getting in the way of their love, so in July of 2017 he secretly married her – although he was already married and had two children – and asked her to move to Mumbai with him. She refused, and that’s when he allegedly hatched a ridiculously stupid plan to get her fired.

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The only thing worse than singing for over 100 hours straight is finding out that it was all in vain. That’s what happened to Dominican singer Carlos Silver who, after performing for 106 consecutive hours in an attempt to set a new world record, learned that his attempt was disqualified by Guinness.

Last week, Dominican artist Carlos Silver performed over 5,000 songs in an attempt to break the Guinness record set by Indian singer Sunil Waghmare, who in 2012 sang for 105 consecutive hours. This was Silver’s second shot at the record for world’s longest singing marathon by an individual, after his unsuccessful attempt in 2016, and this time it looked like he had done it. At the end of his epic 5-day performance, the timer showed that he had been singing for 106.7 hours, over one hour more that Waghmare’s record, but his elation soon turned to disappointment, as Guinness officials disqualified him for breaking the organization’s strict rules.

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The Lyall’s wren was a species of small, flightless birds that once thrived on Stephens Island, in New Zealand. It’s one of the many species that have been rendered extinct by the reckless introduction of predators in their natural habitat, but what makes this bird’s story unique is that it was allegedly both discovered and wiped out by a house cat named Tibbles.

The lighthouse on Stephens Island was built in 1892, but the existence of a yet-undiscovered species of bird on this small patch of land was only reported a couple of years later, when assistant lighthouse keeper David Lyall moved in, along with a small staff and his pregnant cat, Tibbles. Lyall was a passionate naturalist and amateur ornithologist, and was looking forward to pursuing his hobbies on this previously uninhabited island, but little did he know that he would go down in history as the man who discovered the Lyall’s wren and indirectly caused its extinction, both in less than a year.

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Money counting machines have been a staple of banks all around the world for decades now, and China is no exception, but here bank tellers still practice their banknote counting skills every day, and some of them can really give those automated counters a run for their money.

Videos of Chinese bank tellers showing off their amazing money counting skills have been doing the rounds online for a long time, and for good reason. There’s something oddly satisfying about watching someone breeze through a wad of cash in mere seconds, but if you go deeper down this rabbit hole, you’ll find that there’s a whole lot more to Chinese banknote counting, including several techniques, one more impressive than the other, and even a popular TV contest in which money counting champions of different banks compete for the title of fastest and most accurate “human banknote counting machine” and the bragging rights that come with it.

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Hosts are considered the modern version of geishas in Japan. They are charming women who engage in a carefully choreographed performance designed to make clients feel like the most important person on Earth. But in certain clubs around Tokyo’s Kabuchiko district, the tables have turned; here it’s male hosts who cater to the needs of female clients, and there’s no one better at it than Roland, the so-called emperor of Japan’s male host industry.

Like their female counterparts, male hosts work in specialized host clubs in Tokyo’s red lights district and have a very specific goal – to entertain their clients and encourage them to spend as much as possible on drinks. That’s how they earn a living and it’s also how they are ranked. Some clubs actually have posters of their male hosts displayed outside based on how much they managed to convince clients to pay the previous month. This usually involves a lot of drinking on their part as well, but Roland, the 25-year-old head manager of the Platina club and the hottest male host in the business, is a rare exception. He gets clients to spend huge amount of money without having to get drunk himself.

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If you were to see the Great Banyan Tree in the Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Indian Botanic Garden from a distance, you could be forgiven for mistaking it for a forest. Spanning more than 14,493 square meters, the tree is the widest in the world—so large that it covers more ground than the average Wal-Mart.

No one is quite sure exactly how old the Great Banyan Tree is due to a lack of official records, but experts estimate that the tree is at least 250 years old; the earliest references to the tree have been found in travel writing dating all the way back to the 19th century. Over the years, the tree has been through a lot. Not only has it survived 2 major cyclones in 1864 and 1867, but its main trunk was also infected with a deadly fungus. This infection meant that the main trunk of the tree needed to be removed in 1925.

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If you’re looking for the world’s easiest mountain to climb, head to Shouguang, in China’s Shandong Province, where you’ll find ‘Jingshan’, the smallest mountain in the country, and probably the world. It measures only 0.6 meters from ground level to its highest point, and can be conquered with a single step.

Jingshan may not be the most impressive mountain in the world, but as the only mountain in Shouguang district, it is a symbol of the region and one of its most popular tourist attractions. Mentions of the mountain in the district’s official records can be traced back over 100 years, including its precise location, dimensions and the fact that despite its laughable size above ground, it seems to be the tip of a much larger underground mountain.

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The Didu Cafe in Moscow, is one of the most interesting-looking cafes in the world. Its walls are covered with over 140,000 colorful plasticine figurines made by visitors over the years. It’s also home to the largest plasticine Mona Lisa on Earth.

The founder of Didu Cafe wanted to give patrons a chance to leave their mark on this place in a semi-permanent way, but also give them something to do while waiting for their food and drinks. Plasticine was the perfect solution. It’s easy to work with, colorful and ends up looking good, or at least funny, even in the hands of someone with no artistic talents. So he placed boxes of plasticine on all the tables and started inviting guests to create small artworks out of it and decorate the walls and ceiling of the cafe with them. Today, Didu is home to over 140,000 plasticine artworks, from abstract designs and childish figurines, to popular symbols and even profane messages.

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Save for a few symbolic sections in the center of the German capital, the Berlin wall was completely demolished in 1989 . However, a local hobby historian claims to have discovered an 80-meter-long section of which authorities apparently knew nothing about.

37-year-old Christian Bormann found the forgotten section of the Berlin Wall between two train stations in the Pankow district in the northeast of the city, back in 1999. The local government office responsible for monuments was unaware of the surviving segment, and records showed the section registered as demolished. Bormann kept his discovery to himself until recently, when he noticed that it had been damage by storms. Concerned about the slowly deteriorating monument, he finally revealed his secret in a blog post and contacted Pankow district authorities, calling on them to protect it as a historical monument.

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