Russian-born bodybuilder and fitness model Vladislava Galagan has been dubbed ‘Kendal Jenner on steroids’ and ‘real life She Hulk’ because of her pretty face and incredibly muscular body.

Old sayings like ‘seeing is believing’ or ‘I’ll believe it when I see it’ perfectly expressed the belief that one had to see something before believing it to be true. It used to be like that, anyway, before advanced digital tools made us not trust our eyes anymore. In an era of life-like AI-powered news anchors and men posing as beautiful women with the help of phone apps, it’s hard to believe anything you see these days, especially when it looks too good to be true. Case in point, Vladislava Galagan, a 27-year-old fitness model who rose to prominence on social media thanks to the ‘perfect mix’ of an attractive, feminine face, and an impressively muscular body. While boasting hundreds of thousands of fans, Galagan also has plenty of doubters who accuse her of digitally altering her photos for attention, or using AI-powered tools to ‘beautify’ herself.

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A Spanish extreme athlete who voluntarily isolated herself from the world by entering a cave in November 2021 recently emerged from her self-imposed exile after a record 500 days.

When female climber Beatriz Flamini entered an isolated cave in the Spanish region of Granada on November 21, 2021, the world was still in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, Russia had not invaded Ukraine, and Elon Musk had not yet become the tzar at Twitter. Falmini was 48 years old when she entered the cave, but she had turned 50 by the time she stepped out of it and had no idea what had occurred in the outside world in the last 500 days. Although she did not make contact with any other humans, Beatriz was carefully observed by a team of scientists, including psychologists and speleologists, in what is considered a first-of-its-kind experiment.

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90-year-old Jim Arrington got into bodybuilding when he was 13 years old, and he has been keeping at it ever since. At 90 years old, he holds the Guinness World Record for “oldest active male bodybuilder”.

Jim Arrington discovered bodybuilding when he was 13. He walked into a drug store and saw these big, bulky guys on the cover of a muscle magazine. He immediately ordered a copy of a 25-cent book by George Jowett, a Canadian strongman, and started doing the exercises detailed in it using his father’s three-pound steel balls. They certainly weren’t the most useful bodybuilding tools, but they helped him put on more than 10 pounds of muscle in a few months, so he kept going. He has been going at it ever since, and even though his body is much more fragile now, at age 90, he has no plans of ever stopping weight training.

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Hansel Enmanuel lost his left arm when he was only a child, but that didn’t stop him from pursuing his dream of becoming a professional basketball player.

19-year-old Hansel became an online sensation last year when a highlight video of his high-school basketball exploits went viral. People love underdog success stories, and Hansel Enmanuel’s is particularly special. He was only six when a pile of cinder blocks fell on him, crushing his left arm so badly that doctors had no choice but to amputate it below the shoulder. It was a devastating blow to Hansel and his family, but it only made him work harder in order to fulfill his dream of playing basketball at a professional level.

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An Indian man has gained the admiration of millions of devotees after spending eight years carving over 400 stone steps to a hilltop Hindu temple using only a hammer and chisel.

The Baba Yogeshwar Nath temple in Bihar, Eastern India, was famous among devotees of Lord Shiva, but very difficult to reach because of its location at the top of a steep 1,500-foot hill. Able-bodied people spent hours climbing the hill every day, while the elderly, children and disabled people had virtually no way of reaching it without assistance. Trekking up and down the steep, rocky slopes was risky, and people often injured themselves trying to reach the holy temple. So one day, eight years ago, a local mason decided to make every devotee’s life a little easier by carving stone steps from the bottom of the hill all the way up to the temple.

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A 26-year-old animal lover from China has been taking care of over 300 wolves at a wildlife rescue station in the country’s Inner Mongolia region.

Ever since he was a child, Wang Nan was fascinated by the unity and bonds of wolves as a species, so when he got a chance to work with his favorite animals as an adult, he jumped at the opportunity. In 2015, he started working at an animal rescue reserve in Xilinhot, Inner Mongolia, taking care of injured wild wolves, feeding them, breeding them, and slowly earning their trust. Over the years, his pack of wolves grew to around 320 animals, including young pups, who seem to consider him their friend.

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An Australian man has become known as the COPD Athlete because of his incredible ability to run entire marathons despite having only 30 percent lung capacity as a result of an incurable and progressive condition.

Russell Winwood was diagnosed with COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) in 2011. By that time, the Brisbane native had already turned his life around, having survived a stroke at age 36. He had given up smoking, cut down on drinking alcohol, started eating better, and, most importantly, he had taken up sports. For years, he competed in varying distances of triathlons, from sprint to Half Ironman and even a few ultra-marathons. Everything was going great, but at one point Winwood noticed that his usual training felt harder and he found it difficult to breathe. That’s when he received his COPD diagnosis, along with the warning that his lungs were operating at less than 30 percent capacity.

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An Indian ‘sadhu’ monk has been holding his arm in an upward position continuously for more than a decade in honor of his god.

Mahant Radheypuri Juna Akhara, an Indian sadhu – a religious or holy person who has renounced their worldly life – from Allahabad has been keeping his right arm raised high above his head for more than 10 years in honor of a Hindu deity. He was recently featured in a viral Twitter video, telling the interviewer that he wanted to do something for his god, so that it notices him. So he raised his right arm up and never put it down again. Today, it’s sort of stuck in that position, and he claims he doesn’t even feel it anymore.

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Muhamed Kahrimanovic, a martial arts master from Germany, has been dubbed ‘Hammer Hands” for his ability to smash anything from coconuts to baseball bats with his bare hands.

Bosnian-born Kahrimanovic was a teenager when he moved to Germany with his family. He had been studying taekwondo since early childhood and continued his training in his adoptive country, eventually becoming an instructor himself. But Kahrimanovic would end up attracting international attention and setting several Guinness records thanks to this incredibly strong hands, which earned him the reputation of a real-life superhuman and the nickname “Hammer Hands”.

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The ‘Little Princess of Anfu Road’ is a Chinese woman from Shanghais believed to be in her early 50s who always goes out in elegant Lolita-style dresses.

Photos of the ‘Little Princess of Anfu Road’ started doing the rounds online a few weeks ago, drawing mixed reactions from the general public. Some called her a breath of fresh air, others a ‘crazy old lady’ who dressed well below her years, but everyone was intrigued by her, as she always seemed to have a new outfit on, and she seemed to ooze self-confidence despite all the criticism directed at her. As the days passed by, interest in this mysterious character of Shanghai grew, and soon everyone learned that there was a heartwarming story behind her extravagant wardrobe.

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Barbara Humbert, an 82-year-old great-grandmother from Val d’Oise, France, recently set a new world record after running a whopping 125 km (78 miles) in 24 hours.

At the end of last month, during the French Championships held in Brive-la-Gaillarde, 82-year-old Barbara Humbert broke the world record for the longest distance run in 24 hours for her age category. A German woman had run 105 kilometers (65.2 miles) on tarmac a few years back, and Barbara had her sights on improving that record by about 15 kilometers. She exceeded her own expectations, though, smashing through the old world record with a recorded distance of 125 kilometers covered in 24 hours. Not bad for an 82-year-old great-grandmother, is it?

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After losing her husband to a heart attack, an Indian woman spent 39 years pretending to be a man so she could raise her daughter alone in a patriarchal society.

S Petchiammal had only been married for 15 days when her husband succumbed to a massive heart attack. She was 20 years old at the time and pregnant with her daughter. Soon after giving birth, she started working various jobs to make ends meet, but raising a child as a single mother in Tamil Nadu’s Katunayakkanpatti village, a dominant patriarchal society, was tough. The young woman worked jobs at construction sites, hotels, and tea shops, but she faced harassment and sexual taunts every day, so one day she decided that she needed to make a big change.

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Looking at Aboli Jarit, a young woman from Najapur, India, you would be forgiven for thinking her a child no older than six, even though she is really 19 years of age.

Aboli, who stands only 3ft 4in-tall, recently became a viral internet sensation after sharing her story. As a baby, Aboli was diagnosed with renal rickets, a very rare condition that combines chronic renal disease with bone deformity. To make matters worse, she was born without a bladder, so she has to wear diapers all the time, as urine simply flows continually, as it has nowhere to accumulate. The girl’s bones got progressively weaker as time went by, and she eventually became unable to walk, which was brutal, as she had always loved to sing and dance. Every day is a struggle for the 19-year-old, but somehow she finds the courage to be optimistic and see the glass half full.

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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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Luo Yingjiu, an 81-year-old man in China’s Hubei Province, has spent the last three decades of his life taking care of sick and disabled animals at the “world’s loneliest zoo”.

It was during the 1980s that Luo Yingjiu started buying animals and taking them home with him. He wasn’t doing it as a pet collector, but as an animal lover sick of seeing all sorts of disabled and visibly sick creatures being kept in cages and sold on the streets. So he bought them and took them home with him, where he did his best to nurse them back to health. The lucky ones that made a full recovery were eventually released back into the wild, but some were in such bad shape that they required constant care and attention, which Luo was more than happy to provide…

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