Nigel Richards, a 57-year-old New Zealand scrabble phenom, recently won the 2024 Spanish-Language Scrabble World Championship despite not speaking the language at all.

It’s been almost a decade since we first wrote about the talented Mr. Nigel Richards; He had just won the 2015 French-Language Scrabble Championship despite being completely unable to have a conversation in French. It was a remarkable feat that made international news headlines at the time. Richards was already known as the world’s best scrabble player and had earned nicknames like ‘the Tiger Woods of Scrabble,’ but this was completely unheard of. A person who didn’t speak French at all had run through the world’s best French-speaking Scrabble players to earn the title of world champion. Some thought it was a fluke, but Nigel has repeated the feat since, and he recently proved he could do it in other languages he didn’t speak.

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A 31-year-old man has been praised for his exemplary filial piety after selling his possessions to travel through China with his paralyzed mother, carrying her on his back just like she did with him when he was a baby.

Xiao Ma was just eight years old when his parents were involved in a terrible car accident that claimed his father’s life and left his mother unable to move. He and his older sister were forced to take care of themselves as well as their mother, who was later diagnosed with cerebral atrophy, as a consequence of the car accident. Growing up, he worked in the fields picking cotton, was an apprentice in various fields and opened his own restaurant in Xinjiang. Most of the money he made went towards his mother’s recovery, and his hard work seemed to pay off, as the woman was slowly able to leave the bed that had become her prison to sit in a wheelchair and even take a few small steps. However, a few years ago, Xiao Ma got the devastating news that his mother’s cerebral atrophy was not only incurable but progressing at a steady pace. That’s when he decided to make the best of the time he had left with her.

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Helio da Silva, a retired business executive from Brazil, single-handedly planted over 41,000 trees in his hometown of Sao Paolo over the last two decades.

Flying over the Brazilian metropolis of Sao Paolo, it’s tough to miss the 3.2-kilometers-long and 100-meter-wide green strip of trees wedged between two of the city’s busiest roads. It is known as Tiquatira Linear Park, and it is the work of a single man who worked tirelessly for over 20 years in order to transform a previously dilapidated area into an actual jungle within the urban jungle that is Sao Paolo. Originally from the town of Promissao, about 500km from Sao Paulo, Helio da Silva was a successful business executive for many years, but after retiring, he took it upon himself to transform the degraded banks of the Tiquatira River into a green oasis for his community. He started planting trees there in 20023 and hasn’t stopped since.

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Clips of Canadian basketball phenom Jeremy Gohier, who at 13 years of age is already 7 feet and 3 inches tall, towering over his teenage opponents have been going viral online.

Jeremy Gohier is not your average 13-year-old. He is already considerably taller than the average NBA player (6-foot-6) so he usually makes short work of his teenage opponents, dunking on them with ease, blocking shots effortlessly, and moving around the court without anyone being able to stop him. His athleticism and basketball skills are nothing to scoff at, but it is Jeremy’s impressive frame that has everyone talking about him these days. In the video highlights doing the rounds on social media, Gohier looks so dominant that you can’t help but feel a bit bad for the kids having to play against him.

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An Indian man with an incredible memory recently set a new world record by reciting a whopping 14,000 digits of Euler’s number in just 49 minutes.

Deepu V has always had an uncanny memory when it came to numbers. He once set a national record by reciting 2,000 digits of the irrational number pi faster than anyone else, and claims to have committed 500 telephone numbers to memory. But when he heard about a world record for memorizing the most decimal places of Euler’s number, he saw an opportunity to have his name featured in the renowned Guinness Book of Records. He spent four months preparing for this epic attempt and took under an hour to blow the previous record of 10,122 digits right out of the water.

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Zhang Sixuan, a 9-year-old girl from China’s Henan province, bested some of the world’s most elite kung fu masters to earn the title of “Shaolin Kung Fu Star” at this year’s World Shaolin Games.

There are millions of Shaolin Kung fu practitioners around the world, and every year tens of thousands of them compete for a chance to be invited to participate in the World Shaolin Games Finals. This year, an international cast of 124 kung fu practitioners was invited to show off their skills at a Shaolin temple in central China’s Henan Province, in front of respected kung fu masters and an audience of kung fu enthusiasts. Among them was a 9-year-old girl whose incredible flexibility and mastery of tong zi gong (a form of Shaolin kung fu) stunned both the judges and the crowd, earning her the coveted title of Shaolin Kung Fu Star.

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A Vietnamese woman has been dubbed a “sleepless mutant” because of her alleged ability to shun sleep completely. She claims to have remained awake continuously for the last three decades.

49-year-old Nguyen Ngoc My Kim is known as “the seamstress who never sleeps” in her home province of Long An, a nickname she gladly accepts because it apparently suits her. Every time Miss Kim’s reputation attracted the attention of the media, she confirmed that she hadn’t slept in several decades, adding that the complete lack of sleep hadn’t affected her health at all. However, the Vietnamese seamstress has always been quick to point out that she wasn’t born with the ability to function without sleep, she conditioned herself to stay up late ever since she was a little girl. At first, she would lose sleep because she loved reading late into the night, and later, when she started working as a seamstress, she worked late in order to complete her orders. At one point, she didn’t feel the need to sleep at all, so she didn’t.

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Xiao Mai, a beautiful 25-year-old woman from China’s Heilongjiang province, has been having trouble finding a suitable boyfriend because of her height. She is 2.26 meters tall.

A few months ago, Xiao Mai introduced herself to the world in a short clip that quickly went viral on social media mainly because of the young woman’s impressive height. At 2.26 meters (7 ft 5 in), the 25-year-old dwarfs even the tallest of men, and that apparently makes her very intimidating to the opposite sex. Posting the first video of herself was Mai’s mother’s idea. She had watched a clip of a girl from Shanghai proposing to her boyfriend online and was inspired to use the same technique to find her daughter a boyfriend. Apart from showing off Xiao Mai’s impressive physical features, it also showed moments from her daily life as well as an appeal from her mother to everyone watching to suggest suitable boyfriends for her. The video went viral and before long, strangers started showing up at the family’s door in Heilongjiang asking to meet the girl.

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23-year-old Ganesh Baraiya is living proof that nothing is impossible. Despite facing discrimination because of his short stature, he managed to become the world’s shortest doctor.

Ganesh Baraiya was born in the Talaja Thaluka area of Gujarat, India, and faced adversity from a very young age. He was born normal, but at the age of four, his parents noticed that his head was outgrowing his body, so they took him to a doctor. They learned that the boy suffered from an incurable condition and there was nothing anyone could do. Wanting to help her son, Ganesh’s mother put a tub-like helmet on his head to prevent it from growing and give his body a chance to catch up. In school, he was often ridiculed because of his large head and short stature, but he also had friends who stuck by him and he was able to focus on his studies.

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Suni and the Seven Princesses is a popular rap group made up of South Korean grannies in the 70s and 80s trying to take the entertainment industry by storm.

A group of elderly women from rural Chilgok, a county in South Korea’s North Gyeongsang province, is making international headlines for their meteoric rise as rappers. Suni and the Seven Princesses only debuted in August of last year, but the unusual rap group is now known all over the world. It makes sense if you think about it. After all, it’s not every day that you see a bunch of grandmother wearing baggy clothes and chains around their necks, and rapping about their rural lifestyle, especially in rural South Korea.

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Carmen Dell’Orefice is known as the oldest working model in the fashion industry. She was discovered on a bus when she was only 13 years old, and she is still working today, at age 92.

Carmen Dell’Orefice’s first contact with the fashion world was a flop. After being approached by the wife of photographer Herman Landschoff while riding a bus to ballet class when she was only 13 years old, Dell’Orefice saw her test photos go nowhere fast. But she was destined for greatness, and just two years later, at age 15, she graced the cover of Vogue Magazine for the very first time, after becoming a favorite model of photographer Erwin Blumenfeld. Last year, at age 92, Carmen Dell’Orefice was featured on the cover of Vogue Czechoslovakia, this time as the oldest working model in the world.

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Norwegian death diver Ken Stornes just became the first person to perform a ‘death dive’ from over 40 meters, jumping from a rock wall into the icy water below.

Invented by guitar player Erling Bruno Hovden at Frognerbadet during the summer of 1972, death diving or ‘Dødsing‘ is a form of extreme freestyle high diving with stretched arms and belly first. Jumps are usually performed from a platform positioned between 10 to 15 meters above the water, but the bravest of death divers plunge from much higher, with the current record in the men’s classic category sitting at 40.5 meters. It was set earlier this month by Ken Stornes, a Norwegian former MMA fighter turned extreme athlete, who plunged into the icy waters of Nordfjord from a platform on the side of a tall cliff.

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6-year-old Cao Qixian set the new women’s world record for solving a 3x3x3 Rubik’s cube in 5.97 seconds (average) at the World Cube Association Rubik’s Cube International Open in Singapore.

Qixian, who hails from China’s Jiangsu Province, started playing with a Rubik’s cube when she was only three, inspired by a cousin who taught her the art of ‘speed-cubing’, solving the world-famous puzzle as quickly as possible. However, after about a year, the girl got so good at it that her cousin had nothing to teach her anymore and her parents got her a speed-cubing coach. She enjoyed speed-solving the Rubik’s cube so much that she practiced for two to three hours every day, and her time was getting better and better. However, there was a point where she hit a wall and needed all of her family’s help to overcome it.

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A 63-year-old Chinese man who only started learning ballet a decade ago has gone viral on social media as a living example that you are never too old to follow your dreams.

Liu Ziqing has been a fan of ballet for as long as he can remember. He fell in love with it as a little boy, after watching The Red Detachment of Women ballet show in the early 1960s, more than 10 times, but he never really got the chance to practice it himself. Growing up in a poor family in a village near Baotou, the largest city in Northern China’s Inner Mongolia autonomous region, his main focus was always on helping his family and putting food on the table. Dancing was a luxury he could not afford. He ended up becoming a farmer but also worked as a street cleaner in order to make ends meet. But he never got over his love for ballet, and at age 53, he decided to become a ballet dancer.

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A 69-year-old man from the Russian Republic of Dagestan claims to have set a new world record for fastest weight loss, after allegedly losing over 11 kilograms during a 2.5-hour race.

Bahama Aigubov had already had his name inscribed in the Russian Book of Records in 2019 when he lost 9.3 kg after a five-hour race, but he recently managed to blow his own record out of the water by losing  11.1 kg in 2.5 hours during a 21 km race in Makhachkala. Aigubov cannot have his record recognized by the Guinness Book of Records, as it does not acknowledge achievements in rapid weight loss so as not to encourage people to engage in dangerous experiments, but the pensioner claims to be the fastest body weight shedder in the world, by far.

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