A loving mother in China’s Henan province spent more than a million yuan ($154,000) building two metal footbridges in front of her son’s school, to make sure he and the other kids cross the road safely.

The woman, identified only by her surname, Meng, recently told Henan Television Station that the road outside her son’s school was always congested when parents dropped off or picked up their kids, and with no traffic lights installed in the proximity, crossing the road was a dangerous affair for both students and teachers. Another reason why she spent money out of her own pocket to build the footbridges over the road was that the school was located on lower ground and the puddles that constantly formed on the road caused her son to always come home with his feet soaking wet.

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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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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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