Blind people can still lead normal lives and do most of the things that perfectly healthy people can, but one would imagine that riding a skateboard isn’t one of them. Well, this 20-year-old blind skateboarder proves otherwise.

Known as The Blind Rider, Marcelo Lusardi lost his sight completely two years ago, when he was diagnosed with Leber hereditary optic neuropathy (LHON), an incurable genetic disorder caused by mutations in mitochondrial DNA. At first, he started seeing a kind of stain in the vision of his right eye. Soon after that, he lost the vision of his right eye completely, and if that wasn’t devastating enough, doctors informed him that LHON had affected his left eye as well, and that he would soon become completely blind.

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A Japanese animal lover risks her life every single day by venturing into the Fukushima exclusion zone to feed a heard of 11 cows abandoned after the 2011 nuclear disaster.

The earthquake and subsequent tsunami that hit Fukushima in 2011 claimed the lives of over 20,000 people, and forced another 160,000 to leave everything behind and flee to safety. But while people were able to escape the threat of radiation from the damaged reactor at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, animals could not. The area was home to over 3,500 cattle which became known as the “nuclear cows of Fukushima” after being exposed to high levels of radiation. Most of them are dead now, killed by starvation or euthanized by the government, but the few surviving cows now rely on the kindness of humans brave enough to risk their lives to bring them food and water.

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At 17-years-old and suffering from kidney failure, Stanley the cat was on the last of his nine lives. Luckily, his owner decided to gift him a tenth, by shelling out $19,000 for a kidney transplant.

Betsy Boyd earns just $46,000 a year, working as a part-time writing professor, and her husband Michael is a freelance journalist and a stay-at-home dad for their 3-year-old twin boys. They’re not exactly rolling in dough, but when presented with the chance to save their favorite cat’s life in exchange for $19,000, they didn’t hesitate. They even agreed to adopt his donor after the transplant, just so they could have Stanley a little longer.

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In Robert Zemeckis’ 1994 film Forrest Gump, Tom Hanks’ character is supposed to have run a total of 15,248 miles coast-to-coast across America, after being left heartbroken by his childhood sweetheart, Jenny. It seems like an impossible challenge in real life, but someone actually managed to break Forrest’s record by running a total of 15,600 miles in 409 days.

Rob Pope, a 39-year-old veteran from Liverpool, in the UK, spent over a year of his life recreating Forrest Gump’s epic coast-to-coast trek across the United States, an amazing four times. He quit his job in order to complete this monumental challenge in four stages, and has been running an average of 40 miles a day through blistering heat, torrential rain and weather so cold it froze his beard. Despite suffering several major physical injuries throughout his epic run, and repetition and loneliness straining his mental health, Pope says quitting was never an option.

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Cats get stuck high up in trees all the time, and there’s often no one to call for help, but if you live within an hour’s drive of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, you can rely on Randall Kolb, a 64-year-old retiree who has dedicated the last four years of his life to rescuing felines from trees.

Kolb, aka “Cat Rescue Guy”, discovered his calling in 2014, just two days after retiring from his IT job at Louisiana State University. A cat had become stuck in a tree near his house in Baton Rouge, and he spent two days trying to find someone willing to climb up and bring the feline down. When he did, he paid close attention to the rescue and decided to learn how to climb trees so he could rescue cats in the future. He has since bought or created his own tree climbing equipment and used it to save over 150 cats, for free.

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Suchetha Satish, a 12-year-old Indian girl living in Dubai, recently shattered two Guinness World Records at the same time by singing songs in 102 different languages during an epic concert that lasted 6 hours and 15 minutes.

A seventh grade student at the Indian High School in Dubai, Suchetha only started preparing to break the world record for singing in most languages in a single concert just over a year ago. She already enjoyed singing in several Indian languages, like Hindi, Malayalam and Tamil, as well as English, but she had always been fascinated by foreign languages, and this was an opportunity to learn as many of them as she could and also leave her mark on the world. On January 25, 2018, she 12-year-old girl stunned the audience at the Indian Consulate in Dubai by singing in a whopping 102 languages, for 6 hours and 15 minutes.

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If you passed by Chris Arsenault’s home, in Medford, New York, and saw the 300 cats living there, you’d probably consider the 58-year-old retired train conductor a crazy cat person, but that’s only because you don’t know his history with them.

In the summer of 2006, about two months after Arsenault lost his son Eric, 24, in a motorcycle accident, the train conductor found a colony of young cats by some train tracks, in Long Island. There were over two dozen kittens, and Chris knew just by looking at them that if he left them there they would die. So he took them all home, doctored them back to health, fed them and gave them a home. They in turn helped the mourning father deal with the pain of losing his son.

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A devoted father in the eastern Indian state of Orissa has single-handedly constructed an 8-km (5 miles) stretch of mountain road so that his children, who live away from home for school, can visit him more frequently. For the past two years Jalandhar Nayak, 45, set out every morning with an ax and crowbar and spent up to eight hours a day cutting rocks and moving boulders.

Nayak, who has never received formal education himself, lives in an isolated village, 10 km (6 miles) from the residential school where his three sons study. It would be a small distance with proper roads, but the commute takes the sons three hours as their route includes a trek across five hills to reach their home. “My children find it difficult to walk on the narrow and stony path while going to their school,” the man recently told Kalinga TV. “I often saw them stumbling against the stones, and I decided to carve a road through the mountain so that they can walk freely.”

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Mohamed Bzeek, a 62-year-old Muslim immigrant in California, has spent the past two decades caring for terminally ill foster children. These children are neglected by the foster care system, frequently spending the whole of their short lives in state-run hospitals, and rarely get to experience love, hope, and laughter.

About 600 of the 35,000 children monitored by the Los Angeles County’s Department of Children and Family Services fall under the care of the department’s Medical Case Management Services, which serves those with the most severe medical needs. There is a desperate need for loving homes for these children, but Mohamed Bzeek’s is the only foster home in the county known to take them in.

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Meet Mahdi Gilbert, the 25-year-old Canadian magician making waves in the world of magic. He practices card manipulation and sleight of hand, a common skill set for a magician, but what sets him apart is his lack of hands.

Standing at four-feet-six inches, Gilbert’s left arm stops at the elbow, and he has an articulated appendage on his right arm. Gilbert was forced to reinvent magic for himself, individually recreating all of the techniques used in his illusions. “I had to become self-sufficient from an early age; there’s (sic) no magic books written for me,” Gilbert said in an interview for the documentary Our Magic.

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Deepti Regmi, an 11-year-old girl from Nepal, spontaneously developed a peculiar ability last year. She is, inexplicably, able to smell colors, and can supposedly even identify them while blindfolded. Although she does not have an official diagnosis, her ability appears to be related to the sensory phenomena known as synaesthesia.

Synaesthesia causes the person’s senses to become confused, causing sensation to one sensory input (such as the eyes) to stimulate sensation in another (the nose). This is what causes Deepti to smell color, and others to visualize color when they hear music, or to taste flavors when they hear certain sounds. Any combination of this sensory “cross-wire” is possible however, and not at all limited to the examples above.

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Zhou Yusong is known as the “Guardian of Dogs” in his home city of Zhengzhou, China’s Henan Province. The kindhearted man has spent the last 8 years of his life rescuing stray dogs and offering them a home at  his animal protection center.

It all started in 2008, when Zhou Yusong, when he noticed an injured stray dog by the side of a road in Zhengzhou. It had been hit by a car and was fighting for his life, but everyone just ignored it. Unable to do the same, he picked up the canine and took it to a nearby pet hospital. After saving the animal’s life, he took it to a dog shelter, as he had no way of taking care of it himself, in his small apartment. Shocked by the large number of stray dogs already at the shelter, he became more involved in trying to make their lives easier, and started donating 200 yuan ($30) every month, for the animal’s food and medical treatments.

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Harsukh Bhai Dobariya, of Gujarat, India, is very popular with birds. Every day, between 2,500 and 3,000 parrots and sparrows visit his 4-acre farm to feed on tasty millet cobs and build their nests away from predators. Nicknamed “The Birdman”, Dobariya has spent the last 17 years of his life looking out for the birds and transforming his land into a safe ecosystem for them.

It all started in the year 2000, when Harsukh Bhai Dobariya suffered a leg fracture on his property in the Junagadh district of Gujarat, and had to spend most of his time in bed. After a neighbor came to buy some pearl millet from him, he had the idea to hang a millet cob on his balcony, which soon caught the attention of a parrot. The next day, two parrots came to feast on the delicious treat, then three, four, and within a month, there were already 100-150 parrots and sparrows visiting him every day.

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Most people could probably spend a whole year just looking at IKEA’s 2018 catalogue and still not remember all the details in its 328 pages. But then again, Yaanja Wintersoul is not most people, she is a two-time World Memory Champion so she only needed one week to accomplish the seemingly impossible task.

23-years-old Yaanja Wintersoul says that there’s no such thing as a photographic memory, and that it’s all about training your brain to memorize tiny details that most of us forget almost instantly. She knows what she’s talking about, too. Not only has she won the World Memory Championship twice, set a the world record for the the largest number of names and faces ever memorized by a person, but she’s also become IKEA’s “human catalogue”, memorizing most of the details in the company’s 328-page 2018 catalogue in only a week.

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Derek Rabelo is not the only surfer to conquer Hawaii’s famous Pipeline big wave break, but whereas others use their sight to do it, this young professional surfer must rely only on his other senses. That’s because he is completely blind.

When Derek was born, over 24 years ago, his father Ernesto had already decided to name him after Derek Ho, the first Hawaiian surfing world champion. A surfing enthusiast himself, Ernesto dreamed that his son would go on to honour his namesake and inherit the talent of his uncle, a professional surfer. Unfortunately, Derek was born completely blind from congenital glaucoma, but this didn’t stop his family from believing that he could do anything he wanted, even if that meant becoming a surfer.

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