For the last three years, a mystery philanthropist has been hiding $100 bills in and around the city of Salem, Oregon. A total of $50,500 worth of bills has been reported so far, but the true donated sum could be much larger.

The first hidden $100 bills were found at stores and events in Salem in May 2013, and new ones have been surfacing regularly ever since. As soon as local news network started covering the phenomenon, a number of people came out to claim responsibility for the generous act, so to make sure no one tried to steal his thunder again, the anonymous benefactor started signing the bills. A couple of people claiming to be his friends came forward to act as liaisons and confirm his signature, but they never revealed his identity, and always made sure to emphasize that this wasn’t about him, but about helping people in need and inspiring others to do the same.

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Patrick Magno, from San Diego, California, recently won the grand prize in a fitness competition after he managed to lose 49 pounds and get into enviable physical shape in just three months.

After a medical exam revealed that he was 30 per cent body fat and at high risk of developing type 2 diabetes, Patrick Magno decided it was time for a drastic lifestyle change. He was a social worker and had to remove children from broken homes, abusive parents and other harmful situations for a living, a job that he says had a severe effect on his lifestyle and overall health. So he quit, proposed to his girlfriend of six years and set his sights on improving his health so he wouldn’t end up like his father, who had to deal with the terrible symptoms of diabetes.

“I couldn’t even recognize myself,” he said. “I was embarrassed. I was disgusted. I was ashamed that I had let myself get to this point.” So when he learned about Bodybuilding.com’s 250k Challenge, a contest that has entrants transform their bodies with the help of grueling physical workouts, meal-plans and supplements, for the chance to win a substantial sum of money, he decided to go all in. ‘hey said they would give tons of nutritional meal plans, options, workout guides and fitness advice absolutely free of charge, and offer a $250,000 (£190,000) in prize money. It sounded a little too good to be true,” Magno remembers.

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An Indonesian woman who went to great lengths to impersonate a man and even married another woman was recently detained by police after “his” wife alerted authorities about the deception.

40-year-old Surwati, who like most Indonesian goes by a single name, admitted to falsifying her identity and impersonating a man. She had taken the name Muhamad Efendi Saputra and told people “he” was a police officer. Her male impersonating skills were apparently stellar because she managed to full everybody and even convinced a woman into marriage. After a whirlwind romance lasting a couple of months, Muhamad married 25-year-old Heniyati in a ceremony on Java island. To avoid raising any suspicions, Surwati reportedly hired a number of people to pose as relatives of her male alter ego at the wedding.

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A 54-year-old man from Jilin, China, is making international headlines for his bizarre exercise routine. Cong Yan claims daily walks with a 40-kilogram rock balancing on his head have helped him lose 30 kilograms in the last three years.

Cong Yan is a familiar, albeit unusual sight in Jilin parks. Every day, he can be seen walking on the narrow pathways, ascending and descending steps alongside other health-conscious Chinese trying to keep in shape. But what sets him apart from everybody else is the heavy-looking block of solid concrete dangling on top of his head.

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Meet Sajad Gharibi, a 24-year-old weightlifter from Iran who has stunned the internet with his impressive physique. Weighing a whopping 345 pounds – most of it sheer muscle – Gharibi is said to be able to lift up to 386 pounds. He certainly looks like a guy you never, ever want to get on the bad side of.

Lucky for us, those who know this mountain of a man say that, despite his grizzly appearance, he is actually a gentle giant with a very big heart. They mean that both literally and metaphorically, I presume. That’s reassuring as he is probably the closest we’ll ever get to seeing a real life The Hulk, and we don’t want him sharing both his looks and short temper.

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54-year-old Michael Vaudreuil is used to picking up things at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. He has been working as custodian there for the last eight years, vacuuming the carpets, cleaning the floors, wiping the blackboards and picking up the trash. But last month, Vaudreuil picked up something he’ll actually want to hang on to – a degree in mechanical engineering.

In 2008, Vaudreuil, a self-employed plastering contractor, with two decades of successful entrepreneurship under his belt, felt his world crashing down on him. As recession hit, less phone calls were coming in, but he tried not to panic. Soon, clients stopped calling completely and he had no choice but to file for bankruptcy. Soon, his home was foreclosed, his car repossessed and without his income to support his wife’s vending machine business, that eventually went under as well. He and his family moved into a tiny apartment and Michael started looking for jobs with construction companies, but no one was hiring.

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Chelsie Hill knew she wanted to become a dancer ever since she was 3 years old, and not even a life-altering accident that left her paralyzed from the waist down was going to wreck her dream. She learned to use her wheelchair as part of her body and started to dance again. Today she is an acclaimed hip-hop dancer, motivational speaker and a fine example that when life gives you lemons, you can indeed make lemonade.

“Dance is the only thing my daughter has ever wanted to do,” Chelsie’s mother Wendy Hill says. She won her first competition at age five and kept turning in stellar performances all through her school years. She made the high-school varsity dance team as a freshman and everything seem to point to a successful career as a professional dancer. But then, tragedy struck. After a party, Chelsie got in a car with a drunk driver who hit a tree head-on at 40mph. She survived the ordeal, but was diagnosed as a T10 paraplegic. The aspiring dancer retained full control of her upper body, but doctors told her that she would never walk again. She was just 17 at the time.

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Justin Salas was only 14 when he lost his sight almost completely and was declared legally blind. Now 22, the ambitious young man is a living example that nothing is impossible – even though he can’t see, Justin is a professional photographer and skilled rock climber.

Justin’s blindness wasn’t the result of an unfortunate accident or a sudden occurrence where he woke up one morning to find that he couldn’t see anymore. His eyesight had always been poor and he started wearing glasses when he was 5-years-old. But it wasn’t until his freshman year of high-school that his vision started deteriorating at a rapid pace. His glasses no longer helped and tests revealed that his optic nerves were dying, although the cause was a mystery for all the doctors he’d seen.

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Can you imagine never telling another lie – not even an innocent one – for the rest of your life? How about for a whole day? Yeah, me neither, which is why Keith Frankel’s commitment to a no-lie lifestyle is so intriguing.

Up until six months ago, Keith Frankel, a product design executive at Boston education software startup Firecracker, was no different than the rest of us – he would lie on a daily basis, and he was fully aware of it. He admits he had been aware of his ability to lie both persuasively and effectively and that his skills only got better with age. “Sometimes, my career necessitated that I play my little trump card in order to succeed at ‘the game’. Other times, my personal life could be made just a bit more convenient with a little fib here or there. To no surprise, the more I lied, the better I became at lying in the future. Lying, like any other skill, only gets stronger the more you use it,” Frankel says.

He didn’t really see the harm in lying, at first, especially since his little white lies didn’t really have disastrous consequences on the lives of those around him, they were just “little deceptions, teeny, tiny misdirections.” But at one point, Keith realized that having his friends and family seeing him constantly lie to other people had planted seeds of distrust in them – they knew that he could very well lie to them if he so wished (and he admits he did). He felt these ‘tiny erosions of trust’, as he calls them, not only weakened his relationship with his loved ones, but also called into question everything he claimed to be and will eventually become. Worse still, once plated, these seeds of doubt slowly whether relationships and are almost impossible to address effectively.

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When he’s not too busy fighting crime and battling super-villains in New York, Spiderman teaches computer science at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, in Ciudad de Mexico.

It all started in 2002, when the blockbuster movie Spider-Man, featuring Tobey Maguire, started screening in Mexico. 12-year-old Moises Vazquez Reyes instantly fell in love with the Marvel superhero and even started working on his own Spiderman outfit, after failing to find one that fit his high standards. He used online tutorials as inspiration, but it wasn’t an easy job for a young boy. Moises finally finished his dream Spiderman costume in 2014, the same year he started reading more comics about his favorite character. One day he stumbled upon the Amazing Spider – Man # 661 in which the popular superhero offers to be a substitute teacher at the Avengers Academy. He thought to himself “not a bad idea, wouldn’t it be great if Spiderman gave classes in computer science?” 

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As hard as it may be for you to believe, the woman in the photos below is not reality TV star Kim Kardashian, but a 24-year old talented makeup artist from Croatia.

Jelena Peric has attracted over 700,000 followers on Instagram thanks to her uncanny resemblance to socialite Kim Kardashian. It’s nowhere close to the celebrity’s 74 million followers, but for a young makeup artist from Zagreb, Croatia, it’s pretty impressive. Jelena says she is not very surprised by the high number of followers she’s been getting ever since she started posting photos of herself online, considering how popular her inspiration is, and the “very big effort” she has put into nailing not only her facial features, but also her curvy figure and clothing style.

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Mithalal Sindhi, from the Indian city of Ahmedabad, is not a rich man, by any means. He has been living on the streets for the last six decades, earning a modest living by selling Bajra (pearl millet) from his pedal rickshaw. Most of what he makes, Mithalal spends on performing the last rites for unclaimed dead bodies that no one else takes responsibility for. He is without a doubt one of the most kindhearted people we have ever written about.

During the partition of the British Indian Empire, 15-year-old Mithalal moved from Pakistan to Bombay, with his family. He did a number of odd jobs to make ends meet and survive in the big city, but in 1957, he moved to Ahmedabad where he started a small fruit selling business using what little savings he had. It was during this time that he met Nyaldas Sindhi, a vegetable vendor, with whom he became very close friends. They would eat lunch together and even sleep next to each other on the footpath, at night. Their friendship came to an abrupt ending in just two years, after Mithalal tried waking his friend one morning, but he didn’t respond.

Devastated by Nyaldas’ death, the young fruit vendor realized his friend had no close families or relatives to take care of the last rites. Mithalal asked the Mukhya (Leader of Vegetable Market) for help, but he refused, telling him it was not his concern. No one was willing to take responsibility for his friend, so he stepped up and had his body cremated near Callico Mill. It was this experience that made him realize that there were so many people dying every day in Ahmedabad that had no one to perform their last rites. He decided he was going to be the person to do it.

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Retired Filipino accountant Hernando Guanlao has found a wonderful way to spend all his free time – he’s set up a public library right outside his home and he regularly hands out books to poor children for free.

Hernando’s little library is very relevant to the society he lives in, where many children drop out of school to support their families. He says that he set up the library to honor his parents and the only inheritance they left him – an insatiable love for learning. “As a Filipino who didn’t have the opportunity to go to other places, I wanted to do something before I turned 70 that would help other Filipinos,” he added.  “And books are my means to do that, so I can bring people joy, and help them not feel left behind. It seems to me that the books are speaking to me. That’s why it multiplies like that. The books are telling me they want to be read… they want to be passed around.”

Readers are allowed to take as many books as they like, and return them whenever they please. According to Hernando, “The only rule is that there are no rules.”

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American ballet dancer Erik Cavanaugh is proving to the world that plus-size performers can be just as agile and graceful as their slim counterparts. His Instagram is filled with photographs and videos of himself performing ballet and other contemporary dance routines. He hopes to appear in music videos and on the Ellen Show, and his ultimate goal is to “change the mind and shape of dancers”.

Erik, 23, works at a pizza parlor by day and spends all his spare time dancing and choreographing. He learned the basics of dance at the Pittsburgh Creative and Performing Arts School when he was much younger, and was encouraged to post videos of his performances online by his dance coach at his alma mater, Slippery Rock University.

Some of his short video clips feature him pulling off incredibly difficult and impressive moves, like multiple pirouettes, set to contemporary music like Justin Bieber’s Purpose and Jordan Smith’s Settle. The New York Post featured a compilation of Erik’s moves in a Facebook video, which went viral, inspiring millions around the world.

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Most athletes would agree that lactic acid build-up in the muscles is the bane of all long-distance runners – but not American jogger Dean Karnazes. The 53-year-old has a rare genetic condition that rapidly flushes lactic acid from his system, allowing him to run indefinitely without ever experiencing a cramp or a seized muscle. The extreme runner has completed a marathon to the South Pole at -25C, and completed 50 back to back marathons in 50 days. He’s also jogged a whopping 350 miles in just 80 hours and 44 minutes, without any sleep!

When people exercise, glucose is converted into energy and a by-product of this reaction is lactic acid. As it builds up in the muscles, it causes cramps and fatigue, and signals the brain to stop. But in Dean’s case, he never receives those signals because lactic acid never builds up in his muscles. So he’s able to run for long distances over very long periods of time, giving him an edge in some of the toughest endurance competitions in the world.

“At a certain level of intensity, I do feel like I can go a long way without tiring,” Dean said, speaking to The Guardian. “No matter how hard I push, my muscles never seize up. That’s kind of a nice thing if I plan to run a long way. To be honest, what eventually happens is that I get sleepy. I’ve run through three nights without sleep and the third night of sleepless running was a bit psychotic. I actually experienced bouts of ‘sleep running’, where I was falling asleep while in motion, and I just willed myself to keep going.”

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