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 head-teachers’ union in the UK recently reported that youths have become so accustomed to using digital devices that they are having trouble correctly reading time on analog clocks, forcing schools to replace them.

According to Malcolm Trobe, deputy general secretary at the Association of School and College Leaders, children and young teens aren’t as good at reading an old-fashioned clock as previous ones. Because phones, tablets and computers play such a huge role in their lives, they are constantly exposed to time in digital format, so seeing the time displayed in analog format in examination halls can be a cause of unnecessary stress for children. For this reason, some schools are removing analog clocks and replacing them with digital ones.

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Ever felt so tired at work that you needed to rest your head on your arm for a little while? We’ve all done it at some point, but doing it every day for long periods of time can apparently have negative consequences, as one woman in China recently learned.

Surnamed Zhang, 28-year-old  office worker from Harbin, China, used to nap at her desk during her hour-long lunch break, using her left arm as a pillow. Zhang’s fingers would often feel sore and numb when she woke up, but she didn’t pay much attention to that until three months ago, when, upon waking up from her daily nap, she couldn’t feel her left arm at all. She had experienced a similar sensation before, but it usually went away after a couple of minutes. This time the numbness wouldn’t go away, and she started having trouble with menial tasks like picking up objects, so she went to see a doctor about it.

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A 19-year-old man with no medical training whatsoever managed to fool the staff at one of the most prestigious medical institutions in India into thinking that he was a doctor just by hanging out with real doctors and wearing a face mask and stethoscope.

No one knows exactly why Adnan Khurram decided to impersonate a junior resident at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Delhi, but he somehow managed to do it for five months. Despite lacking any medical training or qualifications, and not showing up on the institute’s payroll, the 19-year-old had become quite involved in hospital politics, participated in various events there and even posed as Dr. Adnan Khurram on Instagram.

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Die-hard soccer fans have been known to do some crazy things to honor their favorite teams, but I don’t remember anyone actually covering their entire upper body in a permanent tattoo of their team’s official jersey. Well, a fan of Brazilian soccer club Flamengo spent an entire year doing just that.

José Maurício dos Anjos, a 33-year-old man from Rio de Janeiro, has been making headlines in his home country for having a life-size version of his favorite soccer team’s jersey tattooed on his upper body. It reportedly took a tattoo artist 90 hours of work split in 32 sessions, throughout an entire year. The striped black and red jersey tattoo comes complete with the club’s emblem on the left side of his chest, and the number 10 tattooed on his back.

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Ryusei “Ryuji” Imai, an 8-year-old boy from Nara, Japan, has dedicated his life to imitating martial arts legend Bruce Lee. Despite his young age, he trains for four and a half hours every day, and has already developed a similar physique to that of his idol.

The world was first introduced to Ryuji three years ago, when a video showing him perfectly imitating Bruce Lee’s nunchaku routine from the 1972 movie Game of Death, went viral on social media. He was mentioned by some of the world’s biggest media outlets, gained hundreds of thousands of online followers and even made an appearance on children’s talent TV show Superkids. But he didn’t let the fame go to his head, instead focusing on toning up his physique and imitating even more of Bruce Lee’s famous martial arts scenes.

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A mother-of-three from the UK reportedly performed the world’s first DIY breast implant removal at home, because she couldn’t stand her F-cup breasts anymore and wouldn’t get on the health service’s waiting list.

14 years ago, Tonia Rossington, from Skegness, Lincolnshire, underwent a breast-enlargement procedure in Brussels, which increased her bust size from 36B to 36F. At the time, she felt her large breast looked natural, but a few years later, she lost a lot of weight and she began to hate them. She thought they looked ridiculous and couldn’t bare the thought that she was stuck with them for the rest of her life. So she started weighing her options, and somehow eventually decided that the best thing to do was to remove the implants herself.

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A female candidate for a local position in Taipei, Taiwan, recently became the butt of social media jokes, after people noticed that she looked nothing like the woman on her campaign posters.

The world of politics is no stranger to image editing software, as many politicians turn to programs like Photoshop to make themselves look better in campaign posters. However, PR people sometimes overdo it to the point where the editing is obvious even to the untrained eye. And then there are cases like that of Wang Zhiya, a politician running for a position on Taipei’s City Council, whose campaign posters look absolutely nothing like her.

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12-year-olds get into arguments with their parents all the time, but most of them just storm off to their room to cool off. Not Drew (made-up name), a boy from Sydney, Australia, who, after a fight with his mother, stole her credit card, got on a plane and flew to the island of Bali for an unforgettable 4-day vacation.

Drew’s name may be fake for privacy reasons, but his incredible story is not. After a quarrel with his mother, Emma, the 12-year-old boy decided it was time to do something drastic, and a vacation to the family’s favorite holiday destination, Bali, seemed like just what the doctor ordered. Only this time, he would go all by himself and experience the freedom of being alone in one of the most beautiful places on Earth, at his parents’ expense. For that, he needed his mother’s credit cards and a way to board a plane without having to answer too many questions. Sounds like a tall order, but this kid had it all figured out.

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José Arno Appolo do Amaral, the mayor of Alvorada, a city in Brazil’s Rio Grande do Sul state, recently became a popular meme in his country after a photoshopped picture of him and his subordinates seemingly inspecting a municipal construction site went viral online.

The photo showing mayor do Amaral, and his deputy Valter Slayfer at a dredging site in Alvorada was originally posted on the official Facebook page of the Alvorada Municipality, along with a long caption detailing the visit. The two officials had allegedly overseen part of the operation and had declared themselves satisfied with the work of the hydraulic dredger. Only people soon became suspicious of the photo, which showed Amaral and Slayfer in the distance, flanking the site supervisor. The two officials’ position in relation to the road they were supposed to be standing on, as well as their color compared to the rest of the photos just seemed odd, so Facebook users started sharing it and questioning its authenticity.

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Known as ‘Sea Nomads’, the Bajau people have wandered the waters of southern Asia for thousands of years, living in house boats and free diving for fish. They’ve long been known for their ability to stay underwater for long periods of time, but until recently, no one really knew how they were able to keep their breath for so long.

According to a recently published study from Cambridge University, the Bajau people have 50 percent larger spleens than their land-dwelling neighbours, which plays a key role in how long they can stay underwater. It plays a key part in what’s known as the “human dive response” or “dive reflex”, preferentially distributing oxygen to the brain and heart, and enabling submersion for long periods of time. As the heart rate slows, blood is directed to the vital organs, and the spleen contracts to push oxygenated red blood cells into the circulation. In an average person, the spleen can boost oxygen levels by 9 percent, but even more in the case of the Bajau, due to its unusually large size.

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Mizuki Nakano, a former professor at the University of Tokyo, in Japan, has been consuming only fruit for the last eight years, even shunning water and relying on fruit juices for hydration. He recently came on a Japanese TV show to say that his fruit-only diet has caused his body to somehow convert nitrogen in the air into the protein it needs.

In September of 2009, Mizuki Nakano decided to see what would happen to his body if he consumed nothing but fruit all day, every day. Even back then, the scientific consensus was that a balanced diet that contained enough protein, fat and carbohydrates was the best way to go, and that relying solely on fruits for nutrition would deprive the body of needed nutrients and potentially cause serious health problems. But Nakano noticed that there was no scientific research on the long-term effects of eating only fruits, so he started an experiment with himself as the guinea pig.

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We all know politicians sometimes say stupid things, they’re only human after all, but sometimes their statements just leave you scratching your head in disbelief. Take Indian minister Biplab Deb, who recently said that the internet existed back in the ancient days of Mahabharata.

Speaking at a regional workshop on Public Distribution System (PDS) in Agartala, in the Indian state of Tripura, Chief Minister Biplab Deb told the audience that the internet was invented “lakhs of years ago”, along with other advanced technology like satellites, and not by Western countries, but by ancient Indians. He argued that some of the events described in the Mahabharata couldn’t have been possible without this technologies, which, in his mind, is proof that they existed thousands of years ago.

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I always thought intravenous treatments only worked on humans and animals, but apparently they do wonders for sick trees as well. The world’s second-largest Banyan tree is currently being treated against a termite infestation, with an IV drip.

Known as “Pillalamarri” or “Peerla Marri”, the 700-year-old Banyan tree in Mahabubnagar, India’s Telangana state, spreads across three acres, making it the second-largest of its kind in the world. It’s also in danger of being eaten alive by termites, which have already brought down some of its largest branches. Public access to the tree was restricted in December of last year, as desperate authorities scrambled to come up with a way to save one of a’s biggest tourist attractions.

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A resourceful driver in Suzhou, China, found the perfect way of avoiding a parking ticket. When leaving her car in a no-parking zone, she would simply leave a fake parking ticket in her window so that policemen would think one of their colleagues had already fined her.

It was the perfect crime! Most policemen would only check if the date was correct and move one, and if one of them actually paid enough attention to figure out that the parking ticket was fake, the woman would simply say that she had no idea, that she was the victim of a prank. Genius and safe, I tell you! Unless someone actually saw her putting the ticket in the window, there was no way to prove she was guilty.

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