While most adults struggle to keep their bulging bellies under check, 10-year-old Kyleigh Bass, from Kansas City is putting grown men to shame with her rock solid abs – she recently broke the national record by completing a whopping 2,110 consecutive sit-ups in a mere 90 minutes.

Kyleigh had initially set herself a goal of 2,002 ab-crunches – one over the previous Project Fit America record of 2,001. It was no easy feat, and for a moment it even looked as though she was going to throw up, but she somehow worked through the nausea and surpassed her goal, breaking the record by no less than 109 sit-ups.

“I wanted to break this record because I am a very competitive person and I like to be at the top,” said Kyleigh, who was trained by her PE teacher Bill Lentz at Foxhill Elementary. She had worked hard all through the winter, focusing on strengthening her core muscles. But during the challenge on 7 May, she suffered severe stomach pain and nearly threw up. Her parents, who were taking turns to hold her feet the whole time, encouraged her to keep going.

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23 years ago, Yue Jin lost both his legs and nine of his fingers in a freak accident. He thought his life was over, but somehow found the strength to start over and today he is one of the most sought-after bicycle repairmen in Jilin City, northern China.

In 1993, while he was cutting firewood in the mountains of Jilin province, Yue Jin accidentally fell into a deep valley and almost died. His injuries were so severe that doctors had to amputate both his legs and all but one of his ten fingers. For a man who made his living with his hands, it was almost a death sentence. And it was even more devastating considering Yue had also lost his wife just three days after childbirth, leaving him to take care of their daughter. After the accident, he couldn’t see any other way to do that than go out and beg for a few coins and some food, so he left his daughter in the care of some neighbors and ventured out on to the streets.

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Ansar Ahmad, a young barber from Varanasi, has become somewhat of a national celebrity after a video of him cutting hair with the scissors in his mouth recently went viral online.

From barbers using samurai swords and hot metal tongs to cut hair, to others practicing their trade blindfolded or sitting on their heads, we’ve featured some pretty bizarre hair-styling talents on Oddity Central, but Ansar Ahmad’s skills are new, even to us. The Varanasi-based barber holds the scissors in his mouth to cut hair, and does such a good job that customers line up his shop to get what some describe as “the perfect haircut”.

Ansar has been cutting hair since childhood and first mastered the art the old fashioned way, using his hands. But an accident 15 years ago pushed him to come up with an alternative way of practicing his trade. He soon discovered his mouth was just as able as his hands, when it came to cutting hair. “As I couldn’t work with one hand, I used to face a lot of problem that time. It took me three years to learn the art. Now, I can easily cut hair holding scissors in my mouth,” he told ANI News.

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Inspired by a brewery in Oregon that used yeast harvested from a man’s beard, an Australian company is launching its own bizarre brew made using the navel fluff of employees. 7 Cent Brewery, in Gisborne South, Victoria is all set to reveal their unique beer at the 2016 Great Australasian Beer SpecTAPular (GABS) festival this month.

“We are really interested to see if the idea of drinking something that originated from a brewer’s belly button is too much for even the most hardened beer geek,” the company’s blog states. “Some say why? We say why not?”

To isolate the yeast strain, co-founders Doug Bremner, Brendan Baker, and Matthew Boustead swabbed their own belly buttons and streaked the collected samples out on agar plates. They allowed the plates to incubate and then “found all sorts of interesting things growing, including what appeared to be colonies of yeast.” Bremner said that the yeast strains were tested to ensure they were sterile. So the beverage might sound disgusting, but is completely safe to consume.

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In a bid to control the nation’s growing problem with food wastage, the South Korean government has started a unique initiative – ‘Pay as You Trash’. Residents are required to separate their food waste from the rest of their trash and dump it separately in a centralised bin. And in order to access the bin, they actually need to pay by the kilo!

As of now, the South Korean government has three methods in place to charge citizens for the food thrown away. One is through an RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) card – when users tap this card – embedded with their personal tag – over a specially designed food waste bin, the lid will open, allowing them to dump their waste. This waste is automatically weighed and recorded in the user’s account. The user needs to settle this bill on a monthly basis. Each RFID bin costs 1.7 million won ($1,500) and can cater to 60 households.

The second billing method is through pre-paid garbage bags. These specially designed bags are priced based on volume. For instance, in Seoul, a 10-liter garbage bag costs around 190 won (less than $1). There’s also a bar code management system in place, in which residents deposit food waste directly into composting bins and pay for it by purchasing bar code stickers attached to the bin.

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While zombies thankfully still remain a figment of our imagination, ‘smombies’ – people walking while staring at their smartphones – are very real and a growing cause for concern. Fed up of having to constantly alert both locals an tourists to pay more attention to their surroundings to avoid serious accidents, authorities in a small German town have come up with a more proactive solution – embedding traffic lights in the pavement to make them visible to people constantly looking down at their phones.

The seemingly ridiculous safety measure was put in place after two pedestrians in the town of Augsburg were recently hit by quiet electric street trains as they crossed the street without looking up from their phones. They both escaped with only slight injuries, but a 15-year-old girl engrossed in her smartphone on a street in nearby Munich wasn’t so lucky. She was hit by a tram and dragged along for several feet before she died. So authorities in Augsburg decided to act, installing ground level traffic lights at two tram stops last Tuesday. The lights flash red every time a tram is approaching, or when the regular traffic light turns red.

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Among the brightest of Brooklyn’s diverse inhabitants are Quaker parrots – tropical green birds with blue wing tips, measuring about 12 inches from beak to tail. Although they’re native to the generally hot regions of central and southern Argentina, they’ve successfully managed to colonize the relatively colder New York borough over the past four to five decades.

No one knows exactly how these colonies of exotic birds came to live in the Big Apple, but as with all mysteries, there is a lot of speculation surrounding their existence. The most popular explanation has to do with an accident at JFK Airport, during which a number of birds escaped from broken shipping crates and ended up making a home for themselves in the city. Others believe the real answer to this mystery is much less dramatic, and actually has to do with clumsy bird owners. Quaker or Monk Parrots were very popular pets during the 70’s as they were very cooperative and easy to train, so it’s easy to assume that some of them escaped and founded the colonies that today exist all over New York – in Pelham Bay in the Bronx, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in eastern Queens in Howard Beach, throughout Staten Island, and sometimes in Central Park.

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At age 23, Indian entrepreneur Srikanth Bolla is the CEO a company valued at INR 50 crore (over $7.5 million) . That’s a wonderful achievement in itself, but what’s truly inspiring is that he managed to do it despite being born completely blind. Today, he considers himself the luckiest man in the world, not for his success, but for having supportive parents who always stood by him.

When Srikanth was born blind, several of his parents’ friends and relatives advised them to abandon him. That would indeed have been the easier thing to do, given the fact that they were poor and uneducated, earning a mere INR 20,000 ($300) a year. But they chose to not only keep the boy, but also raise him in a positive, loving environment. “They are the richest people I know,” he often says.

And their excellent parenting has paid off – today, Srikanth is the CEO of Bollant Industries, a Hyderabad-based company that employs physically challenged staff to manufacture eco-friendly consumer packaging solutions made from leaves and recycled paper. The company has four manufacturing units in three states in southern India – Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Karnataka. Srikanth’s hard work and unprecedented success has impressed the business world, attracting investments from the likes of Indian business tycoon Ratan Tata.

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Meet Liang Xiang, a 61-year-old age-defying grandpa with a perfectly chiseled body and six-pack abs. Looking at his photos, you’d think he spent his whole life working out, but Liang claims he only started hitting the gym 10 years ago.  The sexagenarian is now so obsessed with fitness that he spends several hours a day doing intense workout routines.

Liang spent most of his youth running a lighting business in China’s Yunnan province, and later used his earnings to pursue his love of driving. After a few races outside the country, he realised that his physical condition was holding him back from performing well. So he started working out and eventually got this chiseled body that sparks the envy of men half his age. Uncle Liang –  as he’s come to be known online – has been pumping iron around a decade now, and also follows a diet plan that includes seven small meals per day.

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British programmer Joshua Browder is helping people save  a lot of money on legal fees with his latest project – the world’s first robot lawyer. The 19-year-old developed a free service that allows users to ask any kind of legal question and receive relevant answers autogenerated by bots.

Browder first started the project last summer as a free website to help people appeal unfair parking tickets. He came up with the idea after getting a series of tickets himself for “trivial reasons”. Having wasted several hours on writing appeals to these tickets, he realised that many people do not have the time, legal knowledge or even the energy to appeal. So he decided to create an automatic appeal generator, using previously successful letters as a template. He aptly named the service DoNotPay, given that the legal fees involved in challenging tickets could mount up to  sizable amounts between $400 to $900.

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Japanese food stylist Mitsuki Moriyasu is on a mission to prove that salads can look much better than they taste. Last year, she introduced the world to the concept of the ‘Vegiedeco Salad’, an exquisite preparation of vegetables made in the likeness of a cake. The hybrid dish was initially featured on the menu of a bistro in Nagoya, but it got so popular that it is now being exclusively showcased at a brand new cafe in the city.

The savory dish consists of colorful layers of vegetables, sandwiched between two soybean-flour sponge and covered in a tofu or cream cheese frosting blended with vegetables for natural coloring. The end result is a sinful-looking salad-cake that is not just a visual treat but also packs a nutritious punch. Containing very little to no sugar, each salad also includes a good amount of roots and peels for fiber.

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Meet Derek Mitchell, an inspiring 35-year-old race runner who weighs a whopping 545 pounds. Despite his heavy frame, he’s spent the past year walking and running a total of 21 5k races and two 10k events. He even made it halfway through a muddy, 10-mile obstacle course!

Mitchell, a Kansas City native, was diagnosed with a noncancerous tumor on his pituitary gland five years ago, a condition that slows down his metabolism and is the primary cause for his obesity. Although he was put on medication to shrink the tumor, Mitchell felt that “at one point, I was using that condition as a crutch, telling myself, ‘I’ll wait for the pills to start working before I start working out or change my eating habits.’”

But he realised that wasn’t a very good plan in November 2014, when his body weight reached an all-time high of 625 pounds. “That’s when I knew I needed to make a change, and decided to start with a new year’s resolution.” So in the beginning of 2015, he cut soda from his diet, switched to more nutritious food options, and tried switching to a healthier lifestyle.

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She’s probably not done shedding her baby teeth, but 9-year-old Milla Bizzotto is tougher than most adults. The four-foot-tall, 53-pound third grader from South Florida recently shocked the world with her incredible physical fitness, becoming the youngest person in the world to complete the 24-hour Battlefrog Xtreme race, an outdoor fitness event designed by Navy SEALs.  

“I don’t want to play video games,” she explained in an interview with The Miami Herald. “I don’t want to hoverboard. I don’t want to do things to make life easier. I want to be comfortable being uncomfortable. I have one body and it’s all I want and all I love.”

“I’m fearless,” she added. “And knowing I’m inspiring people makes me more fearless. It is hard, but that doesn’t stop me.”

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Protecting the borders of the largest country in the world is no easy task, but luckily Russian troops can rely on the help of Volkosobs – highly-trained wolf-dog hybrids created specifically for this purpose. Volkosobs inherit the size and strength of wolves, but retain an obedient and friendly attitude toward humans that they do not perceive as threats.

Getting the best of both species seems like a worthy pursuit, but getting the desired result took years of research and failed attempts. Over 200 wolf-hybrids bred at the University of Cologne, in Germany, were deemed failures as they all exhibited the typical wolf characteristics of extreme fearful-caution around humans. But scientists and animal experts at Russia’s Prem Institute of Internal Troops finally made a breakthrough in the year 2000. They key to their success was Naida, an usually sociable Caspian Sea Wolf who got along great with humans. Interestingly, during the breeding stage, Naida actually chose a dog as her mate, despite originally being presented with the option of a male wolf.

In 10 years, Naida birthed 40 ‘volkosobs’ (Russian for ‘wolf-dogs’) that shared both her wolf instincts and the father’s friendliness and obedience to humans and they have since then been used to propagate the species. A highly-trained volkosobs is valued $2,000 and $3,000, but in order to benefit from the use of these amazing creatures exclusively, the Russian Military does not sell wolf-dogs. Instead, it only leases them to domestic security organizations, under very strict conditions.

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Megadose, a Brazilian company that designs maternity clothes, has released a new line of anti-Zika apparel. These clothes are made of a special fabric that is infused with a natural mosquito repellent called citronella and are designed to help pregnant women avoid contracting the dreaded Zika virus.

Ever since the Zika outbreak spread across the Pacific to the Americas and reached pandemic levels in 2015, people in these are being regions are being asked to cover up well and use mosquito repellents at all times. There is no vaccine or medication to prevent getting infected, so the only way to stay safe for now is to avoid being bitten by mosquitoes.  

While Zika fever itself has mild symptoms and is treated by rest, it can cause birth defects to the fetus if contracted by pregnant women. In fact, the governments of some countries like Colombia, Ecuador, and El Salvador have recommended that women postpone getting pregnant until more discoveries are made about the risks. But for those who are already pregnant, Megadose is trying to provide a viable solution.

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