Peanut, a chicken from a no-kill farm in Michigan, is the current Guinness Record holder for the ‘world’s oldest chicken’, at 21 years, 156 days, and counting.

Chickens have an average life expectancy of five to eight years, so Peanut is somewhat of a Methuselah of the aviary world. On January 28, 2023, she was officially crowned the world’s oldest chicken by Guinness World Records, at the ripe age of 20 years and 272 days. She has since turned 21 and is chasing the title of oldest chicken in recorded history. But the craziest thing about Peanut is that she almost never existed. 21 years ago, her owner was getting ready to throw a batch of rotten-looking eggs a hen had abandoned into an alligator pond when she heard a faint chirp from one of them.

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Wisconsin’s Lake Chippewa is home to a giant floating island that sometimes moves around blocking a critically important bridge and needs to be moved by local boat owners working in unison.

Lake Chippewa, aka the Chippewa Flowage, was created in 1923, by flooding a large swamp. Soon after that, many of the peat bogs started rising to the surface and became perfect growing spots for plant seeds carried by wind and wild birds. As the years passed, plants from grasses to trees began to grow and their roots actually caused these floating bogs to grow. Today, they vary from the size of a parking space to several acres, with the largest of them, the so-called “Forty Acre Bog” on the west side of the lake featuring mature trees. Almost every year, dozens of local boat owners team up to push it away from a bridge connecting the East and West sides of the lake.

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A 71-year-old man from Brazil’s Tocantins region was pronounced dead in 1995, based on the testimony of his ex-wife and two witnesses. He spent the next 28 years of his life legally dead…

On August 16, Manoel Marciano da Silva finally had his death certificate annulled after a two-year-long court battle. To the Brazilian authorities, he had been dead and buried in the public cemetery of Augustinópolis, in Tocantins, for 28 years, but this only became a problem for the man himself about two years ago, when he couldn’t collect his pension and couldn’t get access to free healthcare, based on his insurance. That’s when he started investigating his ‘death’ and learned that it had been his ex-wife and two witnesses who had declared him dead to authorities.

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Tish, the oldest goldfish in recorded history, lived to the ripe old age of 43. In his later years, his scales actually started changing from gold to silver.

The average lifespan of a common goldfish (Carassius auratus), is 10-15 years, but the current Guinness Record for the oldest goldfish ever was set by a male goldfish named Tish that remarkably reached the age of 43. He spent his life in a fish bowl in North Yorkshire, UK, under the care of Hilda Hand and her son Peter. The latter won Tish as a prize at a fairground roll-a-penny stall in 1956, when he was only 7 years old, and after he left the family home, his mother continued looking after the aging goldfish. No one really expected Tish to reach his 40s, considering that most goldfish barely make it past a decade, but somehow he did, and, 24 years after his death, he still holds the record for the oldest goldfish ever.

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18Wheels Inc., an aptly-named company in Finland, has developed a strange-looking electric 18-wheel all-terrain vehicle that it claims is vastly superior to the common ATV.

The millipede-inspired design of the 18Wheels Inc. all-terrain vehicle is unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. Basically, it consists of a snowmobile-like body and a set of 18 small wheels each with its own individual suspension system. One of the core ideas of the project was to make this unusual-looking vehicle soil friendly, so the wheels are specifically small so that they don’t damage the soil by leaving huge tire marks on it. The unique suspension system provides a special trajectory of movement and a much smoother ride over all types of rough terrain, which can’t really be said about traditional ATVs.

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A UK man has been jailed for draining tens of thousands of pounds from his father’s bank accounts by faking both his voice and that of his dead mother, during phone calls with bank staff.

A complex police investigation found that during a 14-month period in 2017 and 2018, just months after his mother had passed away, 42-year-old Daniel Cuthbert defrauded his grieving father of more than £56,000 ($70,000) by phoning his parents’ bank and posing as both his father and his late mother. Audio footage released by Northamptonshire Police revealed how Cuthbert faked his dead mother’s name on at least nine occasions. He can be heard correctly answering a number of security questions before requesting that a sum of money be transferred from his parents’ account into another account. Cuthbert took all of his father’s savings, including his redundancy pau-out, and also took several loans in his name.

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The Lemon Melon is a newly-developed type of melon that apparently combines the sweetness and aroma of the melon with a slight sourness reminiscent of a lemon.

Japanese horticulture company Suntory Flowers reportedly spent five years developing the lemon melon, breeding it from a type of melon originally imported from overseas. The process involved a lot of trial and error and took about five years. During the development period, horticulturists experimented extensively with a number of factors, including cultivation methods and harvest times. The final product, which is apparently blended with actual lemons, is juicy and sweet like a melon but slightly sour like a lemon, making the perfect fruit to enjoy on a hot summer day.

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A Chinese man who has dedicated most of the last 22 years to trying to find his abducted son finally managed to find his son in a city 560 miles (900 kilometers) away.

On October 9, 2001, Lei Wuze left his home in Yueyang, Hunan Province without knowing that it would be the last time he would see his son for over two decades. The man left his 4-year-old boy, Yuechuan, playing under the supervision of one of his neighbors. The woman later told police that they had met a suspicious man on the street who had later laid a trap for the boy and abducted him when she wasn’t paying attention. Lei was devastated, but he never lost hope of one day seeing his boy again. He immediately embarked on long trips in and around Yueyang, holding pictures of his son and stopping people in traffic to ask if they had seen him. Years passed, but Lei Wuze persisted, and this year, his resilience finally paid off.

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Australia’s Phil Gore recently set a new world record at the 2023 Dead Cow Gully Backyard Masters Ultramarathon by running a whopping 425 miles (685 kilometers) in four days.

The Dead Cow Gully Backyard Masters is billed as a ‘race with no finish line’ by its organizers, and that makes sense because the format requires runners to complete a loop of 6.7km every hour and the race continues until only one runner remains. This year’s event was held on a farm in Nanango, 112 miles northwest of Brisbane, Australia. The endurance race began at 7 am on Saturday, June 17th, and ended four and a half days later, when there was only one person still running, Australian Phil Gore. After running the 6.7-km lap no less than 102 times, he was finally declared the winner.

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An 81-year-old Russian woman with ties to the criminal underworld of Krasnodar was recently arrested for ordering the killing of a criminal investigations detective.

Lyudmila Ryabykh is not your average grandmother. Not only does the 81-year-old have a strong connection to members of Krasnodar’s organized crime, but she once threatened to kill a paramedic with a sawed-off shotgun and she recently placed a hit on a local detective that apparently rubbed her the wrong way. The pensioner was caught red-handed after ordering the killing of an officer from the Krasnodar police department and paying part of the reward for proof of his death. Unfortunately for her, Ryabykh didn’t know that her criminal associates had revealed her plan to the authorities, and she now risks spending the rest of her days behind bars.

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Pinanga subterranea, a new species of palm discovered by researchers at the Royal Botanic Gardens, is one of only two known plants that exclusively fruit and flower underground.

There are more than 2,500 species of palm known to science, but Pinanga subterranea, a new species discovered on the tropical island of Borneo, is the only one that flowers and fruits only underground. The plant and its sweet fruits are well-known to the island’s indigenous population, but it has somehow been overlooked by scientists until now. Dr Paul Chai, a Malaysian botanist and namesake of the palm species Pinanga chaiana was the first to spot the underground-flowering palm, and in 2018, Kew scientists Benedikt Kuhnhäuser, Peter Petoe and William Baker took some samples for research purposes and discovered the plant’s amazing abilities.

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Thai Ngoc, an 80-year-old farmer in Vietnam, claims that he hasn’t slept in over 60 years, since coming down with a fever as a young man. Somehow, this severe insomnia hasn’t affected his life.

Most people can’t go an entire day without a few hours of sleep, but one Vietnamese man claims that he has spent the last 60 years wide awake, without so much as a short nap. Thai Ngoc has been making news headlines in his home country for years now, ever since it was originally reported that he does not need any sleep to lead a happy, active life. Ngoc’s family, including his wife, children, friends, and neighbors insist that they have never seen the octogenarian sleep, and he insists that the complete lack of sleep has never affected him negatively.

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An Italian professor who was recently fired for around 20 years of absence out of 24 years of service at schools near Venice has vowed to contest her recent firing by the Ministry of Education.

51-year-old Cinzia Paolina De Lio, a secondary school teacher who specializes in history and philosophy, became famous in her home country of Italy for managing to skip work for a total of 20 years out of the last 24 years of service at a number of schools around Venice. De Lio was originally sacked in 2017, after an inspection found her to be “unprepared” and “inattentive” in class, but she appealed the decision, and a judge reinstated her the following year. She continued to provide all sorts of excuses to miss work until Italy’s Supreme Court of Cassation decided that her original termination had been justified, especially since she had been absent from the classroom for most of her two-and-a-half decades as a school professor.

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An inmate in Bangladesh sparked controversy in his own country after being released four years and four months earlier for hanging 26 people during his time in prison.

in 1991, Shahjahan Bhuiyan was sentenced to 42 years in prison for murder, but he served four years and four months less by carrying out executions of 26 fellow inmates during his time in prison. The 74-year-old man received two months’ commutation for each execution, which, coupled with his good behavior and other aspects, shortened his sentence by almost a decade. Shahjahan became a hangman at Dhaka Central Prison in 2001, after informing prison officials that he knew how to handle a rope. Bangladesh is one of the few countries in the world that carries out death sentences by hanging, so Shahjahan Bhuiyan’s skills were valued highly.

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23-year-old Luiz Augusto Márcio Marques stopped growing after undergoing a surgical procedure to remove a very rare and aggressive tumor. Today he looks like a 13-year-old boy.

Luiz, who is better known as Guto in his native city of Passo Fundo, in Southern Brazil, had a perfectly normal life until the age of 7, when he started experiencing excruciating headaches that began manifesting more frequently as time passed. None of the doctors his parents took him to could diagnose his condition correctly, and the headaches started affecting his school activity and his daily life. Some claimed that it was just a virus, while others said that it was a psychological condition, or that he was just making everything up because he was lazy. It was only after the boy suffered a seizure that he was taken to the city hospital where the real cause of his headaches was finally revealed…

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