50 Amazing Women: Extraordinary Lives and Achievements

Andromachi Papanicolaou, the wife of the man who invented the Pap smear, volunteered to have her cervix sampled every day for 21 years to help with his research. Their findings went on to save the lives of millions of women by preventing the development of cervical cancer through early detection.

2. In 2010, a woman named Christina Santhouse had the right hemisphere of her brain removed because it was ravaged by a disease called Rasmussen's syndrome. She went on to lead a normal life and received a master's degree in speech-language pathology.

3. Singer Lorde has sound-to-color synesthesia, a unique condition where sound blends with sight to create certain colors. This had a significant impact on the writing process for "Melodrama," where she composed music using the "violets and blues" seen on the album cover.

4. In October 1972, the University of Stuttgart, then in West Germany, reported that their student Veronica Seider (b. 1951) possessed a visual acuity 20 times better than average. She could identify people at a distance of more than a mile (1.6 km).

5. Lydia Fairchild, a mother from Washington State, was accused of fraud and kidnapping her own children. During the application for government assistance, a DNA test showed she had no connection to her kids. It turned out she has chimerism, meaning she has two sets of DNA, which explained the maternal test anomaly.

Scientists discovered a woman with a 'mutant' gene who feels no pain and heals without scarring. Jo Cameron reported sustaining numerous injuries throughout her life without pain, often smelling her burning flesh before noticing any injury, and her case could open doors to new treatments.

7. The 'Night Witches' were a Russian all-female bomber squadron in World War II. This 80-woman group flew 23,000 sorties and received 23 'Hero of the Soviet Union' honors. They earned the name from their technique of shutting off the engines and gliding over their targets to drop bombs silently.

8. In 1951, a poor woman named Henrietta Lacks unknowingly donated her cells to science. Her cells would become the first "immortal cells" that could be kept alive for medical use. They have been used for everything from creating the polio vaccine to cloning.

9. When a 30-year-old woman in Canada was shot in her left breast, her silicone breast implant deflected the bullet away from her vital organs. Her injuries were only broken ribs and damaged implants. It is the first recorded incident of a breast implant deflecting a bullet.

10. In 2005, a woman named Shayna Richardson survived a chute malfunction while falling thousands of feet and face-planting into a parking lot. Not only did she successfully recover, but in the emergency room, she discovered she was two weeks pregnant. The baby was not affected in any way by the accident.

After enduring two severe car accidents, Michelle Philpots completely lost her ability to create new memories, causing her to wake up every day thinking it's 1994.

12. A mother named Elisabeth Anderson-Sierra suffers from hyperlactation syndrome, which leads to an overproduction of breast milk. Instead of disposing of the excess milk, she decided to donate it. She spends 4-5 hours each day pumping milk, and in two years, she has donated 609 gallons of breast milk, with most going to feed premature babies.

13. Ginggaew Lorsoungnern is a Thai woman who survived her execution by gunfire in 1979 because she had situs inversus, a condition where all of the body's organs are reversed. She woke up on the way to the morgue. So then she was once again placed before gunfire, and the second volley succeeded.

14. In 1977, Shakuntala Devi, also known as the human computer, calculated the 23rd root of a 201-digit number in just 50 seconds. The UNIVAC 1101 computer at the US Bureau of Standards verified the response (546,372,891), which required a special program to carry out such a sizable calculation.

15. In 1941, a 30-year-old woman in Nazi-occupied Norway was struck by shrapnel and developed a strong German accent, leading to the town shunning her. This was the first recorded case of Foreign Accent Syndrome.

A woman from Sydney named Joy Milne has the ability to smell Parkinson's disease. In a study, she accurately identified 11 out of 12 patients with Parkinson's, and less than a year later, the final patient was also diagnosed, making her record 12 out of 12.

17. A German woman named Thea Alba earned the nickname "The Woman With Ten Brains" because she could write with all ten fingers simultaneously.

18. Wilma Rudolph suffered from polio and used a brace to walk until she was 12. At the age of 16, she won an Olympic bronze medal as part of the 400-meter relay team. By the age of 20, she had become "The Fastest Woman in History," winning three Olympic gold medals.

19. Maureen Wilton, a 13-year-old Canadian girl, set a new world record for the fastest female marathon in 1967 by more than four minutes. While running, she beamed and exclaimed, "Gee, this is great!" Two minutes after finishing the race, a doctor declared that her heart rate had already returned to normal.

20. A woman was born with three fingers on her right hand. After a tragic accident, she lost her right hand and later developed a phantom limb with five fingers, suggesting that her brain "knew" what a hand was supposed to feel like.

A woman named Michelle Thompson suffered from Permanent Sexual Arousal Syndrome (PSAS) and experienced more than 300 orgasms a day.

22. The renowned female pirates Mary Read and Anne Bonny discovered each other's true genders (as they had been disguising themselves as men) when Bonny expressed her attraction to Read, leading Read to also reveal her true identity as a woman.

23. In 1724, a Scottish woman named Maggie Dickson was sentenced to execution by hanging. Miraculously, she survived the hanging and emerged from her coffin as it was being transported. The courts ruled that since the punishment had been carried out, she was a free woman. She became known as 'Half-Hangit Maggie.'

24. A woman named Jean Hilliard survived being frozen for six hours. When she was transported to the hospital, doctors found her skin too rigid to pierce with a hypodermic needle, and her body temperature was too low to register on a thermometer.

25. A group of women called "The 9 Nanas" kept a secret for decades that not even their husbands knew about. For 30 years, they met at 4 a.m. and anonymously paid bills and purchased clothes for people in need. Each care package included a homemade pound cake and a note that read, "Somebody loves you."