1Miracle Babies
After an 8.0 magnitude earthquake hit Mexico City in 1985, nearly all newborn babies survived a collapsed hospital. They are called "miracle babies" because they made it through seven days without food, water, warmth, or human contact.
2. Erik Weihenmayer is an American athlete who is blind and has special glasses that send signals to a device he places on his tongue, which then sends signals to his brain, allowing him to see. On May 25, 2001, he became the only blind person to reach the summit of Mount Everest.
3. A Scottish woman named Maggie Dickson was sentenced to execution by hanging on September 2, 1724. She survived the hanging and climbed out of her coffin as it was being transported. The courts ruled she was a free woman as the punishment had been carried out. She thus earned the nickname 'half-hangit Maggie'.
4. A woman whom the medical journals just call 'SM' is literally fearless due to a rare genetic condition known as Urbach-Wiethe disease that hardened her amygdala, part of the brain responsible for the fear response. Researchers exposed her to potentially terrifying experiences, and none of them scared her.
5. In 1997, an Indian woman named Shakuntala Devi, who had earned the nickname "the human computer," gave the 23rd root of a 201-digit number in 50 seconds. The answer (546,372,891) was checked by the UNIVAC 1101 computer at the US Bureau of Standards. A special program had to be written for the computer to be able to do such a big calculation.
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6George Aldrich
George Aldrich has worked for NASA for more than 45 years, and his job is to smell things. This is to ensure that there are no unpleasant smells on the ISS or the shuttle. His nose also gets calibrated and retested every four months.
7. When NASA used electronic computers for the first time to calculate John Glenn's orbit around Earth, officials called on Katherine Johnson to verify the computer's numbers; Glenn had asked for her specifically and refused to fly unless Johnson verified the calculations.
8. There is a Native American tribe of ultra-runners known as the Tarahumara. They can run 200 miles non-stop and play running games that go on for up to 2 days without breaks. They use the toe-strike method of running instead of the traditional heel-strike.
9. Dean Karnazes is a man who can run without ever getting tired due to his exponentially high lactate threshold. He was able to run a marathon in the south pole at -25C and run for three consecutive nights before having to stop for sleep.
10. Vesna Vulovic was a flight attendant from Serbia. When her plane crashed at 33,000 feet (10,000 meters), she fell without a parachute and lived. She suffered many broken bones and was in a coma for 10 days, but eventually made a near-full recovery.
11Daniel Kish
Daniel Kish has been blind since the age of 13 months, but he taught himself to navigate by clicking his tongue and listening for echoes, similar to echolocation in bats. Kish and other researchers believe that echolocation produces images similar to sight. He has taught more than 15,000 blind people to use this hidden human ability.
12. In 1919, after pitching 8? innings in a game against the Philadelphia Athletics, Cleveland Indians pitcher Ray Caldwell was struck by lightning. Despite being knocked unconscious, he refused to leave the game. He went on to record the final out for the complete-game win.
13. In 1985, a 17-year-old boy named George Lamson Jr. was ejected from a plane during a crash (Galaxy Airlines Flight 203). He landed upright in his seat in the middle of a street. He was the only survivor from the plane crash.
14. Popular athlete and seven-time Olympic medalist Eero Mäntyranta was one of the most successful Finnish cross-country skiers in the world. He had a gene mutation that allowed him to carry 50% more oxygen in his body than a normal human being.
15. Rasmussen's syndrome destroyed Christina Santhouse's right hemisphere of her brain when she was young, so that half of her brain was surgically removed. After the surgery, she lost most of her motor skills on the left side of her body but went on to lead a normal life and receive a master's degree in speech-language pathology.
16Elizabeth Taylor
Elizabeth Taylor's long, thick eyelashes came from a rare change in her genes that made her have two rows of eyelashes.
17. There's a rare genetic disorder known as testotoxicosis. As the name implies, it only affects males. Affected boys reach puberty very early, just at the age of 2 or 3.
18. Lizzie Velásquez is an American woman who just can't physically gain weight. Born in 1989, she is now a motivational speaker and YouTuber. She's never weighed more than 64 pounds due to an extremely rare genetic disorder.
19. The average person can see about 1 million colors. But 1% of the world's population, who are almost always women, have a rare genetic mutation that allows them to have a fourth cone in their eyes, which allows them to see 100 million extra nuances of color.
20. Legendary bodybuilder Flex Wheeler is renowned for having a perfectly symmetrical body. It was discovered that he has an extremely rare genetic disorder. A study analyzing 62 incredible weightlifters, nine were diagnosed with having a myostatin deficiency mutation. Myostatin is a protein that prevents the body from building muscle. Flex was one of them. In fact, out of the nine men, he had the rarest mutation-the 'exon 2' gene. This mutation gave him significantly more muscle fibers than the other test subjects in this study and ridiculously more than a normal human.
21Immigration Delay Disease
In 2007, a Swiss woman was unable to enter the U.S. because she had no fingerprints. She had a rare genetic disorder called "adermatoglyphia" or "Immigration Delay Disease", where a person is born without fingerprints. It is known to occur in just four extended families on earth.
22. There is a mutation that causes bones to become eight times denser than normal, allowing people to walk away from car accidents without a single fracture but with the trade-off of being unable to swim.
23. A rare mutation among the Bajau people in Southeast Asia lets them stay underwater longer. Natural selection at the PDE10A gene has made their spleens bigger, so they can store more oxygenated red blood cells.
24. Genetic mutations among Tibetans help them to live and work on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, which features elevations as high as 14,800 feet. They can withstand low levels of oxygen and limited access to food. One of these variants was inherited from an extinct group of humans known as the Denisovans, a sister species to the Neanderthals.
25. Scientists have found that Ozzy Osbourne's genes have unique mutations that make his body more resistant to the effects of hard drugs and too much alcohol. One scientist quipped that the "genes connected to addiction, alcoholism... all had unique variations in Osbourne, a few of which geneticists had never seen before."
