26Alzheimer Protection Mutation
About 1 in 200 Icelanders and Scandinavians have a change in a gene linked to Alzheimer's disease that protects them from both the disease and normal cognitive decline.
27. Guevedoces are genetic males in a small community in the Dominican Republic who are born with a vagina instead of a penis. At puberty, their vagina fuses into a fully-functioning penis and scrotum.
28. There is a man named Matthias Schlitte who has a rare genetic defect that makes his right arm 33% bigger than the other, and it has been nicknamed Hellboy Arm.
29. A man living in the 1700s named Tarrare had an endless appetite due to unknown causes. In one case, he ate 15 meals in a single sitting, and his endless hunger led him, while in a hospital, to eat piles of garbage, as well as try to drink other patients' blood and eat corpses from the morgue.
30. Veronica Seider is a German woman who was born with superhuman eyesight. She can see people a mile (1.6 km) away and tell who they are.
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15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
31Wolfgang Pauli
The Pauli effect is a term referring to the anecdotal failure of technical equipment in the presence of Austrian theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Once, he wasn't there when something broke. This seemed to disprove the jinx until his coworkers found out that Pauli was on a train right by the lab when the machine broke.
32. Roy Sullivan, a park ranger, holds the record for the most lightning strikes survived. He was struck seven times: once in a fire lookout tower, once in his truck, once in his front yard, once in a ranger station, twice while driving away from the storm, and immediately after the seventh strike, he fought off a bear with a tree branch.
33. A woman named Anna Bagenholm survived the lowest body temperature ever recorded at 56.7 F (13.7 C). She had been skiing when she fell through a frozen stream and became stuck for 80 minutes. Despite being clinically dead, she made a full recovery and is now working at the same hospital that saved her life.
34. In 1980, a woman named Jean Hilliard was involved in a car accident. She walked 2 miles (3.2 km) in freezing weather to her friend's house and collapsed 15 feet (4.6 m) away from the door. The temperature dropped to -22 °F (-30 °C), and she was found frozen the next morning after spending 6 hours as a popsicle. She was transported to the hospital, where doctors said her skin was too hard to pierce with a hypodermic needle and her body temperature was too low to register on a thermometer. Yet she still had a heartbeat, and she survived and recovered.
35. A Croatian man named Frano Selak has survived seven near-death experiences, including a train derailing into a river, a bus crashing and falling into another river, falling off a plane whose doors had blown off and living by landing on a hay stack, getting hit by a bus, and surviving a car explosion twice. He was then lucky enough to win the lottery in 2004 with the very first ticket he bought.
36Timothy Ray Brown
Timothy Ray Brown is considered to be the first person cured of HIV/AIDS. Brown had chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant to treat leukemia. His transplant came from someone with a natural genetic resistance to HIV. He was cured of HIV, but scientists don't fully understand why.
37. In 2006, a woman in Croatia named Natasha Timarovic shot lightning out of her butthole after it went in through her mouth. Her rubber shoes prevented it from exiting through her feet. She just remained in the hospital overnight and soon made a full recovery.
38. During the 1920s and 1930s in New York City, five men tried to kill Michael Malloy in a fake accident so they could collect his life insurance. He didn't know about the plan, so he survived many attempts they made to kill him, such as eating rat poison, getting hit by a car, and sleeping outside in -14°F (-26°C) weather while soaked in water.
39. Stephen Wiltshire is a savant with autism who can draw detailed landscapes from memory. When he was a child, he was featured in a BBC documentary. Now he has his own gallery in London. At JFK Airport, a 76-meter panoramic memory drawing of New York is on display. In 2006, the Queen appointed him to an MBE.
40. Kim Peek, a savant who was the inspiration for the Rain Man movie, could read both pages of an open book at once, one page with one eye and the other page with the other eye. When he managed the payrolls of 160 people at a company, he was able to complete this task in just hours without a calculator, and when he was fired to be replaced by a computer, it took two full-time accountants plus the computer just to replace him.
