Is she the ‘greatest’ grandma ever?

MaeDell Taylor Hawkins

A 98-Year-old Kentucky woman with more than 230 great-grandchildren met her great-great-great-granddaughter for the first time, as seen in a moving Facebook photo that went viral. Cordelia Mae Hawkins, better known as MaeDell, was seen holding seven-week-old Zhavia Whitaker for the first time at her nursing home in Kings Mountain, Kentucky, on February 18. Along on the visit were the baby's mother, aunt, grandmother and great-grandmother, marking a rare six-generation gathering of women from the same family, it was reported.

The resulting Facebook image shows the sextet, including MaeDell's daughter, Frances Snow, 77, MaeDall and baby Zhavia, granddaughter Gracie Snow Howell, great-granddaughter Jacqueline Ledford, 29, and great-great-granddaughter Jaisline Wilson, 19. "I know it's rare for six generations… it's even rarer for all of them to be of the same gender," said MaeDell's granddaughter Howell, 58. "We're all girls - girl power, as well."

MaeDell Taylor Hawkins with her family

"Grandma was 16 years old when she married my grandpa, Bill," Howell recalled, adding "he was 50 and a widower with 10 children; his first wife died while giving birth to conjoined twins at home [the babies did not survive either]." As a result, the young Kentuckian had to adopt the role of a mother at a young age. However, it was a role the housewife clearly embraced, as she went on to have 13 more kids with the same man.

It appears that MaeDell's kin have followed suit when it came to furthering the family tree: MaeDell Hawkins' descendants all gave birth around the age of 19. MaeDell now boasts a whopping 623 descendants, according to a family chart compiled by her daughter-in-law. It includes 106 grandchildren, 222 great-grandchildren, 234 great-great-grandchildren and 37 great-great-great-grandchildren. The matriarch - who turns 99 in July - hopes to meet her third sixth-generation grandchild this summer, as another child, a boy, is on the way.

Cricket-flavoured ice cream in German parlour

Ice cream lovers, will you take on this challenge?

A German ice cream parlour has expanded its menu with a skin-crawling offering: cricket-flavoured scoops with dried brown crickets on top. The unusual confection is available at Thomas Micolino's store in southern Germany's town of Rottenburg am Neckar. Micolino has a habit of creating flavours that are far outside Germans' typical preferences for strawberry, chocolate, banana and vanilla ice cream.

In the past, he's offered liver sausage and Gorgonzola cheese ice cream as well as gold-plated ice cream for four euros per scoop. That he can now produce the cricket flavour is due to a European Union regulation that allows the use of the insects in food. Under the regulation, crickets may be frozen, dried or used as a powder.

Micolino's ice cream is made of cricket flour, heavy cream, vanilla extract and honey, and he tops it off with dried whole crickets. While some people are disgusted and even upset that he is offering insect ice cream, curious customers have mostly liked the flavour.

The toll-tax collector

A social media user, Dr Ajayita, tweeted a short clip in which an elephant is seen stopping a truck in the middle of the road, grabbing sugarcanes from it, and feasting on them. The video has amassed approximately 2,30,000 views, over 1,000 retweets, and over 6,000 likes so far. A signboard suggests that the incident happened in Thailand.

The Whistle Language

To communicate across the deep ravines of La Gomera in the Canary Islands, a unique style of speaking , only with whistles, was developed. This is because whistles can be transmitted quickly across the island's mountainous terrain. The El Silbo language of "Whistle Island" only consists of a couple of vowels and four consonants, but can communicate over 4,000 words.

The world's largest artificial salt mountain

The town of Herringen, in central Germany, is home to a heap of sodium chloride (table salt) so massive that it has come to be known as Monte Kali. It is the world's largest artificial salt mountain. The company operating potash salt mines in the area started dumping excess salt a few miles from Herringen, and over the years it created a giant salt mountain locals named Monte Kali or Kalimanjaro, a German pun!

The quietest room in the world

A Chamber inside Microsoft's Audio Lab holds the Guinness record for being the world's quietest room. It stops all outside noise, with the total silence even causing some people to hallucinate. Most people find the absence of sound deafening, feel a sense of fullness in the ears, or hear ringing. Very faint sounds (like breathing or the sound of your internal organs) become clearly audible. The longest continuous time anyone has spent inside the chamber is 55 minutes.

Talk about a work out!

A 60-year-old Florida man bested a Guinness World Record when he completed 3,264 push-ups in one hour. Rob Stirling said he decided to take on the Guinness World Record for most push-ups in one hour (male) after learning that Australian Daniel Scali set the total at 3,182 in April 2022. He said video from his successful attempt is now being submitted to Guinness World Records for official verification. Stirling said he is now eyeing a second GWR title. "There's a one-minute world record as well, it's 144 push-ups in one minute and I set out to do that while I was training for this," he told a local channel.