DAVID ADAMS provides a round-up of some stories on the odder side of life…
• The world’s largest ice maze has been officially certified by Guinness World Records. The Minnesota Ice Festival‘s maze covers some 1686 square metres and features 2.4 metre high walls as well as three ice slides, an ice-sculpting competition and a warming area. Construction on the maze in the town of Eagan began in early December and involved placing 3,452 blocks of ice weighing about 193 kilograms each. It was completed on 4th January. Depending on weather conditions, the maze is expected to remain in place until mid-February. The previous record was maze measuring just over 1,200 square metres located in Buffalo, New York.
Deolira Gliceria Pedro da Silva, 119, sits in her house in Itaperuna, Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil, on 14th January, 2025. PICTURE: Reuters/Ricardo Moraes.
• Two months away from what she says is her 120th birthday, Deolira Gliceria Pedro da Silva, a great-grandmother from the state of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil is rushing to be recognised as the world’s oldest living person by the Guinness World Records. The institution currently features another Brazilian, Sister Inah Canabarro, a nun from the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul as the oldest living person at 116 years, but Deolira’s family and doctors are confident that she will soon take the religious woman’s title. “She is still not in the book, but she is the oldest in the world according to the documents we have on her, as I recently discovered,” said Deolira’s grand-daughter Doroteia Ferreira da Silva, who is half her age. The documents show that Pedro da Silva was born on March 10th, 1905, in the rural area of Porciuncula, a small town in the state of Rio. She now lives in a colourfully painted house in Itaperuna, where her two grand-daughters Doroteia, 60, and Leida Ferreira da Silva, 64, take care of her. The grandmother is also supervised by doctors and researchers who are interested in how she outlived the average life expectancy in Brazil, which currently sits at 76.4 years, by more than four decades. “Mrs Deolira, in 2025, will be 120-years-old. She is in a good general state of health for her condition, she is not taking any medication,” said geriatric doctor Juair de Abreu Pereira, who checks up on Pedro da Silva frequently and is assisting her family in the process with Guinness World Records. In a statement, Guinness said it couldn’t confirm receiving Pedro da Silva’s application, because it receives many from people around the world who claim to be the oldest living person. Major floods in the region almost twenty years ago destroyed most of Deolira’s original documents, her doctor said. That may pose a challenge for the official recognition of her age. Even if her age is not precise, Pedro da Silva is certainly older than 100 years, according to Mateus Vidigal, a researcher at the University of Sao Paulo who has studied her case as part of a project to understand the super elderly population of Brazil. “Mrs Deolira has not been excluded from the study, but there is this fragility which is the lack of documentation that is approved by those organisations,” Vidigal said, referring to vetting institutions such as the Guinness World Records. Pedro Silva’s healthy diet and sleeping habits are key to her longevity, according to Dr Pereira. To this day, she has a good interaction with her family and likes eating bananas. “I wish I could get to her age and be like that,” Ferreira da Silva, her granddaughter, said. “While we have high blood pressure and diabetes, she does not have any of that.” – RENATO SPYRRO and ISABEL TELES, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil/Reuters
We rely on our readers to fund Sight's work - become a financial supporter today!
For more information, head to our Subscriber's page.
• With February rapidly approaching, residents in Beeston, Nottingham, are anxious to see whether a mysterious plate of peeled bananas will once again appear on a street corner. The plate of 16 to 20 whole peeled bananas has appeared on the same corner on the second day of each month for the past year. One resident, Clare Short, told the BBC that following their appearance in December she placed a sign on the spot asking for the bananas not to be left again due to the mess that results as they decompose. But, on 2nd January, the bananas appeared again.
