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The stories we love from Outlook this week.

For three decades, Hawaiian surfer Garrett McNamara travelled the world in search of ever bigger waves. Then he was invited to visit Nazaré, a small fishing town in Portugal, where he found the biggest and most powerful wave of them all. And when he surfed it, he made history.

Juan Villalba-Macías has spent decades trying to protect wildlife. He's gone undercover to scupper million-dollar, animal-trafficking deals. He's also rescued two stolen parrots, the last of their kind born in the wild, in the midst of a dictatorship. (Film clip from Rio/ Carlos Saldanha/ Blue Sky Studios & 20th Century Fox Animation)

Sofía Gatica was devastated when she lost her newborn baby to a mysterious illness, but she started to notice that she wasn't alone in her suffering. Sofía went door to door in her neighbourhood of Ituzaingó on the outskirts of Córdoba, Argentina, mapping out who was sick. She noticed a pattern and asked, was there a connection to the soybean fields next door? As Clayton Conn reports, Sofía formed a group called The Mothers of Ituzaingó who began a dangerous quest for answers.

Erika Cheung knew how to work hard, growing up in a one-bedroom trailer, she dreamed of pursuing her passion for science and helping others. So Erika was thrilled to land her first job out of university at a booming tech company promising a revolution in healthcare. Fronted by the glamorous and wealthy Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos claimed to have the technology to be able to tell from a few drops of blood whether someone had a range of diseases. That was not true. And it took Erika, one of their most junior employees, to blow the whistle – at great personal risk.

Presenter: Asya Fouks

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(Photo: Cassette tape. Credit: Getty images)