One of the most difficult things to do today is trying to socially distance yourself from other people, especially in large gatherings or places that are filled with people. It is not impossible, however; every person in that place just has to cooperate.

One especially striking example of this has come from those starting the annual Muslim Hajj pilgrimage in Mecca.

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This year, taking social distancing measures into account, the event was downsized by Saudi officials to allow a limited number of people to the event — last year saw 2.5 million attend, while this year's number is 10,000, and they must be already living in Saudi Arabia. According to the Washington Post, people over 50 or those with terminal illnesses were not allowed to attend.

Photos from Mecca's Grand Mosque are something to behold, a true snapshot of this challenging time we're in.

Check out the photos over at Mashable.

(Image Credit: Mashable)

Ranking the cuisine of various countries is a mission fraught with danger, as food is a matter of both national pride and personal opinion. And it really doesn't matter, as long as you can get something good to eat. But Uproxx still published a top ten list, based on an online survey of 450,000 people willing to rank world cuisines. The descriptions are based heavily on street food, which tells us what you might expect to see if you ever get to travel to those nations. But even if you can't travel, a lot of the dishes mentioned are available in US cities. Check out the top ten and an overview of each nation's food at Uproxx.

In Shel Silverstein's book The Giving Tree, a tree gives its all to a boy it loves, expecting nothing in return. While you admire the tree for its unconditional love, you also feel sorry for it, and the boy comes across as a real ass.

Playwright Topher Payne gives us a different ending for the book, one in which the tree actually teaches the boy to become a better person. They are both better off for the tree's efforts, and so is the world around them. You can read it by clicking on the image here.

It's part of Payne's series called Topher Fixed It, which also includes a new ending for Rainbow Fish. -via Digg

We’ve had our fair share of clickbait articles these past few months, and most of us don’t believe news is true if it has a sketchy title. Intrigued? Yes, but is it believable? Highly unlikely. It’s a good way to get clicks though. However, some stories are unexpectedly true even when they are so bizarre. For example, would you believe a strip club in Miami sold a stolen Russian military submarine to a Columbian drug cartel? No? Unfortunately, it’s true, as Cracked details: 

Together with a part-time Cuban spy and full-time cocaine trafficker named Nelson Yester-Garrido, they hit on a brilliant plan: The Soviet Union had just broken up and corrupt Russian military officers were selling Red Army equipment cheap. It was a golden period for arms dealers, when you couldn't even walk down the street in Moscow without a guy in a trenchcoat offering to sell you a mechanized infantry division, with a cybernetic bomb-sniffing dolphin thrown in to seal the deal. Tarzan suggested using his Russian connections to obtain military hardware for cocaine traffickers. Which is how Porky's, the strip club with the dildo car, wound up under investigation for selling a Soviet military submarine to the Medellin Cartel. 

Check out more unbelievably true crime stories here. 

image via Cracked

Would you quit a well-paying job, in the middle of a pandemic, in order to find something that would make you feel more fulfilled? Some feel free to do so just to have more meaning to their life than working at a desk for hours. Bryan Schatz and Patrick Hutchison did exactly that. They were two people with arguably good careers, but felt caged and overwhelmed by the same, tiring routine brought by their jobs, so they tried out something different, as Outside detailed: 

We laid out our plan, which was: we didn’t really have a plan. We’d build a cabin for sure, but whether we’d keep it or rent it or sell it wasn’t clear. We hadn’t actually priced anything out, but we figured we could get it done for about $20,000, maybe less. We’d pool our money saved from working and go in on it together, splitting up the investment equally. Dan couldn’t quit his job—he was building a career in the maritime industry in Seattle, getting hours toward his captain’s license—but he’d help out on weekends when he could. 

Three weeks later, we found a quarter-acre of raw land near Pat’s tiny off-grid in the Cascades. It was a sloping meadow of ferns a short walk from the Skykomish River, festooned with mature Douglas fir, big leaf maple, and cedar. We put down an impossibly low offer of $3,000, certain the sellers wouldn’t take it seriously. If they accepted, we’d consider it a sign from the universe. 

They accepted almost immediately. It was early spring.  

Check out the full piece here. 

image via Outside

A lot of industries, establishments, and sports are now forced to operate at a minimum, or not operate at all. For professional baseball, some players who are not on the top rosters aren’t able to play due to a lot of games being cancelled. Minor league players don’t have the chance to play and further hone their skills this year, and some believe that players may be less talented next year because of the cancellations. FiveThirtyEight compared the performance of players who missed a full season to players who were called to serve during WWII:  

We don’t have a huge sample to look at. There were 98 players who lost at least one full season to military service between 1939 and 1946. Of that group, there were 30 hitters to reach 150 plate appearances in their first year before service and also in their first season back. There were 15 pitchers to total at least 70 innings in their last year before WWII participation and in their first year playing after the war. All of those players returned in either the 1945, 1946 or 1947 MLB seasons. (There were 343 total MLB players who played in 1944 and 1945, so many returnees were facing players who did not miss time in previous seasons).

The hitters suffered some performance decline, relative to the league average. As a group, their OPS+ — which adjusts for the run-scoring environment and ballpark factors — declined by 5.2 percent, from an average of 118.1 pre-service to 111.9 in their first season back. But there were also cases like that of Ted Williams, who missed his age-24, 25 and 26 seasons and returned in 1946 to win the AL MVP award. Perhaps there was some aging effect in the group, but the average age of players in their return was 30.1 years, which likely placed near their prime performance years.

image via FiveThirtyEight

It was a technical glitch, but hey, at least we can say that Mickey Mouse signed checks to over 200 people in Rhode Island! These people received tax refund checks signed by none other than Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse. Rhode Island officials have clarified that the checks signed with the famous duo’s signature was a technical glitch, and officials have mailed new checks signed by the right people. 

image via TMZ

An unusual question to ask, right? But if you’re curious about it, worry not- researchers from the University of Bristol in England and the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico have discovered the answer! Using 3-D microscopy and advanced mathematical analyses, the team found that the human sperm tails’ snakelike movement is an optical illusion. Human sperm only turns in one direction, as The Smithsonian details: 

Rather than moving side-to-side, sperm tails actually turn in only one direction. Without other adjustments, a one-sided stroke would result in sperm swimming in circles and never reaching their destination, the female egg. To compensate, the scientists found, the body or head of the sperm rotates independently in a corkscrew-like motion in the opposite direction, enabling the whole cell to move forward in a straight line.

“We were not expecting to find what we found,” says Hermes Gadêlha, head of the Polymaths Lab at University of Bristol and lead author on the study. “The aim of the project was ‘blue sky’ [or broad] research, to understand how sperm moves in three dimensions. And the result has completely changed the belief system that we have.”

image via The Smithsonian

As soon as photography advanced to the point where the subject didn't have to sit still for long, photographers found that the public loved to see pictures of animals, particularly funny pictures of pets. Harry Whittier Frees made a career out of posing kittens for amusing pictures, but dogs were popular, too, as seen the archives of the British Newspaper Association. The photo above appeared in the magazine The Tatler in October 1904.

In this quite surreal and charming photograph, it is a dog who is both behind the camera and in front of it, the caption from The Tatler reading ‘Thank you; would you mind turning this way, if you please, just for a few moments?’

This is just one of a gallery of dog pictures featured in newspapers and magazines of the past with the stories behind them at the BNA blog. -via Strange Company

Would you move to a small town in Italy if you could buy a home for one Euro ($1.10)? The actual cost turns out to be more, once you outbid other interested parties, pay the back taxes, and make necessary repairs. It's pretty much the same deal as the condemned homes in Detroit that were going for just a few dollars a few years back. Even with the extra investment, you'll end up with a historic home that's way less expensive than a new home... as long as you are happy living in rural Italy. -via Digg

Astronomers knew about the periodic appearances of comets, but the return of Haley's Comet in 1910 came at a pivotal time in human history. Mass communications kept people informed better than ever before, with books, newspapers, and periodicals, while the average reader wasn't all that well educated in the doings of the cosmos. Into that world, eccentric French scientist Camille Flammarion wrote some sensational predictions in the journal L’Astronomie.   

The incoming of Halley’s comet, he said, contained a poisonous cyanogen gas that “would impregnate the atmosphere and possibly snuff out all life on the planet.” When The New York Times ran a story on his assertion, the fear amplified on a global scale in the tabloids. One science writer, Matt Simon, said folks were so frightened, they began sealing up the keyholes of their houses to “keep the poison out of their homes.”

The “Sacred Followers” religious group in Oklahoma was reportedly planning on sacrificing a virgin to ward off the disaster, but was stopped by police. Comet pills, comet shelters, comet soap, and even submarine rentals became the norm for doomsday preppers.

So while many cashed in on the comet by selling souvenirs and anything with a comet theme, others leveraged the panic with survival elixirs and protection devices. Read about the comet panic of 1910 at Messy Nessy Chic.  

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狗狗時鐘~ #leatherart #leathercraft #leatherworks #leathertooling #leathercarving #皮雕 #皮雕藝術 #皮雕工藝

A post shared by 黃一誠 (@yichen_leather) on May 14, 2020 at 4:21am PDT

A master craftsman, @yichen_leather of Taichung, Taiwan carefully tools and then paints leather images, mostly animals. The worked leather makes the images pop out in three dimensions. These are remarkably beautiful and effective relief sculptures.

In 1951, Henrietta Lacks went to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, despite her misgivings, because the pain was so bad. She was suffering from cervical cancer, which would take her life eight months later. Lacks was wary of the doctors there, because rumor had it that they conducted experiments on Black people against their will and without their knowledge. The first order of business was a biopsy.   

The tissue taken from her cervix 10 days later was given to Dr. George Gey, director of tissue culture research at Hopkins [PDF]. He believed that if he could find a continually dividing line of malignant human cells, all originating from the same sample, he could find the cause of cancer—and its cure. His assistant placed tiny squares of the specimen into test tubes, then labeled each tube with the first two letters of the unwitting donor’s first and last names: HeLa.

Soon, Henrietta’s cells began to divide. And, unlike the other cells they had sampled, they did not die. Gey started giving the immortal cells to colleagues, saying they had come from a woman named Helen Lane.

Within two years, HeLa cells had been put into mass production, commercialized, and distributed worldwide, becoming central to the development of vaccines and many medical advances. By 2017, HeLa cells had been studied in 142 countries and had made possible research that led to two Nobel Prizes, 17,000 patents, and 110,000 scientific papers, thereby establishing Henrietta’s role as the mother of modern medicine.

Henrietta lacks left five children behind, who did not learn about her immortal cells for 22 years, and to this day have not received any of the billions of dollars they have generated. Read about Henrietta Lacks, born 100 years ago, and her cells that still live on 69 years after her death at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Emw)

Artist Kathy Maniscalco lives in Sante Fe, New Mexico. Last month, a family of bobcats, a mother and five bobkittens, paid their home a visit. The Maniscalcos kept their distance, but managed to get plenty of photographs and some video footage, too. Kathy says she may make a painting out of the portrait above that her husband took. Don't they pose nicely! See all the pictures and videos at Bored Panda.

(Image credit: John Maniscalco)

People collect things for a lot of different reasons: the urge to complete a set, the satisfaction of acquiring things, the hope of increased worth, a sense of history, just a hobby, sentimental reasons, or they genuinely enjoy the objects they collect. There are two ways to look at the value of these things: what they are worth to others, or the objective market value, and what they mean to you. That's according to Jeff Foxworthy. You may remember Foxworthy best as the comedian who told why "you might be a redneck." He has a new TV show premiering August 4 on A&E called What's It Worth? in which he explores the value of the things people keep. Foxworthy himself has a collection of baseballs that don't quite fit the mold of collectibles, but they are worth a lot to him. Instead of being autographed by baseball stars, they are signed by his friends, fellow comedians, and country music stars.  

Another baseball that Foxworthy is unlikely to part with is the one he used to throw out the first pitch at a Braves game. “It was during the playoffs,” Foxworthy remembers. After Foxworthy did his first-pitch duties, “Someone said, Stand here until they’re done with the national anthem, then you can go back to your seat. And as I’m standing there, I look over and there’s Jimmy Carter seated in the front row. I had the ball that I had just thrown out for the first pitch, so after the anthem, I turned around and said, Mr. President, would you sign this? And he wrote ‘To Jeff. Great first pitch! Jimmy Carter.’ Well, that’s a great memory of that night, and it’s one of those collectibles that has a story behind it.”

Read about Foxworthy and his unique baseballs at Collectors Weekly.