A 37-year-old man from Hereford, England named Ashley Winter has finally received a certificate from the Guinness World Record which confirmed his mile run last February. With a running time of 10 minutes and 11 seconds, Winter has officially set the Guinness World Record for the fastest mile run while blindfolded.

Winter, who has been diagnosed with vision-impairing eye disease keratoconus, raised money for charity Fight for Sight.

"I'm delighted that my Guinness World Record attempt had been approved. I want to prove to myself and to others with an eye condition what can be done if you put your mind to it," Winter told the Hereford Times. "By raising money for Fight for Sight I hope to help find the next breakthrough in treating sight loss conditions like keratoconus."

Awesome!

(Image Credit: Guinness World Records/ UPI)

Photographs released by NASA are in the public domain, because they are produced by a federal agency. The dozens of photographers that work for NASA therefore rarely get the credit they deserve for the work they do. That's why Maura White of the Johnson Space Center launched the agency's Photographer of the Year awards, now in its second year. This year, the work of around 70 photographers was judged by a panel of experts in order to acknowledge great work. There is apparently not just one photographer of the year, but winning photos in four categories, plus runners-up. The photo above is the winner in the "Places" category.   

Chris Gunn of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland took this shot of the center’s Space Systems Development and Integration Facility. The entire wall is made up of HEPA filters that remove particles smaller than a red blood cell. A thousand times cleaner than a hospital operating room, the facility is used to test high-value instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope’s Optical Assembly.

Gunn also won in the "Documentation" category. See the winners and runners-up at Air & Space magazine.

Free Range Designs, a furniture workshop in Wales, makes beds and storytelling chairs inspired by fairy tale images and fantasy art. But what caught the attention of the internet was this marvelous bed with images from the film The Nightmare Before Christmas. Like the company's other products, this bed is made of reclaimed wood using environmentally friendly methods.

If you're digging a hole in your backyard and you somehow found something -- say, clothing, book, accessory, or any item -- what will you do with it? Will you keep it, auction it, or donate to a museum?

Whatever the case is, it's different if what you find are human bones:

Humans and human remains have a special status in most nations’ legal systems. While animals can be owned, humans can’t. Compounding this, the definition of “human” is itself contested, and this muddies the legal waters when it comes to discovering archaeological human remains.

For instance, recent DNA discoveries of interbreeding between Homo sapiens, Homo neanderthalensis and Denisovans – as well as the fact that Homo naledi and Homo floresensis existed at the same time as modern humans – indicates scientists struggle to reach a consensus on where the boundaries of “human” lie.

The definition of “human” can also be culturally ascribed. Many indigenous peoples including communities from Australasia and Africa recognise an ancestral connection to species not always classified as Homo sapiens.

Whatever the meaning of human is, should human bones be owned by another person? If possible, would you own one?

Read more at Cosmos.

Credit: London Natural History Museum/EPA

Alexis Arnold transforms printed media into crystallized sculptures. The San Francisco-based artist warps the pages and covers of books with water, and then applies a solution to grow crystals all over the book. The solution freezes the printed media, making it nonfunctional, as My Modern Met details: 

“The crystals remove the text and solidify the books into geological sculptures,” she continues.

Arnold has manipulated famous books such as To Kill a Mockingbird, Moby Dick, and The Three Musketeers, as well as reference texts like the Smithsonian Nature Guide: Rocks and Minerals. Each book’s unique characteristics—cover, page number, illustrations—are emphasized when it is congealed by the borax solution. Some sculptures appear more colorful and flamboyant, others are unwieldy with stacks of hardened pages.

“Books hold a great significance as objects, stories, teachings, memories, and more, so they were ripe for investigation with the process of crystal growth I’d been exploring on different objects,” Arnold says. She was prompted to begin the series in 2011, during the surge of e-books. During this time, the artist came across dozens of abandoned paperbacks and hardcovers and used them as experiments for the effects of crystal growth. Arnold realized that the process transformed books—which are valuable in their reusability—into purely decorative, aesthetic artifacts. Instead of illuminating text and great stories, these geological sculptures contain a “history of time, use, and memories.” Arnold’s series equalizes renowned titles and defunct phone books as inoperative, beautiful objects.

image via My Modern Met

The Ku Klux Klan was born during Reconstruction, but by 1915, there was only one member left- William Joseph Simmons. He had trouble recruiting new members, so he hired professional fundraisers Mary Tyler and Edward Clarke. They managed to draw five million new members between 1920 and 1925 by expanding the organization's mission, because racism against Black Americans wasn't enough.

So Clarke and Tyler divided the country in eight regions and sent out 1,000 agents to identify the focus of bigotry and fear in their assigned areas: labor-union organizers and communists in the industrial north, Asians on the west coast, Jews and Catholics almost anywhere.

They began to expand the Klan’s mission, stirring hatred against these groups.

The two also tapped into Americans’ anger at accelerated social change. They wanted to channel the disapproval of the media that mocked tradition, the rebellious attitude of young people, the immodest behavior of women, and, of course, jazz.

Having relatively few adherents in cities, the Klan adopted several attitudes popular in rural areas. They helped enforce Prohibition and they denounced motion pictures.

Almost everywhere they found a public yearning for a golden past, where they remembered an America free of foreign influences. Millions were drawn to the Klan’s policy of “America for Americans” as well as its sometimes violent enforcement of fundamentalist Protestant values.

But it didn't last. While the Klan is still with us, membership fell rapidly after 1925. Read about the campaign to build the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s at the Saturday Evening Post. -via Damn Interesting

PointCrow isn’t Link, the main character of Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild, but he can most definitely emulate Link’s experience in the game. The Zelda gamer recreates Breath Of The Wild in his backyard, playing and interacting as if his backyard is actually Hyrule. 

Sometimes we need a drink. Honestly, I’ve gone through this quarantine period needing something stronger than the red wine available at home. If you’re looking for a different concoction to help you drown your worries away, Elle has found an online mixology resource that generates the cocktails for you based on what ingredients you have. Check out makemeacocktail.com and have a blast! 

image via wikimedia commons

People are drawn to the rich, and many folks will bend over backwards to please them. If one is perceived as very wealthy, they will be offered free things, loans, and even forgiveness for crimes. Quite a few women have leveraged this perception to their advantage as they posed as heiresses, always waiting for their inheritance to come through, while living a glamorous life at others' expense. And often all it takes is a good story that people want to believe.

Violet Charlesworth made her money gambling a stolen fortune on the stock market. She grew up in Stafford, a town in the West Midlands, where her father worked as a mechanic. On a trip to nearby Derby, a city of silk mills, Violet Charlesworth launched herself as Miss Violet Gordon. It was 1905 and she was 21 years old. To a shopkeeper in the city, Violet explained that she was the goddaughter of the famed war hero General Charles George Gordon. Almost to her surprise, she managed to elicit a number of silk dresses on credit, including a cherry-red motor cloak, designed to be worn in open-top luxury cars. She made the trip to Derby more often.

After several afternoon teas with a patriotic widow, the story solidified: on her 25th birthday, Miss Gordon would inherit £100,000 from the general, who, after amassing a great fortune, had died rather grandly during the 1888 siege of Khartoum. Violet spoke with confidence, holding her teacup with a pinch. By the end, she convinced the widow to lend the dear general’s goddaughter her entire savings.

An article at affidavit tells the tales of several fake heiresses from the 19th century to 2019. -via Digg

Shrek 2 was a sequel that actually deserved to follow in the footsteps of the original. The 2004 movie was deeper than many viewers realized at the time, and still had plenty of fart jokes. What do Screen Junkies think of Shrek 2? Find out in this Honest Trailer made as part of their Summer Blockbuster series, where they look back at the biggest summer movies of past years. There won't be one for 2020, so we may as well wallow in nostalgia, if you can call 2004 nostalgic.

A hummingbird helmet is a helmet with a hummingbird feeder attached to attract hummingbirds to your face. Think of it as similar to a Bear Vest, which is a vest made of beefsteaks to attract bears.

Spencer Staley goes all-out with a total of seven feeders hanging from rods extending from a helmet.

I really don't see why, with proper supports, it wouldn't be possible to build a helmet with ten times as many supports. I mean, humans went to the Moon and invented Twitter. A hummingbird helmet with seventy feeders is within our potential.

-via Born in Space

Rainbow lightning, which is the name of my next Queensrÿche cover band, was spotted by the BBC's Weather Watchers over the past weekend. Why did these two meteorological phenomena appear together? The BBC explains:

Firstly, there was a lot of energy within the atmosphere so when the thunderstorms developed there was plenty of electrical charge which produced a lot of lightning. The storms were also quite localised so there were sunny spells between the showers. And lastly, the timing was spot on. As the sun was setting, the angle of the sun was just right with the thunderstorm to form rainbows.

So: sorcery.

-via Aaron Starmer | Photo: CREEZ1993

Entrepreneurs from Mexico developed a method of making cacti into vegan leather- and you won’t even notice it isn’t real leather! When Adrián López Velarde and Marte Cázarez realized that environmental pollution is a serious problem, they were inspired to create vegan leather. The faux-leather is called “Desserto” and is made from cactus, as BoredPanda detailed: 

Why cactus, you ask? The answer is simple—this plant doesn’t need much water to grow, it’s super resilient and strong and it can handle low temperatures without dying. Besides, it’s México so there’s plenty of cacti there.

The vegan leather these guys create is called “Desserto” and it’s the world’s first environmentally friendly organic material made out of Nopal cactus.

image via BoredPanda

Photographers post wallpaper-worthy photos all the time. We save them because we can’t take photos as beautiful as theirs, and there’s no harm in admitting that. I do it all the time. However, this particular photo of a sunset from landscape photographer Gaurav Agrawal did the unexpected. The photo often made android phones crash when set as wallpaper, PetaPixel details: 

Unfortunately, when it came time to export and share the photo after a few edits in Adobe Lightroom, he picked the ProPhoto RGB color space; that, it seems, was the root of the problem.

The color space attached to the photo is unreadable by a large number of Android phones, mostly those by Google and Samsung. When set as the wallpaper on the standard version of Android 10, sRGB is required, and the disparity sent these phones into an infinite re-boot loop. The issue is referred to as a “soft-brick,” because it was often only fixable by performing a factory reset and losing any data that wasn’t backed up.

This fact was discovered and shared widely on Twitter, causing the photo to go viral and inadvertently leading to thousands of phones being bricked as some Android users couldn’t resist the temptation to try using the photo themselves.

Agrawal tells the BBC that he’s sad about what happened. Since he’s an iPhone user (and always uses a photo of his wife as his phone background) he had no idea that choosing the wrong color space could cause such a kerfuffle.

“I didn’t do anything intentionally. I’m sad that people ended up having issues.” says Agrawal. “I hoped my photograph would have gone ‘viral’ for a good reason, but maybe that’s for another time… I’m going to use another format from now on.”

image via PetaPixel

In the Israeli town of Safed lies a historical cemetery containing the graves of Jewish holy men among the 40,000 burials. Safed became the center of Kabbalah, a form of Jewish mysticism, several hundred years ago. The cemetery is undergoing some work: an effort to GPS-map the Hebrew epitaphs of Kaballah leaders from the 15th-17th centuries.   

With no money available to renovate it, the cemetery has been neglected for years. No one knew the number of the graves, and the records went missing decades ago. In the early 1990s the Safed municipality decided to renovate it by cleaning old graves and roads, building a staircase, and painting selected gravestones blue. When the excavations began, they were in for a shock: Under the paths leading to the famous graves were thousands of other graves, buried under the dirt because of the rains and the sediment flowing down the mountainside.

The renovation efforts expose a conundrum. Some believe the buried tombstones must be unearthed and documented for posterity. Since the inscribed markers are mostly limestone, that act in itself exposes them to weathering and destruction. The paint used in the 1990s identifies some graves, but also may have damaged them. Therefore, others believe this sacred burial site should be left as is so the dead can rest in peace. Read about Safed cemetery at Atlas Obscura.