River rafting group rescued after days of eating bark and flowers

A boy’s scream can be heard in the distance on body camera footage released by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources showing how rescue teams last week found two women and a nine-year-old boy who had been stranded for three days when their river tubing trip went wrong. Sarah Vida, 28, and her son Kayden Kovalcik, 9, along with Jazmin Hock, 28; wearing just their swimming suits. Hock’s legs are almost entirely covered in deep, red cuts from scrapes after walking for days through the brush. They have a broken phone and a single water bottle with only a few sips left. The trio had been on a tubing trip on the Muskegon River in the small community of Twin Lake on Tuesday when they’d hit logs and their tubes popped, according to officials. They were reported missing after one of the women didn’t show up to her dentist appointment. The group was found Friday about seven miles (11.27 kilometres) from where they entered. (via CTV News)

A Cleveland dad set an unofficial mile record while running with his baby in a stroller

Sometimes, for the sake of history, you have to ignore bedtime.That’s what Stephen Biebelhausen decided when he and his daughter, Blake, entered the stroller category of Saturday’s Guardian Mile, a Cleveland race over the Hope Memorial Bridge. The race started at 7:45 p.m., a full 45 minutes past the time Blake usually goes off to dreamland.Four minutes, 17.707 seconds later, Biebelhausen, 30, and Blake, 1, unofficially broke the stroller-mile Guinness World Record of 4:26.29 set by Silas Frantz in California in 2025. His Division I years long behind him, Biebelhausen signed up for the stroller mile to support a friend running in the elite competition. While he has run marathons since college and often takes his daughter on casual jogs through his neighborhood, he and Blake only did one workout at speed before the Guardian Mile. Biebelhausen’s original goal was to break the course record, which was 4:44. With two hands on the stroller, Biebelhausen wasn’t able to check his pace until he was halfway over the bridge, where he realized he was ahead of the record. (via The Athletic)

This town in Belgium is only three miles wide but it has 22 borders inside it

Baarle-Hertog is a Flemish municipality of Belgium, much of which consists of a number of small Belgian exclaves fully surrounded by the Netherlands. Parts of Baarle-Hertog are surrounded by the Dutch province of North Brabant, but it is part of the Belgian province of Antwerp. As of 2021, it had a population of 2,935. The total area is 7.48 square kilometres (2.89 square miles). In total, the municipality of Baarle-Hertog consists of 26 separate parcels of land. Four are linked to other Belgian municipalities, from west to east: the largest single section, Zondereigen (named after its main hamlet), is located within mainland Belgium on the contiguous Dutch-Belgian border. In addition to this, there are 22 Belgian exclaves fully within the Netherlands. There are also seven Dutch enclaves within the Belgian exclaves (i.e., counter-exclaves) that are part of the territory of the Netherlands. Six of these Dutch enclaves are located within the largest Belgian exclave, and a seventh in the second-largest Belgian exclave. (via Wikipedia)

Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either through my Patreon or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called The Torment Nexus.

She looked at an eclipse for only a few seconds and saw the image for the rest of her life

The eclipse of 21 August 2017 was, in the specific sense that matters to astronomers, an ordinary eclipse. It was total across a narrow band of the continental United States, from Oregon to South Carolina, and partial across the rest of the country. The public interest in it was, however, extraordinary. Tens of millions of people bought or borrowed protective eyewear. Millions more stepped outside and looked up at the sun anyway. Among the people who stepped outside that afternoon was a 26-year-old woman in New York named Nia Payne. She did not have protective eyewear. She glanced up for about six seconds. By the time she went inside, her left eye already had a blurred area in the centre of her visual field. Over the next two days, the blurred area resolved into an unmistakable shape. A crescent, positioned exactly where the moon had been when she had glanced at it, sitting in the middle of everything she tried to look at. (via Space Daily)

Two sisters bought an island in Cornwall and created a wildlife and nature reserve

Roselyn “Babs” Atkins and her sister, Evelyn “Attie” Atkins, were women who defied the conventions of their time. The pair never married and instead invested in their careers and took up hobbies such as mountaineering and rifle shooting. Then, when Attie was in her mid-50s, the chance came to realise a long-held dream to own an island. She bought Looe Island along with her sister in 1965 for £22,000 and became a daffodil farmer; Babs joined her later when she retired. Cornwall Wildlife Trust took over the island in 2004, after Babs’s death, and the charity manages the 9 hectares (22 acres) of woodland, maritime grassland and rocky shoreline. Apart from the cottage, visitors can stay in a bell tent, which sleeps two, overlooking Trelawny Island to the south-east. Additional revenue comes from the landing fee charged to day trippers, who come across with Looe Sea Safari a few times a day when the weather allows. (via The Guardian)

The object of this game: Don't touch the can

Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as The Morning News from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's Curious About Everything, Dan Lewis's Now I Know, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's The Browser, Clive Thompson's Linkfest and Why Is This Interesting by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy. If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com