Guinness World Records at the Flora London Marathon 2008

An exciting but exhausting day was had on Sunday by Guinness World Records’ very own ‘Team Marathon’. The Flora London Marathon was enormous for us with over 30 record attempts among the 30,000+ runners. From clowns to superheroes, from stilt walkers to Maasai warriors, everyone was up for some marathon record breaking.

We began with an 8am start in Blackheath. The GWR team were there with all of our record attempters at the celebrity start. Some reasonably organised chaos ensued with all of us rushing getting everyone signed up and photographed. We met the team of Maasai warriors who were wedged into the celeb pen with Gordon Ramsay, James Cracknell etc.

Before you could shout ‘Get ready, Set…’ they were off – with our amazing stilt walking lady right at the back. All of our stars were packed into the field – including soldiers, policemen, a scarf knitting lady, one Darth Maul, one Bananaman, one Buzz Lightyear and a chain gang. There was even a young man dribbling a basketball around the whole of the marathon course. The whole scene was very inspirational.

To see them all come through at the end was incredible – whether a record was broken or not. We fully hope that we helped everyone who attempted or was awarded a Guinness World Record to receive as many donations as possible to all the wonderful causes that they were all making such a momentous effort for.

 

These were the Guinness World Records broken:

• Fastest marathon as a film character: James McComish (Darth Maul) 3 hr 55 min 22 sec
• Most linked runners to complete a marathon: Richard Kirk captained a team of 24 Metropolitan Police Officers
• Fastest marathon by a linked team: Oliver Holland, James Kennedy, James Wrighton, Eoghan Murray and Nathan Jones: 3 hr 38 min 24 sec
• Fastest marathon dressed as Santa: Ian Sharman: 3 hr 12 min 27 sec
• Fastest marathon in a military uniform: 5 hr 11 min 42 sec
• Fastest marathon on stilts: Michelle Frost: 8 hr 25 min
• Fastest clown: Jason Westermoreland: 3 hr 24 min 04 sec
• Fastest marathon dribbling a basketball: Jean-Yves Kanyamibwa: 4 hr 30 min 29 sec
• Longest scarf knitted whilst running a marathon: Susie Hewer: 1 m 62 cm
• Fastest marathon dressed as a superheroine: Christina Tomlinson: 3 hr 13 min 33 sec
• Fastest marathon in a fireman’s uniform: Mark Rogers and Paul Bartlett: 5 hr 36 min 12 sec
• Fastest group of Maasai Warriors to complete a marathon: 5 hr 24 min 47 sec

 

We would like to congratulate the new record breakers and welcome them to the family of Guinness World Records. See you at the next 2009 Flora London Marathon!

Vertical (Diagonal?) Farm from Work AC in NYC

We love vertical farms and while they may not be as practical as green roofs, the idea of food being grown right in the city doesn’t get any more local than this. New York magazine asked four architects to dream up proposals for a lot on Canal Street and Work AC came up with this. “We thought we’d bring the farm back to the city and stretch it vertically,” says Work AC co-principal Dan Wood. “We are interested in urban farming and the notion of trying to make our cities more sustainable by cutting the miles [food travels],” adds his co-principal (and wife) Amale Andraos. Underneath is what appears to be a farmers market, selling what grows above. Artists would be commissioned to design the columns that hold it up and define the space under: “We show a Brancusi, but it could be anyone,” says Wood. ::New York Magazine

Keep reading for more vertical farms covered in Treehugger.

It is a “Center for Urban Agriculture,” a building, located on a .72-acre site, that includes fields for growing vegetables and grains, greenhouses, rooftop gardens and even a chicken farm.” Mithun Architects’ Vertical Farm for Seattle

We present Gordon Graff’s Sky Farm proposed for downtown Toronto’s theatre district. It’s got 58 floors, 2.7 million square feet of floor area and 8 million square feet of growing area. It can produce as much as a thousand acre farm, feeding 35 thousand people per year and providing tomatoes to throw at the latest dud at the Princess of Wales Theatre to the east, and olives for the Club District to the north. ::Sky Farm Proposed for Downtown Toronto

“Cities already have the density and infrastructure needed to support vertical farms, and super-green skyscrapers could supply not just food but energy, creating a truly self-sustaining environment.” Imagine an urban highrise CSA where we just walk across the street from our highrise to the next to pick our dinner. ::Futurama Farming in New York

“Robots tend crops that grow on floating platforms around a sea city of the future. Water from the ocean would evaporate, rise to the base of the platforms (leaving the salt behind), and feed the crops.”:: Wayback Machine 1984: The Future of Agriculture

Daekwon Park designed this prefab system: “Clipping onto the exterior of existing buildings, a series of prefabricated modules serving different functions would be stacked on top of each other, adding a layer of green space for gardening, wind turbines or social uses to make new green façades and infrastructures.” ::Retrofitting our Skyscrapers For Food and Power

::Weburbanist has great coverage of Pierre Sartoux of Atelier SOA’s vertical farm.”r. A light-shading skin wraps around the structure and opens to admit sunlight at particular locations for various functional (and aesthetic) purposes. The building’s air, heating and cooling systems are wind-driven and circulate oxygen and carbon dioxide between growing and living spaces. The simple but reinforced structure is designed to handle additional dead loads from the weight of growing floors and also serve to make the entire building more durable (and thus sustainable).”

Double Your Lifespan with a Drug that Mutates Your Ribosomes

 

It’s been known for a while that restricting your diet will increase your lifespan, but now researchers have shown one reason why: Eating less causes your ribosomes (your cells’ protein factories) to mutate. And it’s looking like mutated ribosomes (pictured here) could be one key to life extension. The good news is that you may not have to starve yourself to mutate your ribosomes anymore. Biologists at the University of Washington have managed to induce the life-extending mutation in ribosomes with a drug that doubles the lifespan of yeast cells.

The key is to lower protein-production in cells, which is why eating less can cause lifespan extension. According to the University of Washington:

In this project, the UW researchers studied many different strains of yeast cells that had lower protein production. They found that mutations to the ribosome, the cell’s protein factory, sometimes led to increased life span. Ribosomes are made up of two parts — the large and small subunits — and the researchers tried to isolate the life-span-related mutation to one of those parts. 

“What we noticed right away was that the long-lived strains always had mutations in the large ribosomal subunit and never in the small subunit,” said the study’s lead author, Kristan Steffen, a graduate student in the UW Department of Biochemistry.

The researchers also tested a drug called diazaborine, which specifically interferes with synthesis of the ribosomes’ large subunits, but not small subunits, and found that treating cells with the drug made them live about 50 percent longer than untreated cells. Using a series of genetic tests, the scientists then showed that depletion of the ribosomes’ large subunits was likely to be increasing life span by a mechanism related to dietary restriction — the TOR signaling pathway.

The study will be published tomorrow in the journal Cell.