In 1847, Ireland was suffering through the Potato Famine. Across the Atlantic Ocean, the Choctaw Nation felt the pain of the Irish and gathered together to raise funds. They sent a gift of $170 to Ireland to buy food for those who needed it, despite still suffering from the effects of displacement on the Trail of Tears. That $170 is the equivalent of $5,000 today, and represented a real sacrifice. The Irish never forgot that generosity from Native Americans. In 2020, Navajo and Hopi people are suffering from the pandemic, particularly due to lack of running water, so they set up an account to take donations to ensure the supply of food and bottled water through the Rural Utah Project Education Fund. Donations poured in, many from Ireland, and the account has raised $1.5 million so far.

One Irish donor, Pat Hayes wrote: ‘From Ireland, 170 years later, the favour is returned! To our Native American brothers and sisters in your moment of hardship.’

Another donor shared, ‘Solidarity with the Navajo people from Ireland. Ní neart go cur le chéile.’

While a third wrote: ‘Remembering the help you gave us during the Great Famine – not forgotten. Go raibh maith agaibh. Thank you.’

An investment in humanity is paying off 173 years later. -via Metafilter

(Image source: Go Fund Me)

If you've gotten sick of your usual toast, Manami Sasaki might inspire you to take your toasts to the next level.

Taking inspiration from Japanese traditions, Sasaki created a zen garden-inspired piece of toast art, featuring sour cream for the base that was “raked” with a fork to mimic patterned sand. Matcha powder was used to represent moss, while macadamia nuts and walnuts were artfully placed to look like rocks. Sasaki also created toast inspired by Kintsugi—the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold lacquer. The thoughtful food artist filled the “cracks” of the bread with edible gold leaf.

Image Credit: Manami Sasaki

One of our Troopers in Weber Co. initiated a traffic stop on what he thought was an impaired driver. Turns out it was this young man, age 5, somehow made his way up onto the freeway in his parents' car. Made it from 17th and Lincoln in Ogden down to the 25th St off-ramp SB I-15. pic.twitter.com/3aF1g22jRB

— Utah Highway Patrol (@UTHighwayPatrol) May 4, 2020

An officer from the Utah Highway Patrol pulled a vehicle over and found the driver to be a five-year-old boy. He wasn't driving the car all that well, which was why he was pulled over.

Family members told troopers the boy had gotten upset with his mother at some point earlier when she wouldn't let him buy a Lamborghini, Street said. The boy's parents told investigators the boy had never driven before and they hadn't had any issues like that prior to Monday's incident.

However, it's believed the boy grabbed the keys from a hook in the home, started the car and made it from his home located in the area of 17th Street and Lincoln Avenue to the I-15 South on-ramp at 21st Street, Sreet said. That is about a five-minute drive from the home to the freeway.

The unnamed boy told the state trooper that he was trying to get to his sister's home in California so he could buy a Lamborghini. He had three dollars on him. The child was returned to his home, where he had been under the care of a sibling while his parents were at work. See a video of the encounter at KSL.  -via reddit

Finnish Aalto University has introduced the CHEMARTS cookbook, a project for those interested on experime ting with wood-based materials. The recipes included are both simple and advanced, combining design methods and chemical engineering, which can be done at home, in workshops or in chemistry labs.

the cookbook by aalto university asks questions including: how can we make flexible, transparent wood-based materials? what kinds of materials can we derive from trees, while still respecting the preciousness of nature? could the innovative use of renewable cellulosic materials change our material world? the book showcases experimental ideas and interesting results, focusing on raw materials that are processed either chemically or mechanically from trees or other plants: cellulose fibres, micro- or nano-structured fibrils, cellulose derivatives, lignin, bark, and wood extractives.

Image and video by The CHEMARTS Cookbook

Philadelphia will memorialize Dinah, an African American woman once enslaved by the property’s owners. Why? She saved Stenton House—a historic landmark built in the early 18th century for colonial statesman James Logan—from being burned down.

Freed from slavery in 1776, just months before the Declaration of Independence was signed, Dinah took a paid job as a housekeeper at Stenton. The following fall, she encountered two British soldiers who told her that they intended to set the building ablaze. After the pair retreated to the adjacent barn to gather kindling, Dinah alerted a British officer who had stopped by the residence in search of deserters to the would-be arsonists’ presence. The soldiers were promptly arrested.

Despite the overwhelming accounts and evidences that credit Dinah for saving the Logan's property, several omit her name, and refers to her only as an “old Negroe servant.”

The descriptors that adorned a bronze plaque at Stenton, installed in 1912 to honor Dinah’s contribution, also memorialized her poorly, referring to her as a “faithful colored caretaker.” The stone marker was later removed during renovations. (As of May 1, Dinah remains conspicuously absent from the Wikipedia entry on Stenton.)

Now, centuries after her still-largely anonymous act of bravery, Dinah is finally getting her due, reports Karen Chernick for Atlas Obscura. In collaboration with Germantown-based artist Karyn Olivier, curators at the Stenton House—which has since been converted into a museum—plan to install a proper commemoration of Dinah on its grounds.

Image Courtesy of Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum

We learn to use language and communication as little children, although it is a vast structure of rules, implications, and intuitive leaps. But there is always more to know about the way we communicate, that we really already knew deep down, but never knew how to explain. Tom Scott shares certain assumptions that people communicating with each other start out with. However, you and I and everyone else have known people who don't follow these guidelines. Communicating with those people is strange, and then difficult, and then you just give up. Those are the exceptions that confirm the rules.

The world's largest treehouse was built by Horace Burgess in Crossville, Tennessee. We've featured it here before. The wooden structure burned to the ground in October of 2019, but Burgess was rather chill about the loss. See, the treehouse has quite a story behind it, and it wasn't the first time it had burned down.

“It was just evil,” says Burgess of the older treehouse he built and then razed back in the 1980s. There was “no good about it.” The house had ended up serving as Burgess’s hideaway for doing drugs, which he committed to quitting after the deaths of some friends. Trouble was, the house itself had become part of the habit. A voice came to Burgess, saying that he had to burn the house down if he was going to rebuild his life. And it wasn’t just any voice.

People typically think “you’re a little bit crazy when you say that God spoke to you,” Burgess admits, “but really he’s the one that tells us to put our pants on in the morning.” Looking back, Burgess says that burning that first treehouse down—on God’s advice—was “probably the most sane moment in my life.”

In 1993, Burgess set out building a new treehouse on the same spot, and kept building for the next dozen years, all by himself, with no blueprint or even a master plan. People came from all over the world to see it. Read the story of how the world's largest treehouse was built and then lost at Atlas Obscura.

Japanese artist Marina Fujiwara busies herself with "wasted creations" -- inventions that serve little to no practical purpose. For example, she made a pair of nunchaku that, when flipped into one armpit, take her body temperature.

For those of you working from home, she also has tools that will let you fake a Zoom loading error or, nonetheless, motivate you to keep working.

You can view more of Fujiwara's work on YouTube and Instagram.

-via Core77

A man was clearing out his deceased mother’s apartment in Manhattan when he found something gruesome. He found a decomposed human body in a chest freezer that was sealed with duct tape! The body appeared to have been stored for over a decade, according to investigators. An autopsy is planned, and authorities are investigating the incident. 

image via wikimedia commons

Asian giant hornets could establish themselves in the United States after being spotted in Washington state. These murder hornets can injure and worse, kill humans, and they wipe out bee hives. The Huffington Post has more details: 

“They’re like something out of a monster cartoon with this huge yellow-orange face,” Susan Cobey, a bee breeder with Washington State University’s Department of Entomology, said in an April news release from the university.

Though they aren’t usually aggressive to humans unless their nests are disturbed, their stings are venomous enough to kill someone who gets stung multiple times. According to the Times, the hornets kill up to 50 people a year in Japan and folks on the receiving end of the sting have compared it to the feeling of being speared by hot metal.

They’re also devastating to honey bee populations, wiping out hives and partially consuming the occupants. Last November, a beekeeper in Blaine, Washington, was shocked to discover thousands of his bees with their heads ripped off ― the murder hornet’s signature move.

image via wikimedia commons

In a new episode of “Chef Out Of Water,” Alexis is challenged to make a three course meal with power tools. Yes, you’ve read that right. Alexis is tasked to make meals with two saws, a drill, a heat gun, and a hammer. Watch the video to find out if she succeeds! I know I won’t!  

How did the girl step into the moving background and not fall? How did her body distort as she moved towards the moving background? It’s all thanks to French artist Francois Vogel using slit scan photography! 

View this post on Instagram

seagull girl . #distortion #slicetime #slitscan #spacetime #bird #fly #videoart #videoartist #newmedia #newmediaart #newmediaartist #digitalart #contemporaryart #contemporaryartist #digitalartist #digitalartwork #art #artist #artwork #animation #visualeffects

A post shared by Francois Vogel (@francois.vogel) on Apr 19, 2020 at 8:24am PDT

John Corcoran's story might be hard to imagine, especially as you read through Neatorama without pains, but his story is not unique. Indeed, it is a sobering reminder especially for parents and teachers to never give up on their kids and students' learning.

When I was a child I was told by my parents that I was a winner, and for the first six years of my life I believed what my parents had told me.

I was late in talking, but I went off to school with high hopes of learning to read like my sisters, and for the first year things were fine because there weren't many demands on us other than standing in the right line, sitting down, keeping our mouths shut and going to the bathroom on time.

And then in the second grade we were supposed to learn to read. But for me it wbout has like opening a Chinese newspaper and looking at it - I didn't understand what those lines were, and as a child of six, seven, eight years old I didn't know how to articulate the problem.

Do you know someone who might be struggling with the same thing?

Read more about his story, and how he overcame his fears and years of struggle, on BBC.

Photos Courtesy of John Corcoran

Alan Lane is the artistic director of Slug Low, one of the UK’s most innovative theatre companies. With the current crisis, not only does he and his company try to find ways to stage epic community theatre shows, they have to make sure hundreds of people have the resources they need during the lockdown. BBC has more details: 

"Today we find ourselves with a Transit van full of crisps," he says on the phone from Leeds. "Which is amazing.

"But yesterday we didn't have any vegetables. And tomorrow we're not going to have any eggs.

"So constantly I'm on the phone doing deals. The other day, I swapped a load of tote bags that I got from the university for some face masks, which I split in half and swapped the other half for a lot of cream.

"It's constant creative thinking, constant problem solving."

Six weeks ago, Lane and his company Slung Low were asked by Leeds City Council to co-ordinate the community response in Holbeck and Beeston, meaning any requests for help from the 10,000 households in the area have been passed to them.

image via BBC

When I was a kid, I saw sci-fi movies as far future, like I won't get to see them happen in my lifetime. However, it seems that those who've read sci-fi comics from the 50's might see them come to life in the near future, all thanks to Plastique Fantastique's "isphere".

the designers taped 2 transparent hollow hemispheres together and cut a hole for the head. additional gadgets can give a unique touch to any isphere: it can have a sunshade, a mirrored layer, an integrated microphone, a speaker, or a snorkel. the isphere is a funny and serious object that stimulates how to approach this exceptional situation.

I honestly like it! Do you?

Photo and video by plastique fantastique