Nicholas Bostic, a pizza delivery driver in Lafayette, Indiana, noticed that a house in a residential neighborhood was on fire. He parked and ran up to the house to alert the occupants. Inside were five sleeping children.

Bostic rushed in through the back door of the house and screamed out that the house was on fire. He found four children and took them outside. They told him that a six-year-old child was on the second story. Bostic rushed back into the house, now engulfed with flames. The smoke was so thick that he couldn't see, but he nonethless found the child and jumped out of a window with her. Here he is carrying that child to firefighters who arrived on the scene:

Here’s the video to go along with the story. pic.twitter.com/TvZ5wzCg1f

— LafayetteINPolice (@LafayetteINPD) July 15, 2022

Bostic recieved a deep cut on his right arm and suffered severe smoke inhalation. He had to be hospitalized, but, People magazine reports, is now recovering and was released from a hospital in Indianapolis on Wednesday.

Lafayette Police are, quite rightly, calling Bostic a hero.

-via Sam Ro | Photo: Lafayette Police

A self-portrait of Dutch post-Impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh has been uncovered hidden behind one of his paintings. The image was hidden behind cardboard and layers of glue https://t.co/PEz0MFk2fB 1/4 pic.twitter.com/IlEoPU2TGD

— Reuters (@Reuters) July 14, 2022

The famous Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh was never commercially successful during his lifetime. So, like a lot of starving artists, he reused canvases, painting over them repeatedly. Nonetheless, art convervators at the National Galleries of Scotland were surprised to find a rather complete self-portrait hidden in Van Gogh's 1885 work Head of a Peasant Woman.

The conservators x-rayed the painting in preparation for an upcoming exhibition on Van Gogh's work. Most artists who reuse canvases paint over previous works. But in this case, Van Gogh's self-portrait was painted on the back of Head of a Peasant Woman, then covered the self-portrait with layers of glue and cardboard.

-via Nag on the Lake

There’s a Baseball field in Finland that has a river camera. The results are what I’d expect. pic.twitter.com/XP5H4Fyzja

— Daniel Holland🎗🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 ॐ (@DannyDutch) July 13, 2022

It would be tremendously fun if American baseball fields had rivers, too--especially if they ran through the field in order to create additional obstacles.

In this case, the river is simply a natural feature of the location of the field in Finland. The stadium of the town of Vimpeli, SB Nation reports, fills a small island in the middle of a river. It may be necessary for the outfielders to dive into the river to catch the ball and there are cameras set up to catch the amphibious action.

Strictly speaking, they aren't playing baseball. They're playing pesäpallo, a sport similar to baseball. The primary difference is that the pitcher stands next to the batter and tosses the ball straight up into the air. I don't know if river obstacles are standard.

-via Super Punch

The Charlotte Observer reports that a small plane with a stalled engine made an emergency landing along a highway in the mountains of Swain County, North Caronlina. Sheriff Curtis Cochran reports that there were no injuries, despite substantial traffic along the road.

The pilot, Vincent Fraser, was flying his Aero Commander 100 from Florida with this father-in-law to examine some property he had purchased. When his engine began to stall, Fraser steered toward a river until he noticed that a highway ran next to it. He decided to try to land on the road instead of the water.

At the 0:20 mark in the video, which was captured by a GoPro on mounted on a wing, you can see how the Fraser deftly slipped under a set of power lines. That he was able to land so smoothly while turning the plane on a curved road after touchdown was impressive!

Fraser describes his experiences here:

-via Laughing Squid

Cascada Velo de la Novia in the highlands of Peru (not to be confused with at least two waterfalls of the same name in central Mexico and another in the southern tip of Argentina) is a naturally occurring visual wonder.

The spine of the Andes running through the Cajamarca region allows a river to drop fifty meters down to the valley below. When viewed from the right angle, the water flows over the rocks to form the image of a woman in a long, flowing bridal gown, from her veiled face to her ankles.

-via Nag on the Lake

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A post shared by Jacob Witzling (@jacobwitzling)

Sara and Jacob Witzling make beautiful and unusual cabins in a rainforest. On their YouTube channel, Cabinland, they demonstrate how they build their wilderness retreats.

Much wood must be cut not only for the lumber, but also for firewood. This means that Jacob swings axes a lot. To make it more efficient and/or absurd, he's welded custom axes. This Instagram video details 8 of them. The triple axe could actually be practical, but the flail axe blade strikes me (or hopefully doesn't) as dangerous to swing around.

Even if these axes aren't always useful for chopping wood, the Witzlings are, to say the least, amply prepared to survive a zombie apocalypse.

-via The Awesomer

It is true that no sandwich surpasses the Reuben, but there are other historic sandwiches worth considering and YouTuber Barry Enderwick is touring them in his kitchen. His channel, Sandwiches of History, shows him recreating sandwiches that appear in old recipe books.

Among them is the Eccles Sandwich, which appears in May E. Southworth's 1901 book One Hundred and One Sandwiches. The origin of the name is mysterious, but the recipe is not.

To make it, Enderwick needed fresh maraschino cherries. These are not what you can find in jars at grocery stores and served on ice cream sundaes. True maraschino cherries should be made from freshly picked cherries that soaked for two weeks in maraschino liqueur. Enderwich chopped these cherries and added them to bread, along with chopped almonds.

Enderwick licked the result, but added grated chocolate to the sandwich as an improvement. He suggests that a heavy, sweet cream would help the loose contents of this sandwich bind together.

In an interview with Atlas Obscura, Enderwick explains that he launched this project when a friend sent him a 1909 sandwich recipe book with some weird dishes. The first that he tried consisted of chopped, raw oysters with Worcestershire sauce, lettuce, and buttered bread. What was his judgment? Enderwick determined that "this was nasty" and moved on to a different sandwich.

Finally finished one of these! ☄️ pic.twitter.com/Jwg0OKkzNv

— Birb Trek 64 (OPEN FOR COMMS + WORK) (@SpinaSanctuary) June 21, 2022

How much time during the 90s did you spend on a Nintendo 64? Was it too much or not enough? I'll bet that your answer is "yes!".

At the same time, perhaps you watched Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which is arguably the greatest series in the Star Trek franchise. BirdTooth Studios offers this adaptation of the introductory sequence to Deep Space Nine as though it was the beginning of a Nintendo game. It does not appear to be a direct translation, though, because it shows a Defiant-class starship, not a Danube-class runabout at the beginning. This does not happen in original source material.

-via Gizmodo

The original trolley problem, developed by philosopher Philippa Foot, is straightforward but complex: you can do nothing and let the trolley run over five people or switch the tracks and kill one person.

Neal Argawal, a maker of silly and fun online games, offers a long series of variations of the trolley problem. For example, would you save one cat or five lobsters? Would you kill one stranger or five clones of yourself? Five elderly people or one baby? The answers are rarely obvious, as this example demonstrates. I'd hate this one in particular because it would require me to do math under pressure.

-via Flowing Data

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A post shared by Amaury Guichon (@amauryguichon)

Amaury Guichon is not just a master pastry chef and professor of the pastry arts, but also a top-tier artist. That expertise on full display with his latest creation. This chocolate dragon is so strong that he can mount it on the wall without any apparent internal supports aside from the chocolate itself. Watch this video of its creation and be wowed by his delicate sculpting of the eyes and scales, as well as the painting of the skin.

About one third of the way into the video, you may think that he’s sculpting something else. But that’s only because you have a dirty mind.

-via David Thompson

The dancers weave in and out of heavy bamboo poles that are rhythmically clapped together. They have to jump quickly and at just the right times, lest their ankles get hit.

This is tinikling, a traditional dance from the Philippines. It's named after a chicken-sized, long-legged bird of the same name. This bird is known for jumping up and down in rice paddies, deftly avoiding bamboo traps set for them.

Philstar News reports that this performance from last April shows members of the Filipino Student Association at the Georgia Tech University performing a modern, hip hop inspired version of the traditional dance.

-via TYWKIWDBI

Tigger of North Vancouver is a Bengal, which is a beautiful but not necessarily ferocious cat breed. Nonetheless, Tigger is known in his neighborhood for courage and aggressiveness. He’ll chase away dogs who give him too much trouble. And, from a cat’s point of view, a bear is just a very large and odd smelling dog.

Tigger’s resident human, a pair of brothers, saw their cat staring down the intruding bear. But, CTV News reports, when Tigger wouldn’t back away, the brothers decided to record the incident. Tigger knows how to play for his audience, which is now worldwide.

-via Dave Barry

Tim Peake (left), a British astronaut who stayed on board the International Space Station in 2016, isn't pointing fingers at anyone in particular. Nor is he inviting anyone to pull his finger. He's just explaining that the human digestive tract works differently in microgravity.

The tabloid Daily Star reports that Major Peake was asked what it was like to burp with a space helmet on. He explained that people don't burp in space because burping--the rising of gas in the the digestive tract--doesn't happen in microgravity. The air doesn't go up. It exits the body the other way.

As a result, Peake explains, the space station is a stinky place. It smells "like a barbecue that’s gone wrong. Burnt meat, scorched, metallic smell."

In space, no one can hear you scream. But they can smell you.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: NASA Johnson

For any given geographic point in the world, which peoples and nations have lived there? Point in History, a project by professional data visualizer Hans Hack, informs us. Just click on any spot on a map of the world and the site creates a timeline dating back to prehistoric times.

For my example above, I chose the modern Italian city of Brindisi. The application tells us that after the Stentinello Neolithic culture, the heel of the Italian boot saw the presence of Greeks, Romans, Ostrogoths, and Byzantines, followed by the rule of Sicily, Aragon, Naples, the odd-named Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and, finally, unified Italy.

-via Flowing Data

The board game Reversi was invented in the late Nineteenth Century in Britain, but became enormously popular in Japan during the Twentieth Century. The modern version of the game most commonly played around the world is Othello. It's not as complex as chess, but the game has depth. Now it's even more complex with this 3D variant recently unveiled at a toy show in Tokyo.

Sora News 24 reports on this development. The new Othello comes with two platforms that can be placed anywhere on the board, so as long as the corners line up with all diagonal lines facing the right way. The Japanese-language video embedded above explains the rule changes. If I understand the diagrams correctly, placing tiles on opposite vertical sides of the platforms can flip all chips between them on multiple or single levels, depending upon which rules the players agree to.

Photo: Sora News 24