The stands and seats following most sporting events are usually atrocious. Between plastic cups, used napkins, and food containers left behind, most people leave their trash for stadium employees to pick up after them. But this commonplace behavior is simply unheard of in Japanese culture. Japanese World Cup fans in the United States are showing the world how courteous they are by cleaning up after themselves after the game. Clips of Japanese soccer fans have recently made headlines, showing fans collecting trash in blue garbage bags following their country’s first World Cup match between Japan and the Netherlands on Sunday, June 14. Their selfless act is having an impact on people around the world. Why Japanese fans are cleaning up Japanese fans carried blue bags with them to celebrate during the match against the Netherlands. But once the game was over, they immediately put them to use as trash bags. In a video shared by FIFA, one Japanese fan cleaning up explained why they think it’s important to do so. View this post on Instagram “That’s the culture. It’s respect for everything,” the fan said. “Respect for the players, supporters, and also for the stadium. We are honored to be here, so we don’t want to make a mess and then leave it. I think that’s the reason why we’re doing it.” However, it wasn’t just Japanese fans who tidied up. The Japan national football team (also called the “Samurai Blue”) did its part in the locker room. “Chairs were stacked, trash was collected, and towels were left neatly folded in the center of the room,” according to KDFW-TV. “The pink and orange bibs that players and coaches wore to indicate their stadium clearance were stacked by the door.” A World Cup tradition Japanese fans have practiced cleaning up stadiums after World Cup games since they played their first match in 1998, according to The Associated Press. Back then, Japanese soccer fans collected trash following World Cup games in France. Ever since, they’ve continued to do so. But it’s also part of Japanese culture. The Japanese term for it is “atarimae.” It translates to “natural, reasonable, obvious,” as well as “usual, common, ordinary, commonplace, the norm.” That’s exactly how Japanese World Cup fans view picking up trash after the game. Viewers respond Soccer fans and viewers from around the world shared their thoughts on the Japanese tradition, with many noting that more countries should adopt the courteous practice: “This should be the norm. Thanks Japan for reminding us .” “I have always loved this and always marveled at Japan. And the good news is we ALL can do it. Respect wins always. So leeets go America. We can do this!!!” “The players also cleaned the dressing rooms and even left their shirts folded and sorted. Superior culture.” “We should all be doing this by ensuring that whatever we came with inside the stadium is carried back with us to where it belongs.” “This is why I love the Japanese. They are the most respectful people I have ever met.” “You guys are incredible, so much respect for your culture and your principles.” “This should be the world’s standard.” The post Japanese World Cup fans brought trash bags to clean up post-game. People are in awe. appeared first on Upworthy.

In September 2018, Daryn Sturch was driving down State Road 19 near Denver, Indiana, with her young daughter, Bryanne, in the car when she came upon a wreck. As she told Good Morning America, several motorcycles had gone down, and the injuries were serious. Sturch, a nurse, parked far enough away that Bryanne wouldn’t see the worst of it, then ran toward the riders. “I parked a ways away so my daughter wouldn’t see and I ran up. They had some severe injuries,” she told GMA. According to ABC affiliate WRTV, five bikers were hurt in the crash: three men and two women. Sturch stayed with them, triaging and keeping them calm and conscious until paramedics arrived. All five survived. The bikers, members of the Milwaukee Iron motorcycle group out of Kokomo, Indiana, didn’t forget her. Once they recovered, they tracked her down on Facebook. “I just got a flood of messages from them, thanking me,” Sturch said. The messages turned into a real friendship, and the nurse and the motorcycle club stayed in touch over the following year. Which is how they found out about the lemonade stand. In September 2019, Sturch posted a photo of eight-year-old Bryanne running a lemonade stand outside their home. A few of the bikers mentioned they might swing by. Sturch figured maybe one or two would actually show up. Thirty motorcycles came down her block. The riders lined up one at a time at the folding table to buy lemonade from an eight-year-old who was, by her mother’s account, having the best day of her young business career. “I had no idea how many there would be and they were so generous,” Sturch said. “She was charging $1, and I bet every one of them gave a $5 or $10 or $20. [Bryanne] was as happy as she could be.” The reunion meant as much to the riders as it did to the family. Mary Henry, one of the bikers who walked away from the 2018 crash uninjured, told GMA the day landed harder than expected. “Seeing Daryn and her family, it turned out to be a great day,” Henry said. “It was meant to be that she was there to help that day.” Sturch traded hugs with the riders as they came up the drive, including a long one with an injured biker known as Lumpy, whose recovery she had been following since the crash. For Sturch, the part worth remembering wasn’t the money or the turnout. It was what the whole thing said about a group of people most strangers cross the street to avoid. “It is important to me that people understand that good people are all around us,” she told reporters. “Just because someone doesn’t look or dress the way you do doesn’t mean they don’t have the same core values.” A line of leather-jacketed bikers waiting their turn to buy a dollar’s worth of lemonade from a third-grader makes the case better than any lecture could. The post A nurse saved 5 bikers after an Indiana crash. A year later, 30 of them lined up at her kid’s lemonade stand. appeared first on Upworthy.

Adobe bricks, made of raw earth mixed with straw or another fibrous substance, are about as old as civilization itself. The word “adobe” traces back thousands of years to the Middle Egyptian word ḏbt, meaning “mud brick.” This evolved into the Arabic word al-tob (meaning “brick”), which was brought to Spain by the Moors. Meanwhile, Indigenous peoples in the Southwestern United States and South America were also building adobe structures. In Peru, for instance, ancient adobe monuments and cities were built more than 5,000 years ago. When Spanish settlers finally arrived in the New World, they combined their own European construction knowledge—incorporating features like courtyards and lime plaster—with Indigenous building methods, which led to the type of adobe architecture we now see in the American Southwest and California. Many ancient structures still stand today thanks to this natural material.  Adobe brick wall. Photo credit: Canva It’s also worth noting that adobe is not only resilient but also cost- and energy-effective. The clay naturally regulates temperature, keeping homes cool in summer and warm in winter without heating or air conditioning, and it costs only a couple hundred dollars. It’s also mold-, insect-, and fire-resistant. All in all, it feels like the ancients figured things out a long time ago. Why don’t we see more of these types of houses? Well, because in 48 out of 50 states, it’s illegal. And we have stringent, standardized building codes (with possibly a dash of corporate greed) to blame.  As explained by the Lost Build Archives, in the 1880s, railroads brought lumber to the American Southwest, and towns with rail access began swapping out adobe for this material. Still, rural communities stuck with adobe. When the first model Uniform Building Code (UBC) was introduced in 1927, the entire manual and the rules therein were for wooden structures. Anything not addressed by the code was considered an alternative material and required additional costly clearances. In other words, while the UBC didn’t outright declare adobe houses illegal, it made them so expensive to build that people were left with little choice. Then, in 1949, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) established rigid rules that made any home not built from lumber or concrete ineligible for financing. This essentially wiped out the option for the middle and lower classes. Finally, in 1970, the UBC added an explicit provision for adobe that mandated steel and cement reinforcement throughout, yet again multiplying construction costs and destroying the thermal properties that make it so energy efficient. Interestingly, the Portland Cement Association, which represented cement manufacturers across the country, wrote that provision. It has also lobbied for building codes that require the use of cement. This isn’t to say that adobe is necessarily superior for all climates. Earthquake- and flood-prone areas do need to take some extra precautions when using adobe. But by and large, it is the additional cost of using it that stems from arbitrary regulations. Advocates have since fought to bypass some of this bureaucracy  One notable champion was Hassan Fathy, an Egyptian architect who famously reconstructed 150 homes in an impoverished village using adobe. There would have been more had concrete lobbyists not intervened. Later, in Texas, a woman found a legal loophole and used it to build 600 adobe homes for low-income families. In turn, officials in New Mexico were eventually pressured to create their own adobe-centered codes in 1991 by the long-standing Pueblo communities that reside there. If a 30-year streak with “zero failures” isn’t an indicator of just how resilient adobe is, I’m not sure what is. And now, more places are trying to give adobe a mainstream revival. In Los Angeles, for instance, which has seen its fair share of fire damage, preservationists are not only touting its safety benefits but also the “communal experience” of being able to make the bricks themselves. It’s crazy to think that after protecting humans for thousands of years, adobe’s biggest threat isn’t nature—it’s us. But it’s also comforting to know that as cities search for more affordable and sustainable ways to build, an ancient solution is literally waiting beneath our feet. The post Adobe houses can last thousands of years and barely cost anything to make. Here’s why they’re banned. appeared first on Upworthy.

Most players walking into the French Open are worried about clay-court footwork or film on their next opponent. Maja Chwalińska was worried about where she was going to sleep. The 24-year-old from Poland arrived at Roland Garros this year ranked No. 114 in the world, with no sponsor and no financial cushion. As Sportico reported, she was paying for the whole trip herself, and the math of professional tennis is brutal for someone in her position. Prize money arrives after the tournament, but hotels, travel, and equipment all have to be paid up front. She hadn’t booked a room past the qualifying rounds, because she had no reason to assume she’d still be in Paris. “I actually struggled to pay for the hotel, because you know that we get the check after the tournament,” Chwalińska said in a press conference, a detail that surfaced almost by accident after one of her wins. View this post on Instagram A sudden upswing Her mismatched outfits had the same explanation. When a reporter asked about her rotating, brand-jumbled kit, she said there was no story to it beyond the obvious: she didn’t have a clothing sponsor, so she wore what she owned. But then, she just kept winning. Chwalińska came through three rounds of qualifying and then, in the main draw, beat one higher-ranked player after another. According to CNN, she dropped only a single set across nine matches and knocked out four top-50 opponents on her way through, including a semifinal win over 25th seed Diana Shnaider that put her into the final. View this post on Instagram That result made history. Per stats provider Opta, Chwalińska and Emma Raducanu are the only players, men or women, to reach a Grand Slam singles final straight from the qualifying rounds in the Open Era, which dates back to 1968. Raducanu famously did it at the 2021 US Open, and won the title. Chwalińska’s version ended differently. In Saturday’s final she ran into 19-year-old Mirra Andreeva, the No. 8 seed, who was simply too good on the day and won 6-3, 6-2 for her first major title. 2 – Maja Chwalinska is the second qualifier in the Open Era to reach the Singles final in a Major after Emma Raducanu at the US Open 2021, males included. Unbelievable!#RolandGarros | @rolandgarros @WTA pic.twitter.com/lI4xnSDKHz— OptaAce (@OptaAce) June 4, 2026 She left with more than she’d ever made before But Chwalińska did not leave Paris the way she arrived. By reaching the final she earned roughly $1.6 million, per CNN, which is more than she had banked in her entire career to that point. Her previous career prize money totaled $864,030, accumulated since she first appeared in a major qualifying draw more than six years ago. One fortnight in Paris nearly tripled it. Her ranking moved nearly as fast. Tennis365 reported that the run lifted her 93 spots, from No. 114 to No. 21, the kind of jump that changes which tournaments a player can enter and how she travels to them. Help arrived off the court too: the Polish brand Oshee, which also backs world No. 3 Iga Świątek, stepped in to sponsor her during the run. For her part, Chwalińska seemed to still be catching up with what had happened. “Like a dream, honestly, I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know what to say, sorry,” she said after the semifinal, her face buried in a towel. “Let me enjoy this moment for now.” The hotel, presumably, is no longer a problem. The post Broke tennis prodigy couldn’t afford the tournament hotel. Then she left with $1.6M. appeared first on Upworthy.

Pigeons are unappreciated. Often thought of as pests in big cities, they scavenge for discarded particles of food and stare blankly at passersby. It’s led some people to believe, falsely, that pigeons aren’t very intelligent or worthy of the space they take up. Some people have even been known to try and poison them. But it’s time to change our thinking. Humans domesticated pigeons thousands of years ago, and part of the reason they congregate around humans is because they’ve lost much of their survival instinct. Beyond even that, they’re highly intelligent creatures that don’t get nearly the credit they deserve. Pigeons have been trained to identify cancer with remarkable accuracy A study published in 2015 noted that the visual systems used by pigeons have a lot in common with those of humans. The researchers decided to put that visual recognition to the test in a high-stakes scenario. Pigeons were trained with food reinforcement to recognize the difference between images of malignant and benign human tissue samples. Once they were up to speed, they proved to be incredibly accurate at identifying the cancerous images. What’s especially fascinating is that the researchers were able to demonstrate real learning and pattern recognition by the birds. They were able to generalize their learnings, meaning they weren’t just memorizing the correct answers to the images they trained on. Once trained, they were still accurate when looking at novel images they’d never seen before. The pigeons were then similarly trained on mammogram images and once again showed they were adept at picking up on the visual patterns present in malignant imaging. Reading a mammogram correctly is a highly specialized skill that, in humans, requires years of intensive training—and even then, misses happen quite frequently. The study found that the average trained pigeon was about 85% effective in identifying cancerous images. However, when pigeons were grouped together four at a time—called “flock sourcing”—their accuracy rose to a staggering 99%. “The birds’ successes and difficulties suggest that pigeons are well-suited to help us better understand human medical image perception,” the researchers concluded, “and may also prove useful in performance assessment and development of medical imaging hardware, image processing, and image analysis tools.” Pigeons have a long history of helping humans, and even saving lives Pigeons may not look very smart, but they have exceptional vision and brains that can process images at a more advanced level than humans. For starters, they have a massive field of vision that covers about 340 degrees. That’s thanks to the positioning of their eyes on the sides of their head. Inside their eyes, however, they have an extra color cone not present in humans, allowing them to see ultraviolet and polarized light. It helps them identify patterns and details that are impossible for humans to see. But their smarts and abilities don’t stop there. You’ve heard of homing pigeons, but not many people realize how incredible these birds are at navigation. They have iron-sensitive cells in their bodies that allow them to feel and leverage Earth’s magnetic field. They’re also known to use the sun as a compass, detect familiar scents from miles and miles away, and remember visual landmarks. Humans realized a long time ago that these creatures could be extremely helpful. Hero pigeons Pigeons have been used to carry messages long distances for thousands of years. But during the World Wars, their incredible navigation skills saved lives. During WWI, a famous homing pigeon named Cher Ami became a legend. Amidst the 1918 Battle of the Argonne Forest, an American battalion of over 500 soldiers became stranded behind German lines. Worse, they were being shelled by friendly fire. Unable to communicate, they began sending carrier pigeons to alert allies of their predicament, but the pigeons kept getting shot down. Except for Cher Ami, who was shot through the chest and blinded in one eye, but still managed to fly 25 miles in just 25 minutes to deliver the lifesaving message and save nearly 200 of the soldiers. Cher Ami underwent surgery to save his (Cher Ami was known as a ‘her’ but later correctly gendered as a he) life and was eventually given the French Croix de Guerre for his service. His taxidermied body is on display at the Smithsonian. Another famous pigeon of war, aptly named G.I. Joe, similarly saved at least 100 Allied soldiers during WWII and received the Dickin Medal. In the 1970s and 1980s, the U.S. Coast Guard and Navy used pigeons during ocean search and rescue operations. Their razor sharp vision and excellent navigational skills made them elite spotters of people stranded in the water. Pigeons are no longer used for search and rescue due to budgeting concerns and the advancement of GPS and satellite technology. It’s high time that pigeons were given their due. Instead of sneering and shooing them away, let’s appreciate their brilliance and their “superhuman” abilities. The potential of the humble pigeon to save even more lives may yet be untapped. The post Pigeons are often considered pests. But their smarts and visual recognition skills can save lives. appeared first on Upworthy.