Alzheimer's took her words. Her pitch stayed.

Musician Ester Wiesnerova has been posting videos of herself harmonizing in the car with her mother Marina, a former piano teacher and songwriter diagnosed with Alzheimer's in early 2023. The disease has steadily taken Marina's words. It has not taken her pitch. In one Mother's Day clip, the pair sing "Guantanamera" in Spanish, Marina's second language, carrying a full chorus by heart. In another, they trade harmonies on the Hebrew folk song "Hava Nagila." Ester gives her mother a starting pitch, and Marina finds it. "Even as her capacity to speak and understand language was going down, her musical abilities very much stayed," Ester told Upworthy. "She even responds to verbal cues as long as they're music-related." A 2022 University of Bergen study found that musical memory is partially spared in Alzheimer's patients even when episodic memory fails. Ester is writing an album about her mother. It comes out next year.

Middle schoolers' sailboat crossed the Atlantic in 462 days.

A 5.5-foot unmanned sailboat built by middle schoolers in Rye, New Hampshire, washed ashore on the Norwegian island of Smøla after 462 days and roughly 8,300 miles at sea. The Rye Riptides was launched off the New Hampshire coast in October 2020 as part of a project with Educational Passages, a nonprofit that ships build-it-yourself mini-boat kits to classrooms. Students at Rye Junior High decorated it with artwork, signed facemasks, fall leaves, acorns, and state quarters, then packed in a GPS tracker that reported home only intermittently. The pandemic complicated nearly every step, including the launch, which Educational Passages executive director Cassie Stymiest called "challenging with all the restrictions in place." Even the kids had doubts. "Honestly, I thought it would sink," student Solstice Reed told the Portsmouth Herald. Sixth graders on Smøla opened the boat to find it covered in barnacles. The trinkets inside were intact.

At the Academy for the Blind, the dance floor filled up

The Georgia Academy for the Blind in Macon held its annual prom this month, and the school has been posting clips of the night to social media ever since. The videos show what prom videos usually show. Students in dresses and rented tuxedos, a dance floor, a DJ, the particular kind of grinning that only happens once a year. The footage has traveled further than the school likely expected. Commenters from other states wrote in, including one who mentioned a friend who taught at the school for the blind in North Carolina and kept showing up to events long after he retired. Another wrote, "Congrats to all these amazing students! They will remember this day!" The Academy serves students across a range of vision levels, a detail a commenter gently pointed out for anyone assuming otherwise. The dancing, by every available measure, looked like dancing.

A lemonade stand, flyers, and a class trying to save two eagles

A class of fourth graders in California has started fundraising to help save the shoreline where their favorite bald eagles hunt. Their teacher, Sara Stinson, introduced her students last year to Jackie and Shadow, a mating pair monitored around the clock by a webcam run by Friends of Big Bear Valley. The class watched the eggs hatch. They watched the chicks grow. Then Stinson opened the livestream one day and learned that the last undeveloped stretch of Big Bear Lake shoreline, the eagles' hunting ground, was slated to become a luxury housing development unless local conservationists could raise $10 million to buy it.

"They were like, what can we do?" Stinson told ABC 7. One student set up a lemonade stand. Another taped flyers to local storefronts. The San Bernardino Mountains Land Trust has a purchase option on the parcel, called Moon Camp, through the end of July. About a quarter of the money is in.

A 10-year-old's 3D print shop is buying mom a house

Ernesto Gael Hernandez, 10, runs a 3D printing operation out of his home in Brownsville, Texas, with three printers going at once and roughly $1,500 in profit so far. The business, Prestige 3D Labs, started a few months ago when he asked his mom for a printer. She told him to save his chore money instead. After $500 in chores, he bought the first machine and taught himself custom design from YouTube tutorials.

He prints keychains, whistles, can openers, and fidget items for people with anxiety and ADHD. A local clothing store called Jungle now stocks his products, and orders come in from across the Rio Grande Valley. He sets prints running before school and before football practice.

His mother, Samantha Quezada, says the workload is real. "It's a handful, but honestly I enjoy that we get to do it together," she said. Ernesto's plan for the profits is to buy his mom a house.