It is thought that Vikings brought the first sheep to Iceland more than a thousand years ago, and up until recently, there were more sheep than people in the country. These are free-range sheep. They are turned out in the spring to wander as they please across the highlands, grazing on abundant grass. Then in September, they are gathered up and brought back to civilization, a process that can take up to a week. Then its time for the annual rettir, in which the sheep are sorted and counted. And no one falls asleep doing it!  

All local sheep farmers gather for the sorting, after which they will take their sheep home for the winter. This gives the event an air of a festival, a time for socializing and sharing the work. There are even traditional foods for the rettir, and it's been turned into a tourist draw, too. Smithsonian shares the process of the annual rettir and its traditions so we can enjoy it without traveling to Iceland.

Remember how we were gobsmocked by the Mars rover Opportunity, which was expected to work on the red planet for about 90 days, but ended up working for more than 14 years? It was not the first NASA mission to wildly exceed expectations. We had already seen one probe crash land on an asteroid. It wasn't designed to land at all, and the impact was a suicide attempt. But it survived the crash and continued to work for two more weeks!

In 1996, NASA launched an unmanned probe to go study an asteroid. We didn't know much about asteroids at the time, but that would change. The probe was named NEAR-Shoemaker, which stood for Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous, and after planetary geologist Eugene Shoemaker. The targeted asteroid was 433 Eros. NEAR-Shoemaker was the first probe to ever orbit an asteroid, and that was after it had already performed some unexpected side missions. Hank Green of SciShow has the story of NEAR-Shoemaker's space exploits. -via Damn Interesting

When the California Gold Rush died down, San Francisco was left with an abundance of dogs who were no longer needed to haul wagons of ore from the mines. Left behind by departing miners, they became a nuisance -unless they were talented rat-catchers. A dog named Bummer (because he begged for food) was the best rat-catcher in the neighborhood around Frederick Martin’s saloon. He soon became a local favorite. Bummer saved the life of another dog, injured by other dogs in a fight, who Bummer nursed back to health and became best friends with. This dog was named Lazarus due to his miraculous recovery. Among the thousands of dogs roaming the streets of San Francisco, Bummer and Lazarus were the most famous, and were featured in the local newspapers quite often.

In 1862, the city appointed a new dog catcher, who, unaware of the two dog’s reputation, picked up Lazarus. When news of his impounding reached citizens, a mob marched down to the pound and demanded his release. The dog catcher sensibly released Lazarus into their custody. To protect the city’s two beloved dogs from dog catchers in future, the citizens wrote a petition asking for permanent protection for Bummer and Lazarus. Hundreds of people signed the petition and presented it to the Board of Supervisors. The Board agreed and passed an ordinance granting both dogs a free run of the town for the rest of their lives.

Those newspaper accounts give us a wealth of stories about Bummer and Lazarus, which you can read about at Amusing Planet.

Denis Jaffré, a French beekeeper, lost half of his beehives to the stingers of Asian hornets, which are an invasive species in his country. But now it’s payback time and he’s targeting the creatures that murdered his beloved bees.

Design Boom introduces us to Jabeprode, which is a baited trap that lures insects inside. Bees are small enough to exit through a mesh screen, but Asian hornets aren’t.

Both insects can pass through the exterior mesh, but only bees can get through the interior mesh to access the bait. The hornets, unable to escape, die…eventually.

Jaffré could make a lot of money off his invention, but he sees more focused on killing hornets. So he’s helpfully provided a YouTube tutorial that shows you how to make your own Jadeprode. Now that’s dedication!

Odd colored food is an easy signal that you are seeing an alien planet. In the very first Star Wars movie, Luke Skywalker drank blue milk, a fact that embedded itself permanently into fans' minds. Later he drank green milk in The Last Jedi. The newest Star Wars TV series, Andor, had a scene in which we saw blue noodles. Andrew Rea of Binging with Babish noticed, and set out to recreate those noodles at home.

You will be a bit familiar with the way he did it; he used butterfly pea flower extract, which we learned about a few weeks ago. The first recipe is the easy one in which he boils noodles in water colored with butterfly pea flower. Then he made noodles with butterfly pea flower. The first attempt is a mess, but then he shows us a successful blue noodle recipe. It seems perfect with onions and garlic, but I have to wonder whether these noodles would change color to purple or pink if a citrus sauce were introduced. That's an experiment for another day.  -via Geeks Are Sexy

See more pop culture food videos from Binging with Babish.

I can't believe it's already November and I just now remembered to look up Josh Sunquist's Halloween costume! Sundquist always designs creative costumes around the fact that he has only one leg. This year, he was Thor's hammer, Mjölnir! The costume was built by Calen Hoffman of Propcustomz. Watch as he puts the costume on in this video. It's a couple's costume this year, as you see his wife Ashley dressed as Thor. Sundquist quipped that people tell him he looks like Loki (as portrayed by Tom Hiddleston), but he thought he more resembled Mjölnir. And so he made it happen.

Yes, he can see out of it through a small screen on the end of the hammer head that's not visible in the above picture. The front is also removable. You can see a recap of all of Sundquist's viral Halloween costumes at Bored Panda. 

(Image credit: Josh Sundquist)

People who read way too much on the internet (like me) learn to look for red flags and dismiss any "facts" that seem sketchy. That's a good thing. Then there's Tom Scott (previously at Neatorama), who makes a living by going there and finding out for himself whether something that sounds strange is true or not. So he went to Warsaw to find out if the city uses clams to monitor water quality. It's true! And the process they use is quite interesting. If the water is good, they will open their shells to bathe in it. If something is wrong, they will close up to protect themselves. It's like an early warning system that will alert human experts if the water needs more thorough testing.

The people who run the waterworks also refer to the clams as their colleagues. Instead of eating them after their stint has ended, they release them into the wild. I bet those folks never eat clams.

Gene Roddenberry's original pitch for the TV series Star Trek is enshrined online. The document, dated March 11, 1964, envisions the starship the SS Yorktown visiting the possibly three million planets that contain intelligent life similar to ours. The key to this concept is that a tiny fraction of such planets would have an evolution similar to our own, with just enough differences to make an interesting story. Examples include a world that has already been devastated by nuclear war, another in which women keep men as pets, one that is going through the medieval era, and one where the real intelligent beings are cows. The regular cast of characters could find themselves in a historical scene, or alternate history, or a futuristic society... plus there's always the possibility of a straight-up alien world.

The document describes the main characters, which were changed quite a bit before the show made it to air. The character who became Mr. Spock was named "Mr. Spook," had red skin, and was described as rather satanic-looking. The ship's navigator was a South American named José Ortegas. The second in command was an emotionless woman. 

But the best part of the pitch are the many proposed episodes. Some you will recognize as stories that were used, while others are so off-the-wall they were never heard of again. And there are some you can see were altered quite a bit from the original concept before production. But the name Star Trek was already perfect. -via Boing Boing

How else would you expect us to give children candy on Halloween? FIRE MISSION!!!
🇺🇸 💥 🎃 👻 🍬 🍭 🍫 🍪
💥Blast credit: 1-78 FA#happyhalloween #motivationmonday @178FABN1 @USArmy @TRADOC @6_fires @7Fires3 @USAFAS @U_artillery @75thFA_BDE @434FA_BDE @428THBDE @3ADABDE pic.twitter.com/j8ip6xG4pJ

— US Army Fort Sill (@OfficialFtSill) October 31, 2022

I think that it's a M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), which is currently in use by Ukrainian forces against the invading Russians.

At Fort Sills, Oklahoma, home to America's field artillery, the US Army is deploying at least one unit to propel Halloween candy to local trick-or-treaters. If I interpret the tweet correctly, it's from the first battalion of the 78th Field Artillery Regiment.

-via Super Punch

English is a peculiar language, what with its many letters that are left silent. To make pronunciation even more challenging, which letters are silent is not always consistent. This is often due to the introduction of words from foreign tongues, such as French and Texan.

Internet comedian Matt Colbo addresses the complexity of English pronunciation by imagining an encounter in the woods with an alternate universe version of himself--one from a universe in which every letter is pronounced.

As far as encounters alone in the woods with versions of yourself from alternate universes, that's a pretty safe encounter.

CONTENT WARNING: FOUL LANGUAGE.

-via Nag on the Lake

Broken Peach puts a little extra pizzazz in their songs for Halloween. Last year they graced the world with a slasher version of "Tainted Love," and this year we get "Don't You Want Me," originally by The Human League. If you're not familiar with the song from 1982, you'll still recognize the story as that from the many movie versions of A Star Is Born. Broken Peach also invites you to listen to their full concert called The Night of the Halloween Specials, which was recorded live in one take. -via Metafilter

Sleepwalking is totally separate from acting out one's dreams. It is more like zombie behavior. Yes, sleepwalking occurs in the deepest part of sleep, and we don't have control over what we do when sleepwalking. So how do we do it? That's the creepy part. We have a lot of behaviors that don't require conscious control, including walking, eating, and even driving while we're asleep! You know how your mind sometimes drifts off while you're driving and you end up at some familiar location that wasn't where you were going? That's how we act when we sleepwalk, but its even more dangerous because we are really asleep, often with our eyes closed. This TED-Ed lesson from Emmanuel During explains what is really happening during a sleepwalking incident.

We know about haunted houses, asylums, hospitals, hotels, castles, and other buildings, but nature has its own legends of horror that scare people even today. Forests can be scary even without ghost stories attached to them, and sometimes it's even a single tree that is said to be haunted, like the haunted apple tree in Douglass, Massachusetts.

Legend says that, in the 1800s, a traveling peddler stopped to rest under this apple tree, and someone—likely the orchard owner himself—slashed the peddler’s throat and killed him. The victim’s spirit haunted the murderer, following him everywhere, until the man moved away to escape it. Passersby later reported seeing apparition standing under the apple tree, holding its throat and crying shrilly. The flesh of the apples grown on this tree are stained red, reminiscent of the blood that gushed from the peddler’s neck.

Read about ten such haunted trees and forests and the legends behind them at Mental Floss.

Mondrian painting has been hanging upside down for 75 years https://t.co/TKyyo0g84H

— The Guardian (@guardian) October 28, 2022

In 1941, the Dutch abstract artist Piet Mondrian painted this untitled work, which was first displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1945, and then the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Germany.

Recently, curator Susanne Meyer-Büser researched Mondrian’s work to prepare for an upcoming exhibition on his work. She determined that Mondrian tended to put thicker lines at the top of his paintings. Furthermore, a photograph of Mondrian working on this piece shows with it rotated from its usual direction on his easel.

Thus, this painting certainly upside down—and had been for over 75 years.

The Guardian reports that the exhibition, which will open today, will not reflect this new conclusion. The Mondrian piece will continue to be hung in its traditional orientation—upside down.

-via Dave Barry

Polaris Dawn is a planned private space mission from SpaceX that may be launched as early as March of 2023. The four astronauts training for the mission are pictured above, but if you look long enough, you'll see that their left eyes do not match their right eyes. It's not Photoshop; those are contact lenses, developed for a specific science reason.

The University of Colorado has been studying a condition called spaceflight associated neuro-ocular syndrome (SANS). That's when people who spend time in space experience swollen optic nerves and changes in the eye's shape. These hi-tech contact lenses equipped with micro-sensors will measure the changes in the eye as space flight proceeds. It is hoped that the data will test the theory that shifting fluid is responsible for SANS.  

Eye will be back…for research. Polaris Dawn will carry with us on our mission 38 experiments from 23 partner institutions, including this device that measures intraocular pressure through a contact lens. See https://t.co/VHKqpel7BB for more! pic.twitter.com/QBGqziW4Ij

— Anna Menon (@annawmenon) October 24, 2022

-via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Polaris Dawn)