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.

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

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.

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)

The feeling of fear can be pretty unpleasant, but we developed it for a reason. That scary feeling is a warning that things are not right, and we need to flee or hide or fight or do something for our own safety. But humans also seek out fear experiences, from climbing trees to watching scary movies to bungee jumping, for the thrill of fear they give us. Is that just for the adrenaline rush or is there a benefit to seeking out fear?

The scientists at the Recreational Fear Lab in Denmark think it may be an instinctive educational technique. Just the right amount of fear, in a fairly controlled situation, helps us learn to deal with real world fear. One study shows that horror movie buffs fared better psychologically during the COVID-19 lockdown than those who never watched scary films. Maybe a regular dose of moderate fear helps us to cope with those feelings, or learn to control them. Read more about the effects of recreational fear at Smithsonian.

Read more about the Recreational Fear Lab and its haunted attraction from Dystopia Entertainment at Atlas Obscura.

This is not just a LEGO Ferris wheel, which would be impressive by itself. This one loads and unloads sports balls (um, "passengers") by machine into the 64 carriages as it goes along. Designing this and keeping it going in sync is quite an accomplishment! Berthil van Beek built this contraption for the Eurobricks TC23 competition. Just watching this machine do its thing is soothing and satisfying. We also get an idea of the work involved. When van Beek loads 64 balls and finds that two fell along the way, he redesigns the mechanism to make sure that doesn't happen again. I would be surprised if I got one to load properly! -via Geeks Are Sexy

In 1929, a pilot's wife went into labor, and they boarded his plane and flew around until she gave birth to a baby girl they named Airleen. That started a long line of rare births on airplanes. Twenty-eight years ago, Shona Kirsty Yves (note her initials) was born on a flight from the Ivory Coast to London. While she was premature, there was an obstetrician on the flight. She has done the research and has found around 50 people who were born in-flight, an exclusive group called Skyborns.

Skyborns are almost always premature, as airlines do not want to risk airborne births, but all cases so far have resulted in live births. The nationality of the child is almost always considered to be the nationality of the parents, but there are exceptions. The real confusion comes later in life, when people have to explain their place of birth for procedures like obtaining a passport. But it also comes with perks such as airline upgrades when they tell their stories. Read about the phenomenon of sky births and how it effects those who were born in the air at Conde Nast Traveler. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Bill Larkins)

This is a longer video than I would normally consider posting, but it's well worth it. Gavin Free and Dan Gruchy, the Slow-Mo Guys, have always wanted to record electricity in slow motion, but thought it might be a bit dangerous. They are no strangers to danger, at least Dan isn't. He usually gets to do the dangerous stuff. But this time, they are teaming up with Mehdi Sadaghdar from ElectroBOOM (previously), who we know isn't at all afraid of being shocked. So they set up a Tesla coil in order to record electrical arcs at 1,750,000 frames per second so we can really see what's happening. That's overkill, since we can't watch it for the many hours the film would run at regular speed. As you can guess, we'll have plenty of hijinks along the way as Medhi and Dan get their share of jolts and Gav stays safely out of the way. Their pain is our gain. -via Digg