In some areas, Halloween festivities actually start the night before October 31, on a night that goes by a few very unusual names. Plus: how about an unusual lollipop that's far off the beaten trick-or-treating path? 

Mischief Night? Cabbage Night? Goosey Night? What does it all mean? (NJ.com)

Blue Cheese Lollipops (Lolliphile)

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Composting can turn some of our food waste back into useful stuff, but it can take a while. A new device out of Germany aims to cut the time it takes to go from food waste to compost to just 48 hours. Plus: on this National Cat Day, we salute the very tiny but impressive Cat Museum in Krakow, Poland. 

Kitchen gadget converts food scraps to compost in a claimed 48 hours (New Atlas)

Poland Is Home to a Very Tiny Cat Museum (Mental Floss)

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We’re not the only species that knows the difference between a face-to-face chat and a remote one. Research out of Vienna shows cows prefer live human voices to recorded ones. Plus: on National Chocolate Day, we pay a visit to the world's largest chocolate moose, in Scarborough, Maine. 

Cows prefer to co-moo-nicate in person, research suggests (CNN)

Lenny the Moose - The World's Only Life-Size Chocolate Moose (LenLibby.com)

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A project out of MIT is using artificial intelligence to scan lost languages and find rules and conventions that may help us figure out what all those words from years ago might mean. Plus: historic signs in South Nyack, New York are using QR codes to tell us something timeless - a message that's never gonna give us up.

MIT CSAIL’s AI revives dead languages it hasn’t seen before (VentureBeat)

Rickrolled: South Nyack historical sign on Esposito trail delivers pop music prank (lohud)

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Scientists at Purdue University have a way to help keep us cool to the point that we might not even need air conditioning, and all it takes is a fresh coat of a special paint. Plus: the town of Asbestos, Quebec has finally chosen a new name!

New 'Super-White' Paint Can Cool Down Buildings and Cars (Interesting Engineering) 

Goodbye Asbestos, hello Val-des-Sources: Que. town changing infamous name (CBC)

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We're replaying some of our favorite car-themed episodes this week, like this one from July 2020, about a driver in Italy who got a ticket for driving 437 miles per hour. Since that’s  almost three times as fast as the car could legitimately go, it’s  believed to have been a malfunction of a local speed camera. Plus: the  creations of cabinet maker Henk Verhoeff aren’t malfunctioning, they’re  meant to be, as the artist put it, “broken and weird.”

Ancona: a Ford Focus caught at 703 km / h (due to the speed camera) (Autoappassionati)

How do speed cameras work? (The Guardian)

This Retired Cabinet Maker Goes Viral For Making Broken And Weird Furniture That Belongs In Disney Movies (Bored Panda)

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We're replaying some of our favorite car-themed episodes this week, like this one from May 2019, about an exhibit at The Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles called “Hollywood Dream Machines: Vehicles of Science Fiction  and Fantasy.” If you’ve ever wanted to get close to the coolest rides  the big screen ever shared with us – like, say, the DeLorean in “Back to  the Future” – this is your chance.  Plus:  a guy in Arizona tries to  skirt the carpool lane rules with a scheme that could have come straight  out of one of the “Mannequin” movie franchise.

Check out Batman’s and Marty McFly’s rides at the Petersen Museum (Ars Technica)

Man busted driving with mannequin in carpool lane (WJBF)

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We're replaying some of our favorite car-themed episodes this week, like this one from December 2019, in which Cornell researchers find that making intersections more autonomous could  help get self-driving cars where they want to go more efficiently.  Plus: on the anniversary of the last day of the last Apollo mission to  the moon, how about a trip to the Museum of the Moon, now visiting  Philadelphia? 

Smart intersections could cut autonomous car congestion (Science Daily)

Last lunar-landing mission ends (History.com)

Museum of the Moon (Franklin Institute)

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We're replaying some of our favorite car-themed episodes this week, like this one from January 2020, a car that was to be (at least partly) made from soybeans. And it was  the idea of none other than Henry Ford. Plus: Steven Paul Judd is an  Oklahoma-based artist of Kiowa/Choctaw descent, and last month he made a  portrait of Sitting Bull using just over 20,000 black and white dice.

Henry Ford And His Soybean Car (A Moment of Science)

Soybean Car (The Henry Ford Museum)

This Amazing Sitting Bull Portrait Made from 20,000 Dice (Twisted Sifter)

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We're replaying some of our favorite car-themed episodes this week, like this one from November 2019, about a vehicle right out of Richard Scarry’s Busytown: the Big Banana Car,  which is a 15 foot long banana with four seats on the frame of a Ford  F-150. Plus: the Volkspod is a motor scooter made with upcycled parts from old-school Volkswagen Beetles!

BigBananaCar.com

Michigan trooper pulls over banana car, gives driver $20 (WTHR)

Designer Transforms Vintage Volkswagen Beetles into Adorable Minibikes (My Modern Met)

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