As we slide into October, it's time to get to know the creatures of Halloween. The more we know about them, the less frightening they are.

Bats are scary because they fly in the dark and you won't see them coming until they startle you with a sense of movement out of the corner of your eye. There's something alien about mammals that fly and rest by hanging upside down. But they have their place in the ecosystem, as some bats eat thousands of mosquitos every night, while others pollinate crops. At Bat World Sanctuary in Texas, injured or orphaned bats can be sheltered and then released back into the wild, and bats rescued from labs and zoos can find a permanent home. They know how to make bats less alien-looking just by turning the camera upside down! Then they are just animals dealing with weird gravity. You can get to know more of the residents of Bat World at Instagram, and in a gallery of livestreams.

You've heard of the turducken, a holiday feast consisting of three deboned birds stuffed inside each other- a chicken inside a duck inside a turkey. It's an over-the-top display of carnivorous excess and culinary skills, but it's really nothing new. A cookbook from 1800 gives us a recipe for Yorkshire Christmas pie, which starts with five birds! You debone "a turkey, a goose, a fowl, a partridge and a pigeon" and stuff each inside the larger bird. We might assume the "fowl" is a chicken or duck. There's more, as you are instructed to fill the rest of the pie crust with pieces of hare on one side and all the game fowl you can get on the other side. Along with spices, you add four pounds of butter and bake it for four hours. And then hope that all your guests show up and have an appetite.

Other holiday pies are described, like a beefsteak pie made with beef slices and pickles, and two recipes for mincemeat pie that really had meat in them 200 years ago. Read all these recipes for autumn pies at All Things Georgian.  -via Strange Company

(Unrelated image credit: Harris & Ewing)

The term "Wall Street" is used to denote the American hub of finance and stock trading. It's used more as an idea than as a place, but it is also a real street in Manhattan. You recognize it by the big bronze bull, which is actually on Broadway, but still in the financial district. But how did that financial district come about? The story goes back almost 400 years in the history of New York, at least to explain where the name came from. It took a lot longer for Wall Street to cement its reputation for trade and finance. These days, the actual neighborhood in New York doesn't have all that many banks and investment companies left. But when you hear the term Wall Street, you know what someone is talking about. If you're interested in the subject, you can read a timeline of Wall Street's history here. -via Laughing Squid

Although people with land have always buried their pets, the first urban pet cemetery was founded in London in 1881 when a distraught family asked if they could bury their small dog Cherry in the garden of the gatekeeper's house at Hyde Park. The gatekeeper, Mr. Winbridge, agreed, and soon other people asked for the same dignified rites. The pet cemetery at Hyde Park is still there today. But the US has many more pet cemeteries, and there are others sporting gravestones and memorials all over the world. Historian, photographer, and author Paul Koudounaris visited many of those cemeteries over the last ten years, taking photographs and talking to grieving pet owners for his new book Faithful Unto Death: Pet Cemeteries, Animal Graves and Eternal Devotion.



Koudounaris even worked for a time as a grief counselor for pet owners to gain insight into the love people have for their pets. After all, the memorials they use to honor those pets aren't so much about the pets themselves, but about our memories of them and the love and appreciation that continues after death. Read about the book and the many memorials for beloved pets at Smithsonian. And get a preview of Koudounaris' book by clicking to the right on both images above.

Warning: this video will make you hungry. Pasta is an amazing food. It's made of wheat, like bread, but can be stored for a long period without going bad. It's easy to cook, and it fills you up. But most important, it can carry a full dish of flavor depending on what sauce or other ingredients you combine it with. It can help a small amount of meat or soup feed an entire family. It's no wonder pasta is popular all over. We consume it in a variety of forms, from ramen to lasagna to Kraft Dinner. But where did it really come from? How was it developed? And how can we get some right now?

Weird History Food takes us through the history of pasta, as much as we know, plus the many different shapes it comes in and why they exist at all, and also the process for making pasta in a factory. Now excuse me, I have to put on some water to boil.

We already knew that hummingbirds are pretty extreme. They are the world's smallest bird, their wings flap at 50 times a second, they have tongues that wrap around their brains like woodpeckers. But that's just the beginning of how these tiny, beautiful creatures push the envelope among bird species, and frankly, among animals. 

For example, hummingbirds are the only bird that can fly upside down or backwards. At certain times of the year, they can spend 13 hours a day flying, searching for nectar. They have amazing metabolisms that they can change at will, so that their energy expenditures while sleeping or in winter are barely above what will sustain life. They can fly at altitudes that a helicopter won't attempt. The sugar water they consume causes them to have blood sugar levels six times that of a human, but they've developed ways to deal with that, and with the relatively massive amounts of fluids they consume. How do they do it all? Several scientists who are hummingbird experts have put in the work, and they tell us how it's done at Knowable Magazine. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Paul Danese)

Sometimes, if I'm unable to sleep in the middle of the night, I wake up and login to X to help me get back in the right head space to sleep. Does it work?

I'll get back to you on that. For now, let's keep in mind that doomscrolling is a respected tradition that has been practiced by sleep deprived people for millennia. J.L. Westover of the cartoon Mr. Lovenstein illustrates the phenomenon.

As I mentioned last week, scholars in a library in Leipzig discovered a previously unknown piece by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. It's a 12-minute composition made for a string trio.

A few days ago, the Jugendsinfonieorchester (Youth Symphony Orchestra) of Leipzig held a public performance of it. In the YouTube notes, you can see a breakdown of the seven movements of Ganz kleine Nachtmusik.

Could Mozart win a Grammy for this work? There's online speculation on the subject. I don't see anything in the official rules for the Grammy awards that would restrict the maestro from securing a trophy even though he's dead.

-via Kottke

The New Zealand filmmaking group AFK is producing a Star Wars fan film series on YouTube called For the Empire. You can see all the episodes so far in this playlist. It's an epic saga, but occasionally an episode stands alone rather well. In this one, the stormtrooper TK-FNG gets busted for incompetence and demoted. His assignments deteriorate until he finds himself guarding a Clone Wars fan convention. Then as his shift ends, he encounters his own cosplaying son, TK-FKU, attending the con. The two get a chance to catch up with each other even though they are quite different. In other words, it's a weird family bonding night.

This episode has a callback to one we posted earlier, in that TK-FNG finds himself on an elevator with Darth Vader and his wheezing on the worst day of his life. The stormtrooper has come a long way since then, and he handles it bit differently this time. -via Geeks Are Sexy

The pop culture idea of witches that make up our Halloween decorations and costumes is pretty benign, but the real historical women who were accused of witchcraft are tragic tales. These were women who stood out in some way, who caused trouble or else were a scapegoat for superstitious fears. They were shunned, tortured, or even executed in gruesome ways.

Even after the era of witch killings, women who didn't fit in or upheld the standards of respectability were labeled as witches, and that reputation can follow one beyond death. The graves of some women have carried their reputations and are considered haunted. Meg Shelton's grave has a huge boulder laid atop, to make sure she never comes back. Susan Gavan’s grave has a small fence around it, but is that to keep people who get too close from being cursed? Bathsheba Sherman was accused of killing her infant, and a movie franchise grew up around her story.

This has even happened to a couple of gravesites in which the deceased had never been considered a witch in life -or may have never existed at all. It's a common story: someone approaches a gravesite, becomes spooked by a sound or a gust of wind, and has to tell someone. Urban legends grow up around these sites, and every encounter gives someone else a story to tell. Read about eight graves allegedly haunted by the witch buried there at Mental Floss. Six of them are in the US, in case you want to plan an autumn road trip.

Every once in a while, you have to pass a CAPTCHA test to use something on the internet. This is supposed to prove you're a human user, and not a robot or an algorithm trying to introduce spam, malware, or misinformation. Sure, we understand why these are sadly necessary, but they can be enraging. You may be instructed to check all boxes that contain a traffic light, for example, but they don't tell us whether the pole holding it is included. Or the indicated object is too far away to see. Or you may miss a tiny corner. Bingo- you've been labeled as a 'bot and cannot access what you came for. Requesting a different image may or may not improve your chances, but you get the feeling that just the request causes a bias against you. Who comes up with these things?

It takes an entire team, but the photographer is Landra Fontaine, who loves her job because she's a sadist. And a trickster. A professional troll. You might even call her the scum of the earth. The next time you are confounded by a CAPTCHA, you will know who to blame. -via Laughing Squid

The Grumman F6F Hellcat was used in many dogfights in World war II, but afterward was considered obsolete. The US Navy made use of them, as drones to serve as targets for testing new battle aircraft and weapons. On August 16, 1956, a Hellcat equipped to be controlled by radio launched for just such a test. But the drone took matters into its own hands, or wings, and stopped responding to the RC pilot's commands. Instead of heading out to sea, it circled back to Southern California. The Air Force dispatched two pilots in F-89D Scorpions loaded with missiles to shoot it down. Their equipment, while thoroughly modern, did not cooperate either, and one failure led to another. It was a comedy of errors in the sky, but on the ground below, residents of Palmdale and Santa Clarita were dodging missiles.

The drone managed to avoid all 204 missiles fired at it, but was eventually brought down. The missiles on the ground started fires that burned hundreds of acres and involved around a thousand firefighters. It was only luck and coincidence that no one was killed. Read about the drone that embarrassed both the US Navy and the Air Force at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: US Navy) 

Jeff Letendre encountered a fawn who was too young to be away from her mother, but there was no sign of a mother, and the fawn was very hungry. So he provided her with milk and named her Fairy. These cases are sometimes pretty sad because a baby wild animal adopted by humans often has to live in captivity for the rest of their life. But Jeff was well aware of that and kept Fairy outside and encouraged her to meet other deer once she was weaned. Fairy lucked out and met a deer family with a mother that had enough maternal instinct to let a strange fawn join the family. Now Jeff has the best of both worlds, knowing that Fairy is happy and healthy living in the woods, but coming back to see him every once in a while. That makes him a Disney princess. You can see more of Jeff and his woodland friends at Instagram.

People somehow get the idea that America's national parks are safe places. If they weren't, why would they encourage people to visit? But that's not the philosophy of the parks. They operate under the idea that people should see and experience the wonders of nature, and they have set up rules, guidelines, and warnings to keep people safe. It's up to us to heed those warnings. Yellowstone National Park has two million acres of natural wonders, and some of them can kill you, but that mainly happens when people disregard the rules and the warnings.

The most dangerous things at Yellowstone are not the bears, nor the bison, although people have been killed by them. The thermal vents have killed more people than all animal attacks combined. And the difference is even more stark when you consider serious injuries. Just last week, a woman fell into near-boiling water when the ground gave way, because she was hiking off the marked trails. Read up on the history of injuries and deaths due to disregarding the guidelines near Yellowstone's hot springs and thermal vents at Outside Online. Keep in mind those deaths and injuries are still rare. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Brocken Inaglory)

The word "we" in the post title doesn't mean me or you, because I haven't got a clue, but rather scientists who know what temperature many species of dinosaur had when they were alive. I didn't even know those had been discovered at all, much less how they did it. All we have left of those dinosaurs are fossilized bones and a few impressions from skin, feathers, and footprints. But chemical analysis has detected a chemical called bioapatite, which sounds like something that makes you hungry. The study of this molecule tells us that dinosaurs were warm-blooded, or at least many dinosaurs that we know about. That makes them very different from the reptiles we studied in grade school, and more like the birds we barely studied at all. Minute Earth explains the importance of molecular chemistry to the study of paleontology and how some scientists took the temperatures of long-extinxt diosaurs.