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Good morning Staker! Here’s what’s cookin’ today. What will the Artemis II astronauts eat in space, a new device wants to help Rover call you, and remembering a long-ago car track…at the top of a building in Toronto 👀

But first our weekly poll!

It’s fair to say that the menu for the astronauts on the Artemis II mission will be out of this world.

NASA recently released a list of all the 189 unique menu items that will be available to the crew as it travels to the Moon, zips around it, and returns home over the course of ten days.

Chez Space Capsule’s offerings will be quite delectable this time around, with the menu featuring items like breakfast sausages, granola with berries, couscous with nuts, mango salad, barbecued beef brisket, and mac and cheese, to name just a few.

There will also be coffee, tacos, peanut butter, chocolate, maple syrup, honey, cinnamon, and spicy mustard aboard the Orion spacecraft.

“On a typical mission day—excluding launch and reentry—astronauts have scheduled time for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Each astronaut is allotted two flavored beverages per day, which may include coffee,” NASA explained.

“Preparation is intentionally simple, using ready-to-eat, rehydratable, thermostabilized, or irradiated foods that can be safely prepared without interfering with crew operations or spacecraft systems,” the space agency added.

CBC’s Marketplace conducted an investigation into the sunscreen industry, and learned that SPF labels are misleading and nearly useless, with sunscreen from a single source often bottled into tubes with different labels.

The researchers sent bottles labelled “SPF 50” to five testing facilities across the United States and Canada. Every facility provided a different result: 34, 50, 60, 44 and 15.

SPF stands for “sun protection factor,” and refers to how long a person can be exposed to UV rays without getting burned. SPF 50, 30 and 15, mean a person can withstand exposure 50 times, 30 times, and 15 times longer than with unprotected skin.

Health Canada and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration use the same method of testing SPF. It requires applying the product on to the backs of ten light-skinned volunteers and then exposing three areas to UV rays: exposed skin, skin rubbed with a control sunscreen, and skin rubbed with the test product.

24 hours later, the volunteers are evaluated and the manufacture can assign an SPF label.

This method is vulnerable to significant variability, given the individual differences in human skin and how it reacts to sunlight.

“The SPF is really a crude indication of how well a product protects you,” said Brian Diffey, a professor emeritus of photobiology at Newcastle University in England.

While sunscreen is still incredibly important and effective, it should be just one part of the regimen that includes shade and limiting exposure during peak hours, according to dermatologist Dr. Julia Carroll.

Singapore technology firm uCloudlink developed what it calls a smartphone for pets that can send notifications to the owner when cued by the pet.

The wearable device is guided by AI, motion sensors, and a GPS tracker to detect when a pet makes certain gestures or movements that can be programmed to mean the animal needs something.

For example, when your dog starts spinning in circles, it’s probably hungry, thirsty, or needs to do its business. If it starts jumping up and down multiple times over the span of ten seconds, that can be a cue for something, too.

Each owner can determine what their pet’s behavior signals are and program them into the device. When those behaviours happen, it triggers a feature named Paw Call Me.

It’s designed to act similar to a baby monitor, but with greater sophistication, allowing for more than simply viewing the pet through a camera installed by their bed or the couch they’re jumping on when they don’t think you can see them 🤫

The history of North America’s integrated auto manufacturing industry dates back over a century.

One of its highlights rests in an unassuming building at 672 Dupont Street in Toronto, where Ford Model Ts used to be test-driven six storeys above the newly paved roads of a rapidly expanding city.

The building was constructed in 1914 and opened a year later as Ford’s northern manufacturing outfit, conveniently located right next to the tracks of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

Above the first floor showroom, the second floor loading dock allowed parts to be efficiently brought in and organized before being sent up to assembly lines on the third and fourth floors. Inch by inch and piece by piece, men assembled Model Ts by the hundreds before sending them to the fifth floor for a paint job.

Then came the fun part. A freight elevator, cautiously labelled with a maximum capacity of 10,000 pounds, would swallow the finished products before releasing them on the roof, where a purpose-built test track waited for rubber to meet the road.

At the time, it was an astonishing sight to see, likely in the realm of watching a fighter jet do a low altitude flyby at Mach 5 today.

Ford had outgrown the facility by the 1920s, but the building later hosted Mr. Peanut and Planter’s for nearly 40 years, until 1987. It was given special heritage status a year later, was bought by Canadian coffee appliance seller FAEMA in 1994, and remains its HQ today.

A café on the second floor doubles as a showroom, where Model T replicas show off for passersby and the ghosts of their fathers roar across the roof.

Quizmaster’s choice

It’s Friday and you know what that means! Time for trivia à la carte. It’s a little of this, a little of that, and a whole lotta fun.

Give today’s trivia a try and you might just win a $25 e-gift card.

Winner will be notified on Monday afternoon. Keep an eye on your inbox and don’t forget to check your spam folder! *