If you need a place to get your work done in Montreal, one coworking space is offering a great deal over the holidays. At the new Oopsmark shared office space, you can work for free in exchange for non-perishable food donations to a city food bank called Moisson Montréal, as TreeHugger reports.
The coworking location isn’t officially open yet, so it’s currently sitting unused. This initiative puts the empty space to good use, both for remote and freelance employees, and for people who are hungry over the holidays. It’s just a temporary program, though, so people will have to pay for a spot at the hip new space once January rolls around.
Collectie Anne Frank Stichting Amsterdam via Wikimedia Commons // Public Domain
Otto Frank, the only member of Anne Frank’s family to survive the Holocaust, spent decades trying to identify the person who tipped the Nazis off to the secret apartment where the family was hiding. The discovery—on August 4, 1944—resulted in the arrests of all eight occupants, and their subsequent confinement in concentration camps. But a new theory from the Anne Frank House proposes an alternate version of the events: They might have been found by chance, The Washington Post reports.
The currently accepted version of events is that an anonymous telephone call to the Germany Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst, or SD) notified Nazi authorities about the presence of the Franks. But researchers at the Anne Frank House say this phone call may never have occurred. There was another reason for the SD to search the location: illegal work and ration coupon fraud took place at the building Otto Frank’s company owned, which was home to a tea business and a furniture company at the time, in addition to the Secret Annex. The investigators who found the movable bookcase that led to the Franks’ residence may have simply been hunting down people who were committing ration fraud, rather than specifically looking for Jews in hiding.
In the course of searching the building for evidence of these crimes, the SD might have found the bookcase and discovered the Franks. This hypothesis is partially based on the fact that the three men known to have been involved in the search and subsequent arrests were not regularly involved in tracking down Jews, but were more often involved in arresting both Jews and non-Jews for criminal activity and in confiscating jewelry, furniture, and more from those deported to the concentration camps.
The paper [PDF] put forth by the Anne Frank House doesn’t rule out the possibility that the families in the Secret Annex were indeed betrayed, but simply puts forth another possible route of investigation for researchers to pursue.
From gaslight to d’oh, many common terms we use today have their roots in pop culture. Now, Merriam-Webster reports that the word Jedi, which originally referred to a member of the fictional knightly order in the Star Wars universe, is increasingly cropping up in contexts that have nothing to do with the franchise.
The dictionary cites a few examples of its usage from the past several years. In May 2012, The Wall Street Journal reported an increase in employers looking to hire a “Jedi,” and in February 2016, The Salt Lake Tribune wrote that Liev Schreiber portrayed Boston Globe editor Martin Baron as a “newsroom Jedi” in the 2015 film Spotlight.
When both writers use the term Jedi, they aren’t talking about someone who has mastered the Force and knows their way around a light saber. In this context, a Jedi can refer to a person who is exceptionally skilled at anything.
According to Merriam-Webster, the phrase “Jedi mind trick” has also entered the lexicon, and it’s used to talk about something a little different. When removed from its Star Wars origins, it means “coercing someone into a different state of mind,” like in this excerpt from a February 2011 issue of Redbook.
“So how do you hold on to your Zen when your husband’s in a bad mood? Leave him alone … To get him to sync with you (and not you with him), just sit back and let your good vibes work a Jedi mind trick on him.”
Star Wars isn’t the only major franchise to have an impact on language. The first Harry Potter book debuted decades after the premiere of A New Hope, and the word muggle already has an entry in Oxford Dictionaries. When used outside the context of the films and books, its meaning is the exact opposite of a Jedi: “A person who is not conversant with a particular activity or skill.”
The sweet and striped shepherd’s hooks can be found just about everywhere during the holiday season. It’s time you learned a thing or two (or 10) about them.
1. THEY’VE BEEN AROUND SINCE THE 17TH CENTURY.
While the origins of the candy cane are a bit murky, legend has it that they first appeared in hooked form around 1670. Candy sticks themselves were pretty common, but they really took shape when the choirmaster at the Cologne Cathedral in Germany got the bright idea of twisting them to look like shepherd’s hooks. He then handed them out to kids during church services to keep them quiet.
2. A GERMAN IMMIGRANT BROUGHT THE TRADITION TO THE STATES.
It’s no surprise, then, that it was a German immigrant who introduced the custom to America. The first reference we can find to the tradition stateside is 1847, when August Imgard of Wooster, Ohio, decked his home out with the sugary fare.
3. THEY HAVEN’T ALWAYS BEEN STRIPED.
Candy canes without the red don’t seem nearly as cheery, do they? But that’s how they were once made: all white. We’re not really sure who or exactly when the scarlet stripe was added, but we do know that images on cards before the 1900s show snow white canes.
4. THEY’RE A (RELATIVELY) VIRTUOUS HOLIDAY TREAT.
Most candy canes are around five inches long, containing only about 50 calories and no fat or cholesterol.
5. THEY DON’T ALWAYS FIT ON A CHRISTMAS TREE.
The world’s largest candy cane was built by Geneva, Illinois chef Alain Roby in 2012. It was 51 feet long, required about 900 pounds of sugar, and was eventually smashed up with a hammer so people could take home a piece.
6. EVERYONE HAS THEIR OWN WAY OF EATING THEM.
Fifty-four percent of kids suck on candy canes, compared to the 24 percent who just go right for the big crunch. As you may have been able to guess, of those surveyed, boys were nearly twice as likely to be crunchers.
7. MORE THAN A BILLION ARE MADE EACH YEAR.
According to the National Confectioners Association, about 1.2 billion candy canes are made annually, and 90 percent of those are sold between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Which honestly begs the question: Who’s buying the 10 percent in the off season?
8. A PRIEST PLAYED A MAJOR ROLE IN THE CANDY’S MOVE TO MASS PRODUCTION.
Bobs (that’s right; no apostrophe) Candies was the first company to really hang its hat on the sweet, striped hook. Lt. Bob McCormack began making candy canes for his kids in the 1920s, and they were such a hit he decided to start mass-producing them. With the help of his brother-in-law, a Catholic priest named Gregory Harding Keller (and his invention, the Keller Machine), McCormack was eventually able to churn out millions of candy canes a day.
9. THEY HAVE THEIR OWN (ODDLY-TIMED) HOLIDAY.
December 26 is National Candy Cane Day. Go figure.
10. THE PROCESS FOR MAKING THEM BY HAND IS MESMERIZING.
Here’s how they make candy canes at Disneyland—it’s a painstaking (and beautiful) technique.
Scientists have discovered that sea star larvae swirl the water around their bodies to suck in pieces of food and propel themselves through the water. The researchers published their findings in the journal Nature Physics.
Baby sea stars bear almost no resemblance to their slow-moving, stelliform parents. Each lumpy little larva is smaller than a grain of rice and spends its days paddling across the open ocean, trying to gobble up enough energy to morph into its next form. It’s a tightrope act: The larvae have to paddle far and fast enough to find food, but not so far and fast that they use up all the energy they currently have.
Researchers at Stanford University’s Prakash Lab were fascinated by the young sea stars’ predicament. They wondered how the larva got its shape and why it moved the way it did. To find out, they brought lots of larvae into the lab and let them loose under microscopes hooked up to video cameras. The researchers tracked the movement of three distinct elements: the sea stars themselves, the water around them, and particles of algae suspended in the water.
They soon realized that they were looking at very accomplished water-benders. The movements of cilia (tiny hairs) on the sea stars’ bodies were creating swirling vortices in the water. All that wiggling seemed like a lot of work. So why were they doing it?
Upon closer inspection, the researchers realized that wiggling allowed the larvae to do less work in the long run. Some of the vortices caught particles of algae and spun it closer to the sea stars’ waiting mouths. Others helped push them forward through the water. The larvae, in other words, had created a life hack, making the water do the work for them.
“Evolution seeks to satisfy basic constraints,” first author William Gilpin said in a statement. “The first solution that works very often wins.”
