Author: Shaunacy Ferro

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.

Take a look around the space in the video below:

[h/t TreeHugger]

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.

[h/t The Washington Post]

In the future, perishable foods may have a biological assist from coatings that improve their shelf life. Apeel, a company based in Santa Barbara, California, is designing invisible, edible coatings that keep out air to prevent fresh produce from rotting. The company just secured $33 million in funding, according to Modern Farmer, meaning that the innovation is closer to making its way to a supermarket near you.

Essentially, Apeel’s coatings are tasteless peels that can give other fruits and vegetables the hearty shelf life enjoyed by fruits like oranges, which have thick peels to better protect them from mold and water loss. Since every fruit is different, Apeel makes different coatings for various types of produce based on how it degrades, all made with agricultural byproducts like grape skins or broccoli stems. It estimates that its Edipeel coatings can extend the shelf life of food by two to five times what’s typical for uncoated products.

Food waste is a major issue worldwide. The United Nations’s Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that a third of all food goes into landfills due to spoilage or because it gets discarded. (Like if it falls off the truck on the way to the store.)

Edible protective coatings could end up making your fruit taste better, too. Because fruit has to withstand the perils of shipping, it’s often picked when it’s not as ripe as you’d like it to be, which is why grocery store tomatoes are way less delicious than the ones from your garden. Plus, produce doesn’t need as much packaging if it’s already coated.

The company also wants to reduce pesticide use by driving away bugs from plants in the field. “Our Invispeel formula camouflages produce surfaces with an ultrathin layer of chemically-contrasting molecules, rendering crops unrecognizable to pests and thus protecting them from bacteria, fungi, and insects,” according to Apeel, meaning that farmers wouldn’t need to use as many chemical pesticides.

It’s still in the testing phase right now, but select farmers will start using Edipeel in 2017.

[h/t Modern Farmer]

All images courtesy Apeel.

An unusual type of ballerina is coming to New York City’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Hippo Ballerina, a sculpture by Danish artist Bjørn Okholm Skaarup, is going to be placed across the street from the famous performance space this winter thanks to the city’s Art in the Parks program.

Adorned in a copper tutu and weighing over 2.5 tons, the mammalian sculpture is more than 15 feet tall, and will stand in Dante Park at the corner of Broadway and 64th Avenue.

The bronze hippo has a somewhat menacing air about her, perhaps to better fit in with New York’s other animal sculptures, like the famous Wall Street bull or the lions outside the New York Public Library. The piece’s design inspiration was a mash up of the Degas sculpture Little Dancer Aged Fourteen and the dancing hippopotami of Disney’s Fantasia.

She’ll be on view until the end of July 2017.

Landing your first job after college can be a difficult, stressful process, and not many college graduates feel their university’s career services offices gave them the help and support they wanted, according to a Gallup poll spotted by The Atlantic. Only 16 percent of graduates of all ages (from the 1940s to the class of 2016) say their experience was “very helpful,” and only 27 percent say it was “helpful.” In total, about two in five graduates think visiting the career counselors at their school was useful. Another 16 percent found it “not at all helpful.”

Even if they had a good experience, students didn’t think career services really prepared them for the real world. “Graduates who visited their career services office are not much more likely than those who did not to believe their university prepared them well for life outside of college, to say their education was worth the cost and to recommend their university to others,” according to Gallup.

Recent college grads in the U.S. have an unemployment rate of 5.6 percent, and a 12.6 percent underemployment rate (meaning they might be working as a barista instead of putting that sociology degree to use at work). College career services have an important duty, then, to help students get jobs and launch careers, so it’s important that the experience be helpful.

The results are based on online surveys of 11,483 people with at least a bachelor’s degree between August and October of 2016.

[h/t The Atlantic]

A long-lost Christmas song has been discovered at Oxford, and yes, it’s about drinking. The score by George Butterworth, an English composer who died in the trenches of World War I, was uncovered at the university’s Bodleian Libraries, whose researchers believe it to be the only surviving copy.

Butterworth, who was born in 1885, was an avid collector and composer of folk music as well as an early adopter of new recording technologies. His work was relatively popular by the time he enlisted in the infantry in 1914, and according to the Bodleian Libraries, he was considered one of the most promising English composers of his time. He was killed in battle at 31 years old, and most of his compositions were lost. He had destroyed much of his music before he left for the war, thinking it wasn’t worth preserving, though after his death his surviving compositions came to be lauded as masterpieces

The three-page score for the lost Christmas song was found by Martin Holmes, a music curator at the Bodleian Libraries, in a collection of uncataloged music that made its way from the university’s music department to the university’s Weston Library. The library isn’t sure where it came from, but it might have been donated by the composer’s father to Butterworth’s friend from Oxford, Sir Hugh Allen, who later became a music professor at the school. Allen’s papers were donated to the Oxford Music Faculty Library after his death in 1946.

According to the library, the song “begins with the words ‘Crown winter with green, And give him good drink To physic his spleen…’ and ends with the lines ‘And merry be we This good Yuletide.’” In the vein of his other folk-inspired songs, “he wrote the musical setting for this poem in the style of a drinking song, for voice and piano,” the library’s press release continues. The song was probably written early in Buttterworth’s career sometime in the early 20th century. It’s not a masterpiece, but it can provide scholars with a better idea of how his compositional talents evolved.

The manuscript score is on display at the Weston Library at Oxford through this weekend, where you can also listen to a recording of the song.

Radio has the power to let listeners eavesdrop on pop culture and news in far-flung locales or even subcultures close to home (see: Wicca Radio International in New Orleans). A new site aims to connect people across the world to radio signals that span the globe, allowing people to listen to radio stations in other countries, as The Verge reports.

Radio Garden is set up as a globe visualization, with green dots representing different stations you can tune into. Spin the globe and find stations playing Russian pop, Christmas music in Chicago, Spanish news, or metal in Québec.

The app also lets you explore historic radio clips and jingles—the kind that signal what the station is about. The “Stories” tab includes a smattering of interviews and educational programming. Some are about transnational radio, and others more generally talk about international exchange, like an Arabic lesson broadcast in Montreal and a storytelling program about borders from Milan.

These clips come from the past few years, dating back to 2014. There aren’t as many stories as there are live radio stations, so if you’re looking to get a taste of Buenos Aires or Nairobi, you’re better off searching the live stations. Happy listening!

[h/t The Verge]

You probably know what a red pepper looks like when it’s cut in half. You may even know what a half a conch shell looks like. But how about a camera? Or a Nike shoe? Macro Room, a YouTube channel devoted to beautiful macro images, recently cut a bunch of ordinary objects and foods in half to take a close look at their insides, as Boing Boing spotted. You might find yourself with a sudden urge to slice all your belongings down the middle after you watch this.

[h/t Boing Boing]

New York City’s subway has more riders than any other city transit system in the U.S., averaging more than 5.5 million riders per weekday over its 660 miles of track. (It’s possible to ride the whole system in a day, if you have 22-plus hours to spare.) It’s easy to imagine what a single train looks like at rush hour, but how about the whole system? An intrepid Columbia University student decided to find out, as CityLab reports.

Using data from the Metropolitan Transit Authority and Google Maps, Will Geary created a moving map of New York City subway data from a single day. Geary has previously done the same with the city’s bike share service, breaking down Citi Bike activity by gender over the course of October 2015.

Each train line is represented by the color it’s assigned by transit maps. The visualization spans 24 hours, and has been sped up around 400 times its real-time length. It’s set to some classical music, making it a much calmer experience than actually riding a subway train.

[h/t CityLab]

Fast food is notoriously bad for you—and a major factor in America’s obesity epidemic—but not all drive-thru visits are equal, health-wise. On Flowing Data, stats nerd Nathan Yau crunched the numbers to figure out how different fast food restaurant menus stack up in terms of calorie counts, as WIRED recently highlighted.

Unlike some other breakdowns that compare the calories of specific fast food items or meal combinations, Yau’s visualization takes all the major menu items into account so you can see in general terms how restaurant menus stack up, as compared to seeing the calorie count of just your chicken tenders or double cheeseburger.

Carl’s Jr. and Jack in the Box lead the pack, with some single menu items containing more than 1200 calories. McDonald’s, that much demonized symbol of American fatness, comes in third place. (Stay away from that Big Breakfast!) Surprisingly, the fried chicken empire of KFC keeps its menu relatively low-calorie compared to other restaurants, with its highest calorie meal, the chicken pot pie, containing around 800 calories. Of course, few people go to KFC for a single chicken drumstick, and in this chart’s case, it’s hard to tell exactly how much of your daily caloric intake you’d gobble up if you ordered a few sides, too.

[h/t WIRED]