The future is looking bright for dissatisfied grocery shoppers. Earlier in December, Amazon unveiled their concept for a store with no checkout lines. Now inhabitat reports that an augmented reality supermarket designed by an MIT professor has opened in Milan.

The new high-tech location of Coop Italia, Italy’s largest supermarket chain, is designed to provide shoppers with up-to-date information about their purchases as they make them. When customers walk up to take a product from a table or shelf, they’ll activate motion sensors nearby. A screen above will then display facts about the item, including allergens, nutritional information, and tips for disposal.

The augmented reality grocery store concept is the brainchild of Carlo Ratti, a designer and director of the MIT Senseable City Lab. He debuted the prototype with his team from Carlo Ratti Associati at last year’s Milan World Expo.

Now the idea is ready for the real world, with over 6000 products filling 10,000 square feet of space. But in a press release, Ratti emphasizes that there’s still room for improvement:

“Today, this information reaches the consumer in a fragmented way. But in the near future, we will be able to discover everything there is to know about the apple we are looking at: the tree it grew on, the CO2 it produced, the chemical treatments it received, and its journey to the supermarket shelf.”

If you’re missing out on the high-tech shopping experience in Milan, there are plenty of ways to get your information before you enter the store: Here are some supermarket products to avoid if you’re looking to become a smarter shopper.

[h/t inhabitat]

It’s tough at the top. History is littered with thwarted monarchs, quashed queens, and unlucky emperors. Many leaders reached power only to have it snatched from their grasp after a very short time, consigning them to just a footnote in history. Whether due to illness, rebellion, murder, or mystery, the following unfortunate people enjoyed some of the shortest reigns in history.

1. SHORTEST-REIGNING POPE

Pope Urban VII died just 13 days after being appointed as pope, the shortest-ever papacy. When Sixtus V died in 1590, the conclave elected Cardinal Castagna as Pope Urban VII. Urban had a great reputation as a man of piety, prudence, and decency, and so the people were full of hope that Urban would be a wonderful pope. Indeed, in his first few days he had a list made of all the poor in Rome so that he might help them, gave extra cash to cardinals with insufficient means, and ordered the bakers of Rome to bake larger loaves and sell them more cheaply, covering any losses out of his own pocket. But after just a few days in office—and even before his papal coronation—Urban VII became gravely ill. After just 13 (highly successful) days, he died.

2. SHORTEST-REIGNING KING

The prize for the shortest-reigning king goes to Louis-Antoine of France, who very briefly became king in 1830 when his father Charles X abdicated. Louis-Antoine considered his position for 20 minutes before signing papers to confirm that he, too, was abdicating.

3. SHORTEST-REIGNING QUEEN

When the sickly son of Henry VIII, Edward VI, died, many influential Protestants feared the crown would pass to his Catholic half-sister, Mary. Edward VI had come to the throne at just 9 years old, and the powerful John Dudley, Earl of Warwick and later Duke of Northumberland, soon positioned himself as Edward’s effective regent. Fearing he was to lose control of the crown, Dudley plotted to have Lady Jane Grey, a cousin of Edward VI, put onto the throne. To ensure his place at court, he forced Jane to marry his son. Grey reportedly fainted when told she was queen. She went through the motions of monarchy, but lacked public support—and after just nine days, Mary and her large army took back the crown.

Many historians believe that Mary had intended to pardon her young cousin—it was obvious she had been but a pawn in other people’s power games—but Jane’s father foolishly took part in further rebellion. As a consequence, Jane became too much of a risk to live and was executed when she was just 16 years old.

RUNNER-UP: Berengaria of Castile was named Queen of Castile (in modern-day Spain) in 1217 when her brother Henry was killed in a freak accident—a tile blew off a roof and hit him in the head. Berengaria was the granddaughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine, famous for reigning as queen of both France and England in her lifetime and a force to be reckoned with, and Berengaria clearly had her grandmother’s wits. Instead of keeping the crown for herself, she abdicated after two months and 25 days in favor of her son Ferdinand, who was in line to become king of León. By sacrificing her own prospects in favor of her son’s, Berengaria ensured her son had an even greater legacy by ultimately unifying the kingdoms of León and Castile.

4. SHORTEST-REIGNING U.S. PRESIDENT

William Henry Harrison died after just a month in office in 1841. The 68-year-old was the ninth president of the United States and the oldest to become president, until Ronald Reagan took office at age 69 in 1981. Harrison insisted on making an extremely lengthy inauguration speech (the longest so far) in freezing conditions while foolishly shunning a hat or coat. He contracted pneumonia—or so historians long believed—and was dead within a month. Although the pneumonia diagnosis has long been accepted, more recent analysis has blamed enteric fever the president contracted as a result of the sewage-laced water in the White House.

RUNNER-UP: James Garfield, the 20th president of the United States, was shot by a disturbed man just over 100 days into his presidency. Garfield did not die immediately; he lingered on the edge of death for two and a half months as doctors tried, in vain, to locate the bullet lodged in his body, finally succumbing after six months and 15 days of his presidency. His death came not as a result of the bullet wound, but because of an infection caused by prolonged probing in the wound by doctors with unwashed hands.

5. SHORTEST-REIGNING EMPEROR

Although this category is made difficult in part by the number of self-proclaimed emperors in history, one reasonable candidate for the title of shortest reigning emperor is Napoleon II. He was named Emperor of France in title only when he was just 4 years old, after the defeat and abdication of his father, Napoleon, at Waterloo in 1815. The only legitimate son and heir of Napoleon, Napoleon II was never able to fulfill his promise—he reigned in absentia in exile with his mother in Austria for just 16 days before the French monarchy was (temporarily) restored with Louis XVIII. Napoleon II lived out his days in Austria, with the mollifying title of Duke of Reichstadt given to him, but sadly died from tuberculosis when he was just 21.

RUNNER-UP: Taichang was the 14th Ming Dynasty emperor, and came to power despite his father favoring a younger son for the post. Taichang was named emperor in 1620 and immediately got off to a good start, abolishing unpopular taxes and filling many posts left vacant by his father. But after just 10 days, he fell ill with diarrhea, suffering mightily for many days until a member of his court, Li Kezhou, gave him some red pills to cure his ailment. After taking one pill, Taichang declared that he felt much better, so he was encouraged to take another—but by the next morning, he was dead after serving just 29 days as emperor. The contents of the pills and the intentions of Li Kezhou have become something of a folk legend in China, known as the “Mystery of the Red Pills.”

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]

Is it possible that murderous crustaceans have a softer side? A new video shows cannibalistic deep-sea crabs grooming one another the same way chimpanzees do.

Austinograea williamsi is not generally a snuggly critter. This pale, eyeless crab makes its home in the darkness near hydrothermal vents thousands of meters below the ocean’s surface. Its previous appearances on camera have all been a lot less aww-inspiring and a lot grislier, featuring feeding frenzies in which everyone eats everyone else’s legs.

But family members aren’t A. williamsi’s only food source. It also eats snails, anemones, and algae. Given the opportunity, it may also eat bacteria scraped off undersea surfaces. Researchers aboard the R/V Falkor believe that that may be what’s going on in this video they captured at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean thanks to a robotic submarine:

“He was literally grooming this smaller shell, just in the same way that you would see chimpanzees for instance picking bugs off of the hair of a mate,” Falkor biologist Amanda Bates told New Scientist.

Bates and her colleagues can’t say for sure why the crabs are doing it. Grooming may be a lazy way to score a snack, or it may be as much a social activity for crabs as it is for primates. Either way, Bates said, “it’s incredible to see that same type of behaviour in crabs that are 3,500 metres under the sea.”

[h/t New Scientist]

The 20-sided die you see above could have been built by ancient Egyptian Dungeons & Dragons players, but it wasn’t. Rather, it was made by an unknown craftsperson at some point between the second century B.C.E. and fourth century C.E.—a relic from an age when casting the dice often had higher stakes than hit points.

Made in the shape of an icosahedron (a polyhedron with 20 faces), the die is constructed out of serpentine, which ancient Egyptians often used for their amulets and vessels. The die could have been made during Egypt’s Macedonian period, during which it was a major center of Greek trade and culture, or during its later time as a Roman province, when Egypt kept its strong trade ties with Greece. That would explain the Greek letters carved into the faces of the die. 

Historians aren’t entirely sure why such dice exist, but it’s thought they were sometimes used for divination. The die could even be an example of an alphabet oracle—a text-based divination tool that could stand in for a flesh-and-blood oracle or seer when needed.

In an alphabet oracle, each letter of the Greek alphabet had a corresponding phrase that you could use to determine your fortune. One such alphabet oracle was found on an inscription discovered in the ancient city of Olympos. Although it’s thought that shards of pottery were used with that oracle, the process is just as doable with dice. Roll the Greek letter lambda, for example, and the oracle would tell you that “the one passing on the left bodes well for everything.” A zeta told you to “flee the very great storm, lest you be disabled in some way.”

Unfortunately, the die you see here didn’t come with a corresponding guidebook, so it’s impossible to know if it was associated with an oracle or not. Another possibility is that such dice were used for games. Ancient Egyptians are known to have used dice for senet, a popular board game thought to have been kind of like backgammon. The game has been found in the tombs of Egyptian royalty, and gameplay has been linked to the mythological Egyptian journey through the underworld.

The 20-sided die is far from the first of its kind, of course. Dice are thought to date back millennia, and the oldest known example was associated with a 3000-year-old board game of the ancient Near East called the Royal Game of Ur.

These days, 20-sided dice are most familiar to role-playing gamers. As games historian Jon Peterson writes, 20-sided dice became commercially available around the early 1970s—right when table gamers were beginning to recognize the need for dice that would allow for more outcomes and make games more realistic. Among those gamers was Gary Gygax, who ended up creating Dungeons & Dragons with Dave Arneson in 1974.

Ancient fortune-telling tool or remnant of a centuries-old D&D predecessor? You can visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and speculate for yourself—the die is on display in Gallery 138.

If you’re struggling to get more done in a day, it might be because you’re thinking of productivity as a one-size-fits-all endeavor, says Carson Tate, author of Work Simply. “We each have a productivity style, influenced by how we think and process information,” she says. “If you’re not customizing your strategies to that style, they’re not going to work for you and you’re going to get frustrated.” She breaks down the four styles and corresponding strategies that can turn you into an efficient, to-do-list-killing machine.

1. THE PRIORITIZER

Style Traits: You’re analytical and competitive. Long-winded explanations set your teeth on edge, and when coworkers start swapping stories about what they did over the weekend you start silently watching the clock (so much wasted time!). “Prioritizers are very focused on the outcome or goal—not the soccer game your kid had over the weekend,” says Tate. “They want people to make their point and back it up—they never met a piece of data they didn’t like.”

Productivity Boost: Play to your natural competitive streak by timing yourself as you run through routine tasks, suggests Tate. How quickly can you prep lunches before work? How many minutes does it take to clear out your inbox each morning? Trying to beat your own time will spur you to stay focused, but it can also nudge you to streamline—like prepping a week’s worth of veggies at once or setting up templates for emails you send again and again.

2. THE PLANNER

Style Traits: You’re hyper-organized, detail-driven, and thrive on deadlines. You have every appointment and reminder possible in your calendar, and you relish making action plans. Your biggest pet peeve is when people are running perpetually late. “These are the people who turn their work in early and will add an item to their to-do list even if it’s already done, just for the satisfaction of crossing it off,” says Tate.

Productivity Boost: Batching should be your new best friend, says Tate. That means scheduling time to knock out all of your phone calls at once or cranking through spreadsheet set-up, assembly-style. “Grouping similar tasks together lets you get into a flow state and not waste any time switching between tasks,” she explains.

Another trick that works particularly well for planners is creating a to-do list of things that can be done in 15 minutes or less. “There are so many microsegements in the day, where you finish one meeting and have another starting in 15 minutes,” says Tate. “Instead of defaulting to email, a 15-minute list lets you actually execute.”

3. THE ARRANGER

Style Traits: A natural born facilitator, you’re highly intuitive and communicative. You do your best work with people and on teams, and you tend to understand instinctually what needs to get done to wrap up a project. “They’re the people who will color-code their calendars, because color is important, or have certain types of pens for certain tasks,” says Tate.

Productivity Boost: Spending the entire day holed up in an office will actually backfire for Arrangers. “They need to intersperse solo work with group work,” says Tate, or their energy and focus will start to flag. Schedule a coffee break with coworkers, or break up a big work project with quick trips to the water cooler. Those minutes aren’t wasted—they’re recharging your efficiency and focus. Sunshine can also have a surprisingly big impact on productivity with this group, says Tate. Even standing near a window for a few minutes will perk you up to get more done.

4. THE VISUALIZER

Style Traits: Post-its and white boards are your go-tool tools, and even though your cubicle may seem like it’s in disarray you can locate anything in less than a minute. “Visualizers are big-picture thinkers and risk takers,” says Tate. “They’re great at juggling a large variety of work, and they work very quickly.” They’re also the ones who are most likely to squeak in just seconds before the deadline, and to chafe at lengthy processes. “Too much structure drives them crazy, because they want time and space to think and brainstorm.”

Productivity Boost: Stop thinking you can knock out a project in one long marathon work session. “Visualizers crave novelty, so to keep your energy and momentum high you need to break up the boring work with more interesting work,” says Tate. While ping-ponging between tasks might slow other styles down, it can actually fuel this group—so think of yourself as a sprinter, working on one thing for 20 minutes before moving on to something completely different.

As we get deeper into winter, getting dressed to go outside becomes an ordeal. Not only do we have to worry about wearing enough layers to stay warm, we also have to deal with static electricity giving our garments a life of their own.

If you’re hoping to tackle static cling head-on this season, it helps to first understand the science behind why it happens. TIME recently spoke with two experts, Rutgers University biomedical engineering professor Troy Shinbrot and George Mason University professor of Earth sciences Robert Hazen, about why this sticky phenomenon becomes so pervasive once the temperatures drop.

According to Shinbrot, the culprit is an excess of either positive or negative electrical charge. All atoms contain both positively charged protons and negatively charged electrons. When balanced in number, these charges cancel each other out; but when two objects make contact, electrons can come dislodged from their original atoms and jump to another, disrupting the object’s “neutral” charge.

The “cling” part comes in when these imbalanced atoms start sticking together. Opposites attract, atomically speaking, so when wool tights with too much positive charge are introduced to a dress with a neutral or negative charge, the protons in the tights will adhere to the electrons in the dress. Like charges, on the other hand, repel each other. If you get a bunch of positively charged atoms in one place the protons will push away from one another. This is why your hair sometimes acts like it wants to float off your head after you brush it. “Like people on a crowded beach who want to put space between themselves, they all stand up and spread out,” Hazen told TIME.

But that still doesn’t answer the question of why static cling is at its worst in the winter. For that we’ll need to shift gears briefly from atomic physics to meteorology: According to WCCO Minneapolis meteorologist Chris Shaffer, cold air means dry air (anyone who’s gone through multiple bottles of hand cream in January can attest to this).

In the summertime, water molecules in the air attract most surplus protons or electrons around you, so charges on your clothes or hair rarely stay imbalanced long enough for you to notice them. But when the air outside is cold and ill-equipped to retain moisture, these charges can quickly get out of control.

That doesn’t mean you’re forced to live with static cling until spring rolls around. There are ways to take the seasonal annoyance into your own hands: When getting dressed in the morning, keep a spray bottle filled with water and a tablespoon of fabric softener nearby. A spritz or two should be enough to tame sticky fabrics when the air is dry. For static that disrupts your ‘do, a little hair spray will work to the same effect. And it’s important not to underestimate the power of dryer sheets. The positively charged material combats the negative charges that build up as your clothes dry, and they can even be used outside the laundry room to wipe down unruly hair.

How much would it cost to be Santa Claus?

Kynan Eng:

It will cost $24.3 billion to make the toys, plus $683 million to deliver them by ocean and road freight (delivery time 2 months). Or, if it absolutely, positively must be there overnight, air freight will cost $95.8 billion before discounts. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough planes in the world to deliver everything in one day and airport capacity is limited, so it will take around 5 days if every commercial and military plane in the world (40,000 planes total) is pressed into service. Further details below.

How many kids in the world? Where are they?

Around 27 percent of the world’s population is aged 0–14, according to the CIA. As a crude approximation, we can extrapolate that to 32.8 percent of the world being aged 0–17. People are spread out around the world as shown in the list below, as of August 2016. Note that some regions of the world have a higher proportion of kids, but we will ignore this factor for the purposes of the calculation.

Population by Regions in the World (2016)

• North America: 579 million (190 million kids)
• South America: 423 million (139 million kids)
• Europe + Russia: 887 million (291 million kids)
• Africa: 1216 million (399 million kids)
• India: 1252 million (411 million kids)
• East Asia/Oceania: 3043 million (988 million kids)

TOTAL: 7.4 billion (2.43 billion kids)

How expensive to produce a toy?

In 2000, one McDonald’s Happy Meal toy cost 43 cents to produce. Let’s be generous, and say that we expend a production cost of $10 per child on toys, including packaging and wrapping paper. We will also assume that these toys weigh a total of 2 kg per child and a volume of 0.01 m3, including packaging. So our toy budget is $24.3 billion and we have to ship 4.86 billion kg, with a volume of 48.6 million m3.

Where are we shipping from?

Depending on who you ask, Santa Claus lives in one of several locations:

• Alaska, USA
• Rovanemi, Finland
• Kakslauttanen, Finland

However, in reality, modern Santa produces in and around Shenzhen, China. His northern residence serves mainly as a theme park, marketing headquarters, and tax haven. So everything must be shipped from Shenzhen or nearby Hong Kong.

Shipping cost: Ocean + road freight

The most cost-effective way to send stuff is by ship and then road. The data here comes from an online freight calculator. A standard 40-foot shipping container has an interior volume of 67.6 m3, of which about 60 m3 is usable after accounting for fork lift pallets, etc. So we can fit 6000 presents into each container. Therefore we will need to ship 405,000 containers. The world’s largest container ships can each carry upwards of 9000 containers, so we will need only 45 ships to carry all of the presents. The ocean shipping costs are broken down below ($cost/container x number of containers):

• North America: Hong Kong – Los Angeles: $1400 x 31667 → $44.3 million
• South America: Hong Kong – Panama: $1450 x 23167 → $33.6 million
• Europe + Russia: Hong Kong – Rotterdam: $750 x 48500 → $36.4 million
• Africa: Hong Kong – Port Said (Egypt): $625 x 66500 → $41.6 million
• India: Hong Kong – Mumbai: $600 x 68500 → $41.1 million
• Asia: Hong Kong – Shanghai: $400 x 507167 → $39.5 million

For the road shipping cost, we will make a wild assumption that the average road distance is about 2400 miles, which is about the distance from Los Angeles to Philadelphia. This costs around $1100 per container in the USA, which we will use as the overall cost. So we get:

Total ocean + road freight cost = $236M + $446M = $683M

Shipping cost: Air freight

The point of origin will be either Shenzhen Bao’an International Airport or Hong Kong International Airport, which are very close to each other. Air freight requires two air legs (Hong Kong → regional hub → destination city) and one road leg. The exception is within Asia, which requires just one flight. The first-leg air freight costs are as shown below (cost quoted per present).

• North America: Hong Kong – Los Angeles: $19 → $3.61 billion
• South America: Hong Kong – Panama: $20 → $2.78 billion
• Europe + Russia: Hong Kong – Frankfurt: $19 → $5.53 billion
• Africa: Hong Kong – Port Said (Egypt): $22 → $8.78 billion
• India: Hong Kong – Mumbai: $25 → $10.28 billion
• Asia: Hong Kong – Beijing: $21 → $20.7 billion

Total first leg: $51.7 billion, plus second leg ($18/present): $43.7 billion, plus road: $446 million = $95.8 billion

Do we have enough planes? In short, no. In 2015, FedEx shipped 16.02 billion tonne-km of air freight, while the top 10 companies combined shopped 85.528 billion tonne-km. This works out to shipping our load 17600 km—so it would be possible to do it only if every air freight company could delivery their annual capacity in one day. Modern cargo aircraft range in capacity from around 39,780 kg (Boeing 757–200 freighter) to 134,200 kg (Boeing 747–8F). If we take an average payload of 80,000 kg per plane, we will need 60,750 long-haul flights, plus the same number of short-haul flights. The world has about 20,000 civilian aircraft and 20,000 military aircraft, but most of them are not long-haul—so we will need some sort of well-organized short-hop relay system.

Another bottleneck is the number of airports. The capacity of a modern airport is around one take-off every 60 seconds, which is 1440 flights/day. There are 10 civilian airports within 300 miles of the area, so we can start around 15,000 flights/day. So it will take around four days to get all of the stuff out by air. After that, regional and local airports can handle the traffic easily—the world already handles around 100,000 scheduled flights per day.

This post originally appeared on Quora. Click here to view.