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A solar-powered society is not as unreasonable as it may seem. While Tesla CEO Elon Musk has told state governors about how the United States could easily switch to sun power using a small patch of land, only around 10 percent of the country's energy is renewable. A new analysis published last week shows how most countries around the world could make the switch using just a tiny fraction of national space.

Price comparison website Finder.com has produced an interactive map that shows how the world could move onto solar energy. The group found that around 87 percent of countries could meet their power demands with solar panels covering less than five percent of the land area. The world could power itself on just 1.1 million square kilometers of solar panels, less than the size of South Africa.

"While, of course, we can't replace South Africa with solar panels, spreading this area out across the world does seem like something we could achieve in the future," the team writes.

Just three countries would need more solar panels than its land area to meet its energy needs: Bahrain would need 156 percent of its land space, Hong Kong needs 213 percent of its land space, and the city-state of Singapore would need a staggering 830 percent of its land space to go all-solar.

On the whole, though, the findings show how an all-solar future would use surprisingly little land for many countries. The United States, for example, would use a small block for power production:

It's a small amount, but still notably larger than the figure Musk gave at the National Governors Association meeting in July, where he told 30 representatives that the country needs just 100 square miles of solar panels (or 259 square kilometers), combined with a battery pack around one square mile.

Canada would also use very little space to provide energy for its 37 million people:

China, the world's most populous country, would require a small patch of land for its 1.4 billion people. The country has made big strides in the switch, including the 850 megawatt-capacity Longyangxia Dam Solar Park by the Tibetan plateau, one of the largest solar farms in the world stretching over 10 square miles, enough for 140,000 homes. A full switch would look something like this:

The same goes for Russia, the world's largest country:

Not every country would find it straightforward to switch. Germany has an impressive track record with renewables, reaching a level of 85 percent usage in April 2017, but its 82 million people would need to cover most of the country to meet their energy needs from solar alone:

North Korea would require very little land:

South Korea, on the other hand, would have a much harder time:

The team used the following equation to work out the number of solar panels required:

Energy (kilowatt-hours) equals total solar panel area (square meters) multiplied by solar panel yield or efficiency (percent) multiplied by annual average solar radiation on tilted panels not including shadings multiplied by performance ratio

For energy the group looked at consumption based on the CIA World Factbook, yield and performance ratio used the standard figures provided on the Photovoltaic Software website that recommends the equation, while annual average solar radiation came from OpenSolarDB. Countries with missing data in the World Factbook or OpenSolarDB were left out of the map - which notably leaves out a large section of Latin America.

See the full list of countries below:

Afghanistan - 470 square km (0.1 percent)

Albania - 150 square km (0.6 percent)

Algeria - 3,010 square km (0.1 percent)

Andorra - 2 square km (0.3 percent)

Angola - 480 square km (0 percent)

Argentina - 7,380 square km (0.3 percent)

Armenia - 250 square km (0.9 percent)

Australia - 6,270 square km (0.1 percent)

Austria - 2,530 square km (3.1 percent)

Azerbaijan - 1,680 square km (2 percent)

Bahrain - 1,200 square km (156.3 percent)

Bangladesh - 2,810 square km (2.2 percent)

Belarus - 3,640 square km (1.8 percent)

Belgium - 6,240 square km (20.6 percent)

Benin - 140 square km (0.1 percent)

Bhutan - 30 square km (0.1 percent)

Bosnia and Herzegovina - 280 square km (0.6 percent)

Botswana - 80 square km (0 percent)

Brunei Darussalam - 280 square km (5.3 percent)

Bulgaria - 840 square km (0.8 percent)

Burkina Faso - 60 square km (0 percent)

Burundi - 10 square km (0 percent)

Cambodia - 140 square km (0.1 percent)

Cameroon - 200 square km (0 percent)

Canada - 24,010 square km (0.3 percent)

Cape Verde - 20 square km (0.4 percent)

Central African Republic - 10 square km (0 percent)

Chad - 10 square km (0 percent)

Chile - 2,040 square km (0.3 percent)

China - 106,200 square km (1.1 percent)

Comoros - 3 square km (0.2 percent)

Republic of the Congo - 220 square km (0.1 percent)

Democratic Republic of the Congo - 130 square km (0 percent)

Cote DIvoire - 300 square km (0.1 percent)

Croatia - 730 square km (1.3 percent)

Cyprus - 150 square km (1.6 percent)

Czech Republic - 2,360 square km (3.1 percent)

Denmark - 1,600 square km (3.8 percent)

Djibouti - 20 square km (0.1 percent)

Egypt - 6,400 square km (0.6 percent)

Eritrea - 10 square km (0 percent)

Estonia - 330 square km (0.8 percent)

Ethiopia - 200 square km (0 percent)

Fiji - 60 square km (0.3 percent)

Finland - 2,450 square km (0.8 percent)

France - 13,120 square km (2.4 percent)

Gabon - 130 square km (0.1 percent)

Gambia - 10 square km (0.1 percent)

Georgia - 350 square km (0.5 percent)

Germany - 86,460 square km (24.8 percent)

Ghana - 320 square km (0.1 percent)

Greece - 1,590 square km (1.2 percent)

Guinea - 50 square km (0 percent)

Guinea-Bissau - 10 square km (0 percent)

Hong Kong - 2,230 square km (212.5 percent)

Hungary - 2,230 square km (2.5 percent)

Iceland - 360 square km (0.4 percent)

India - 22,730 square km (0.8 percent)

Indonesia - 8,750 square km (0.5 percent)

Iran - 17,620 square km (1.1 percent)

Iraq - 3,060 square km (0.7 percent)

Ireland - 1,600 square km (2.3 percent)

Israel - 1,520 square km (7 percent)

Italy - 10,950 square km (3.7 percent)

Japan - 29,170 square km (8 percent)

Jordan - 740 square km (0.8 percent)

Kazakhstan - 2,340 square km (0.1 percent)

Kenya - 270 square km (0 percent)

North Korea - 140 square km (0.1 percent)

South Korea - 19,130 square km (19.6 percent)

Kuwait - 3,100 square km (17.4 percent)

Kyrgyzstan - 230 square km (0.1 percent)

Laos - 30 square km (0 percent)

Latvia - 460 square km (0.7 percent)

Lebanon - 530 square km (5.2 percent)

Lesotho - 20 square km (0.1 percent)

Liberia - 20 square km (0 percent)

Libya - 1,100 square km (0.1 percent)

Liechtenstein - 3 square km (1.9 percent)

Lithuania - 620 square km (1 percent)

Luxembourg - 460 square km (17.9 percent)

Macedonia - 160 square km (0.6 percent)

Madagascar - 50 square km (0 percent)

Malawi - 30 square km (0 percent)

Malaysia - 5,350 square km (1.6 percent)

Maldives - 30 square km (10.1 percent)

Mali - 30 square km (0 percent)

Malta - 130 square km (40.8 percent)

Mauritania - 50 square km (0 percent)

Mauritius - 80 square km (3.9 percent)

Mexico - 27,890 square km (1.4 percent)

Moldova - 360 square km (1.1 percent)

Mongolia - 140 square km (0 percent)

Morocco - 1,030 square km (0.2 percent)

Mozambique - 250 square km (0 percent)

Myanmar - 610 square km (0.1 percent)

Namibia - 80 square km (0 percent)

Netherlands - 9,720 square km (28.9 percent)

New Caledonia - 60 square km (0.3 percent)

New Zealand - 1,520 square km (0.6 percent)

Niger - 40 square km (0 percent)

Nigeria - 2,320 square km (0.3 percent)

Norway - 4,230 square km (1.2 percent)

Oman - 2,150 square km (0.7 percent)

Pakistan - 4,380 square km (0.6 percent)

Palestinian Territory - 50 square km (0.9 percent)

Philippines - 1,760 square km (0.6 percent)

Poland - 6,550 square km (2.1 percent)

Portugal - 1,490 square km (1.6 percent)

Qatar - 3,070 square km (26.5 percent)

Romania - 2,210 square km (1 percent)

Russia - 60,980 square km (0.4 percent)

Rwanda - 20 square km (0.1 percent)

Sao Tome and Principe - 3 square km (0.3 percent)

Saudi Arabia - 14,410 square km (0.7 percent)

Senegal - 150 square km (0.1 percent)

Sierra Leone - 20 square km (0 percent)

Singapore - 5,890 square km (830.2 percent)

Slovakia - 1,220 square km (2.5 percent)

Slovenia - 410 square km (2 percent)

Somalia - 20 square km (0 percent)

South Africa - 3,310 square km (0.3 percent)

Spain - 7,940 square km (1.6 percent)

Sri Lanka - 410 square km (0.7 percent)

Sudan - 310 square km (0 percent)

Swaziland - 20 square km (0.1 percent)

Sweden - 3,130 square km (0.8 percent)

Switzerland - 1,660 square km (4.2 percent)

Syria - 780 square km (0.4 percent)

Taiwan - 6,860 square km (18.9 percent)

Tajikistan - 160 square km (0.1 percent)

Tanzania - 260 square km (0 percent)

Thailand - 10,820 square km (2.1 percent)

Togo - 40 square km (0.1 percent)

Trinidad and Tobago - 2,370 square km (46.2 percent)

Tunisia - 810 square km (0.5 percent)

Turkey - 9,420 square km (1.2 percent)

Turkmenistan - 4,520 square km (1 percent)

Uganda - 90 square km (0 percent)

Ukraine - 5,390 square km (0.9 percent)

UAE - 9,980 square km (11.9 percent)

UK - 29,690 square km (12.3 percent)

US - 129,390 square km (1.4 percent)

Uzbekistan - 1,100 square km (0.3 percent)

Vietnam - 2,880 square km (0.9 percent)

Yemen - 410 square km (0.1 percent)

Zimbabwe - 120 square km (0 percent)

Hello! You've made it to the end of the article. Nice. Here's a related video you might like: "Three Times Elon Musk Failed Harder Than You Ever Will"

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Map Reveals How the World Could Switch to Solar Using a Tiny Amount of Land

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A solar energy-powered society is not that unreasonable. While Tesla CEO ELon Musk is pushing a change in the United States, a Finder.com map shows how most countries could switch to renewable energy with a small amount of land usage enabled by solar panel technology.

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Solar Energy: Finder.com Map Reveals How the World Could Make the Switch | Inverse

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Nose-pickers, nude bathers, and speedy drivers beware: there's a new eye in the sky that can see you doing your most private activities, and in unprecedented detail.

Today, British startup Earth-i published the first collection of high-quality, color image taken from its VividX2 satellite, the first of 15 that the company hopes will comprise its "constellation."

The video, set to the most inspirational music humanly possible, shows off the satellite's ability to capture high-quality, color video footage of the everyday goings-on of Earth. The satellite boasts a resolution of about 60 centimeters at up to 50 frames per second - enough to see individual cars zipping down the highway.

After just a two-minute flyover, the satellite is able to construct a composite video of the scene. It can also render 3D models of whatever it's looking at, which could help first responders and other disaster response teams track floods or structural damage to buildings after a major storm, for example.

For now, officials can use drones to capture aerial footage of events like natural disasters or wildfires, but a detailed, nearly-live feed from a satellite can let first responders and other officials better see the big picture so that they can better distribute people and resources.

On its web site, Earth-i claims that its VividX2 satellite will be able to help with disaster relief efforts, oil spill monitoring, geographical mapping (thanks to its 3D models), and managing large tracts of farmland.

Oh, and it can do some surveillance and reconnaissance, too, for militaries or private citizens (it's far from the only company to offer these services).

Down the road, after more satellites are launched, Earth-i hopes to offer customers access to a 2-minute video a video feed of a specific location or track moving targets like cars or airplanes.

If that sounds kind of freaky to you, well, you're not alone. The future is full of surveillance for hire, in unprecedented resolution.

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Startup's crazy high-res satellite can see you pick your nose in traffic

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Nose-pickers, nude bathers, and speedy drivers beware: there's a new eye in the sky that can see you doing your most private activities, and in unprecedented detail. Today, British startup Earth-i published the first collection of high-quality, color image taken from its VividX2 satellite, the first of 15 that the company hopes will comprise its "constellation."

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Startup’s Crazy High-Res Satellite Can See You Pick Your Nose In Traffic

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U.S. soldiers are revealing sensitive and dangerous information by jogging - The Washington Post

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Strava's Global Heat Map shows where soldiers may be sleeping, exercising, patrolling and eating in some of the most sensitive and secretive military sites in the world.

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U.S. soldiers are revealing sensitive and dangerous information by jogging - The Washington Post

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Scientists and politicians all agree - climate change and global warming are not just myths. They are a fact. This compilation of maps will show you what are the reasons behind it and what are the consequences of that process.

I'm a professional always thinking outside the box and a self-confessed gadget addict. As a son of a professor of cartography I was surrounded by maps all my life and as a result spatial way of thinking and seeing reality is naturally embedded in who I am.

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Top 11 maps that ultimately explain climate change and its impact

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Scientists and politicians all agree - climate change and global warming are not just myths. They are a fact. This compilation of maps will show you what are the reasons behind it and what are the consequences of that process. An atlas of pollution: the world in carbon dioxide emissions China overtook the US as...

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Love and geography go together well! These satellite images from TerraServer.com reveal that love is all around us.

1. Galešnjak Island, Croatia

Image taken on 2016-10-31, 43.9785357, 15.3811181

2. Sri Sathya Sai Sanjeevani Hospital, Raipur, India

Image taken on 2016-11-03, 21.210944,81.8106802

3. Heart of Voh, New Caledonia

Image taken on 2016-08-07, -20.9368846, 164.654972

4. Three heart-shaped ponds near the Halmstad Airport, Sweden

Image taken on 2015-08-20, 56.679884, 12.812780

5. Heart Lake, Canada

Image taken on 2016-10-10, 45.0189738,-76.9007247

6. Heart Shaped Field in Kingswood, UK

Image taken on 2016-08-30, 51.607267, -2.386522

7. Heart-shaped pond in Strongsville, Ohio

Image taken on 2016-08-03, 41.303921,-81.901693

8. Heart-Shaped Island-South Korea

Image taken on 2015-03-08, 34.781691, 127.557114

I'm a professional always thinking outside the box and a self-confessed gadget addict. As a son of a professor of cartography I was surrounded by maps all my life and as a result spatial way of thinking and seeing reality is naturally embedded in who I am.

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Love from above. Satellite images reveal that love is all around us. - Geoawesomeness

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Tweet Share on Facebook Share Share Email Pin Pocket Flipboard Love and geography go together well! These satellite images from TerraServer.com reveal that love is all around us. 1. Galešnjak Island, Croatia Image taken on 2016-10-31, 43.9785357, 15.3811181 2. Sri Sathya Sai Sanjeevani Hospital, Raipur, India Image taken on 2016-11-03, 21.210944,81.8106802 3.

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TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an amazing initiative that organizes events where inspiring people share their inspiring research, work and ideas. For the upcoming holidays we've rounded up 20 of the most inspirational and interesting TED talks about maps and geography out there. No matthew if you want it or not watching YouTube videos will most likely end up in your Christmas break's agenda. This compilation will make it not a total waste of time.

1. Hans Rosling: The best stats you've ever seen

3. Aris Venetikidis: Making sense of maps

4. Daniele Quercia: Happy maps

5. Eric Sanderson: New York - before the City

6. Parag Khanna maps the future of countries

7. Frederic Kaplan: How I built an information time machine

8. Dan Berkenstock: The world is one big dataset. Now, how to photograph it ...

9. Ben Wellington: How we found the worst place to park in New York City - using big data

10. Steven Johnson: A guided tour of the Ghost Map

11. Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos augmented-reality maps

12. Stephen Lawler: Look! Up in the sky! It's Virtual Earth!

13. Eric Berlow and Sean Gourley: Mapping ideas worth spreading

14. Dave Troy: Social maps that reveal a city's intersections - and separations

15. Parag Khanna: How megacities are changing the map of the world

16. Allan Jones: A map of the brain

17. Lalitesh Katragadda: Making maps to fight disaster, build economies

18. Derek Sivers: Weird, or just different?

19. Greg Asner: Ecology from the air

20. Danny Dorling: Imagining the world anew - redrawing the world map

I'm a professional always thinking outside the box and a self-confessed gadget addict. As a son of a professor of cartography I was surrounded by maps all my life and as a result spatial way of thinking and seeing reality is naturally embedded in who I am.

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Top 20 most inspiring TED videos about maps and geography - Geoawesomeness

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Tweet Share on Facebook Share Share Email Pin Pocket Flipboard TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an amazing initiative that organizes events where inspiring people share their inspiring research, work and ideas. For the upcoming holidays we've rounded up 20 of the most inspirational and interesting TED talks about maps and geography out there.

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Drones and smartphones help fight malaria in Tanzania - Engadget

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Isis plotting to drop biological bombs from drones on European cities, terror chief warns

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Check out this article from USA TODAY:

Like going 'from an old flip-phone to an iPhone X:' New weather satellite promises quantum leap in forecasting

https://usat.ly/2idf90P

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Check out this article from USA TODAY:

Like going 'from an old flip-phone to an iPhone X:' New weather satellite promises quantum leap in forecasting

https://usat.ly/2idf90P

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Despite investment into alternative energies, oil is still the world's most traded commodity. Want to know where it comes from? Here are the world's oil exporters, ranked by revenue and global market share.

howmuch.net

Top heavy

Over 100 countries export crude oil, but the players at the top run the game. Many low-ranking nations represent less than 0.25% of the world's market. For them, oil exports are better counted in hundreds of dollars than millions. To demonstrate the unevenness, consider this: five exporters make up nearly 50% of all oil exports. It takes 100 countries to comprise the other half.

Top 10 Exporters of Crude Oil

These are the top ten exporters of crude oil, ranked by earnings and their percentage of the world market.

1. Saudi Arabia - $136.2 Billion | 20.1%

2. Russia - $73.7 Billion | 10.9%

3. Iraq - $46.3 Billion | 6.8%

4. Canada - $39.5 Billion | 5.8%

5. United Arab Emirates - $38.9 Billion | 5.7%

6. Kuwait - $30.7 Billion | 4.5%

7. Iran - $29.1 Billion | 4.3%

8. Nigeria - $27 Billion | 4.0%

9. Angola - $25.2 Billion | 3.7%

10. Norway - $22.6 Billion | 3.3%

One thing you should know is that earnings are measured in millions of U.S. dollars. In other words, when we say that Kuwait's export revenue is $30,700 million, what we really mean is that their oil revenue is over $30,000,000,000!

Saudi Arabia is king

When it comes to oil, Saudi Arabia is unmatched. They command 1/5th of the world's oil exports and earned almost twice as much as runner-up Russia, even though Russia is eight times bigger.

As of this writing, Saudi Arabia is a hotbed of political uncertainty. The country has been inching closer to military conflictsagainst Iran, its regional rival, and the Crown Prince recently arrested several members of the royal family. Both could have an impact on their oil exports.

Surprise: U.S. ranks #20

The U.S. has a reputation for being an oil country, and rightfully so. Still, the data shows that our role in the export market is smaller than we might expect.

Of all global exporters, the United States ranks 20th, behind countries like Angola and Kazakhstan. We own only 1.2% of the export market, and our biggest neighbors, Canada and Mexico, export much more oil than we do.

Who is tomorrow's big dog?

Saudi Arabia holds the top spot, but their political instability could make them less attractive partners to buyers in the coming months. Meanwhile, Russia is making oil movesall over the world, and America continues to make its influence known.

In the end, it may not be the oil itself, but national ambition, that determines the top crude exporter of the future.

Sources: Table 1.1

Get the latest Oil WTI price here.

Read the original article on Howmuch.net. Howmuch.net is a cost information site. Copyright 2017. Follow Howmuch.net on Twitter.

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MAPPED: The world's biggest oil exporters

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Despite investment into alternative energies, oil is still the world's most traded commodity. Want to know where it comes from? Here are the world's oil exporters, ranked by revenue and global market share. Over 100 countries export crude oil, but the players at the top run the game.

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The company photographing every spot of land on earth, every single day

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The company photographing every spot of land on earth, every single day

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Planet, the American satellite company, is now snapping a picture of every part of earth's landmass every single day.

Analyzing the imagery over time promises to unlock critical information about the economy and the environment for Planet's customers, which range from investors to activists. It's also a milestone in humanity's ongoing efforts to understand the planet it calls home.

Last year, Planet said it was photographing a third of the world's land each day. In February of this year it launched 88 satellites on an Indian rocket, and last week it launched 10 more satellites on an Orbital ATK rocket from California. Most of the images they take are at a resolution of three meters (10 feet) per pixel. By taking images daily, the company can track changes in the physical world, like how quickly the temporary city of Burning Man rises out of the desert:

Planet's imagery can track the effects of sudden events like Hurricane Harvey or long-term problems like California's drought, among many other applications.

Planet is seven years old and launched its first satellites only in 2014, but it now has more commercial satellites in orbit than any other: 182 of its Dove satellites, each of which weighs 5 kg (11 lb), plus 19 larger satellites that it acquired by buying two other earth-imaging companies.

The firm's founders-Will Marshall, Robbie Shingler, and Chris Boshuizen, now an entrepreneur-in-residence at the venture fund Data Collective-met at NASA's Ames research center in Mountain View, California. They took their understanding of small spacecraft to a garage in nearby Cupertino, and made daily imaging of the entire earth their "mission one." Designing low-cost but effective cubesats to snap pictures in orbit, they launched their satellites in waves, adding new features to each wave, and raising over $150 million to back their business.

Planet's speed and fundraising success allowed it to get ahead of a potential glut of competitors by buying them out. It purchased a satellite constellation from the German firm Blackbridge in 2015 and bought TerraBella, formerly SkyBox, from Google in 2016. These satellites take sharper pictures than the Doves, at one meter per pixel.

When I visited to Planet's San Francisco headquarters this summer, Marshall said that Planet's ultimate goal is to answer questions with the data it collects; developing space technology is just a means to that end. "We are not an aerospace company," he told me. If "mission one" was to collect the data, "mission two" appears to be making it available to and useful for people who aren't experts in geospatial information analysis.

On the software side, that means figuring out what kind of questions possible users-from a farmer in Iowa or a forest manager in Brazil to a hedge fund in Singapore or a government ministry in Nigeria-will need answered, and how to deliver that information in the most useful format. Planet will also add higher-resolution imagery from the satellites it acquired to its platform, and continue upgrading the Dove-now on its 13th operational version-to take clearer images, last longer in space, and transmit more data back to earth.

"Planet will index physical change on Earth the same way Google indexed text on the internet," CEO Marshall wrote yesterday on Planet's blog. "Questions will typically be framed to search an area for a feature (such as a plane or a road), a count of features (how many planes at San Francisco Airport), a time that a feature appeared, or to quantify some aspect of temporal or spatial change (sq km of land damaged by wildfire)."

Space market observers like Hoyt Davidson, who runs Near Earth LLC, a boutique, space-focused investment bank, tend to see Planet as the likeliest of a new generation of space companies to list on stock exchanges. The company hasn't commented on such speculation. But if that is its goal, being able to say it can now take a picture of the whole earth every day will no doubt bolster its case for getting investors, and the case for investing in space more generally.

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The company photographing every spot of land on earth, every single day

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Planet, the American satellite company, is now snapping a picture of every part of earth's landmass every single day. Analyzing the imagery over time promises to unlock critical information about the economy and the environment for Planet's customers, which range from investors to activists. It's also a milestone in humanity's ongoing efforts to understand the...

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Mapping Poverty to Save More Than a Billion Lives in the World's Most Remote Slums

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Mapping Poverty to Save More Than a Billion Lives in the World's Most Remote Slums

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Early on a recent morning, woodsmoke wafted above the murmur of village life in Gorama, Sierra Leone, as Rupert Allen sat sweating in the shade of a concrete veranda. A member of Missing Maps-a humanitarian project that maps parts of the world vulnerable to natural disasters, conflicts and disease-Allen tapped away on a small laptop next to a black goat and a small, tame monkey. Connected by a smartphone hotspot, Allen was in charge of mapping the nearby area.

This summer, the Missing Maps team spent months traveling to remote parts of Sierra Leone by motorcycle to chart them for the first time. Despite the ubiquity of Google Maps, there are many places on Earth where people and the terrain they live on haven't been mapped. Globally, over a billion people are unaccounted for-literally not attached to a physical address in cartography or databases, which means they often don't receive basic services. That number is growing; by 2020, there will be 1.5 billion people living in slums, the majority of whom are unmapped. Accounting for these people is important not just to better understand our world but also because there's a direct link between people being not accounted for on maps and the risk of catastrophe for them-and, as the Ebola outbreak demonstrated, for the rest of us.

Ivan Gayton, the founder of Missing Maps, says his crew ventured so far into the bush in Sierra Leone this summer that even local team members were sometimes astonished when they came across villages where their maps had showed blank spaces. "You're watching light dawn in their eyes, as they see no one has ever been here-no one has ever cared enough to come here," he says. "There's just people living in the forest hacking their own roads with machetes, essentially unknown to anyone."

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Gayton first became interested in cartography in 2010 when he was battling one of the worst cholera epidemics in history in post-earthquake Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Then a field logistician for Doctors Without Borders, Gayton and the other medics in Port-au-Prince asked all the patients who walked in where they lived. But because the team didn't have accurate maps of the city, they couldn't send help-to trace contacts or find other sick people-to the right places.

Knowing where patients are coming from, and therefore being able to track the progress of a disease spatially, may seem like common sense now, but modern epidemiology itself is comparatively new. It wasn't founded until 1854, when Dr. John Snow mapped an outbreak of cholera in London. The developed world has since taken spatial epidemiology-the study of the distribution of health outcomes-to an extreme. By comparing geographic data to medical records in Europe and the United States today, health workers can now predict life expectancy by mailing address. But in vast swaths of the world, it's still impossible to trace disease outbreaks even the way Snow did more than 150 years ago, because there are no accurate maps.

Back in Haiti, feeling desperate about the fast-moving epidemic, Gayton asked Google to help chart which slums had cholera patients-"like calling the Bat Cave," he jokes. Luckily, Google was already working with earthquake disaster relief, like the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team that had been mapping destroyed areas of Port-au-Prince. With the use of these new maps, Gayton was able to pin where groups of patients were coming from and identify potential contamination sources, such as infected wells. The effect was like magic, he says. "The conversion rate instantly turned around."

This success spurred Gayton to help organize a map-making collaboration between tech-industry volunteers like Google and OpenStreetMap and nongovernmental organizations like Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross. Missing Maps now regularly holds "mapathons," in which volunteers look at satellite photos to find towns and villages in regions at risk of disease or conflict. That data are then sent to locals in those areas, who often go out with printed copies of the satellite images and label street names and neighborhoods in their own language. (To be useful, the maps have to be locally relevant. Imagine a doctor trying to locate a patient in a slum without knowing how to spell or even pronounce the street names.)

Over the past few years, Missing Maps has made much progress, but in many places satellite photos are either obscured or inaccurate. That's why Gayton decided to privately fund an expedition to Sierra Leone this summer, collecting donations but mostly paying out of his own pocket. For weeks, a small team on motorcycles mapped remote parts of the country and trained locals to use their smartphones and bikes to record geographic information about their environs. All that spatial data will be connected to local place names and then shared online. Since Sierra Leone was part of the Ebola outbreak in 2014, says Gayton, "ultimately our proof of concept is that we make a map that will [be able to] stop Ebola. I like maps, but what I care about is access to health care. The outcome I'm looking for is tangible evidence that it helps saves lives."

A review recently published in the International Journal of Epidemiology found that the lack of spatial data was, in fact, a key factor in West Africa's Ebola outbreak. "Infectious diseases have a spatial structure," the author, Tom Koch, writes, so mapping these areas has become a low-tech race against time-and the next epidemic.

Gayton's already putting his initial data to use in collaboration with Dr. Ed Monk, a visiting resident at a small hospital in Segbwema, a town in eastern Sierra Leone that serves 30,000 people. "As soon as you walk on the wards, you can tell there's been a better time for the hospital," Monk says. When Segbwema had a bustling diamond mine, it was the home of a renowned Lassa fever virus center, but during the civil war on and off from 1991 through 2002, the railroad was gutted and the hospital where Monk now works was temporarily closed. Today, the old water tower outside the hospital has a shrapnel hole through it, and the wards are sprawling rows of cots with improvised mosquito netting. But what the hospital does have is surprisingly good patient records, thanks in part to Gayton's efforts.

This summer, Gayton mapped all the dwellings in the catchment area, finding 3,000 hamlets by going door to door and "asking them, 'What do you call this village?'" He produced a gazetteer, a map with both statistical and geographical information, for the hospital registrar. Now, when patients come in, their homes can be identified on a map.

Ka-Ping Yee, a former Google software engineer who visited Port-au-Prince in 2010, came to the hospital to help train the staff on how to use the gazetteer. Ping also built a program to collect medical data, making it possible to track where patients are coming from. "Let's say one village has so many malaria cases," says Solomon Musa Vandi, a community health nurse at the hospital. "We go there, we find out why. That's what we lacked in the time of Ebola in this country. If people had this sort of facility, that disease would not have spread."

Gayton's team in Sierra Leone has, of course, run into challenges, large and small. In June, a team on motorcycles was very deep in the diamond hills, after hand-poling a ferry across a river and navigating flooded roads where the bikes were up to their gas tanks in water. A team member came down with a fever. "In the back of my mind, I was thinking, If he gets worse, what do I do? There's no one to call," says Allen. They mapped the village, and the stricken man, shaking with malaria, had to be held upright on the back of a motorcycle for the return trip.

The team also had to struggle with the enormous physical challenges of a technologically sophisticated project in a country where neither electricity nor network signals are reliable. "We're building a playbook so anyone else in the world who wants to can replicate it," says Gayton, who's kept careful logs of the process. "This is how much it costs, this is how much we pay mappers, this the technology, the training manuals-you can just adapt it to the local context. I have one goal from this, and it's to get the rest of Africa mapped."

The communities Missing Maps are working in are often isolated and undereducated, far from government oversight or opportunities for education-places where, when something goes wrong, people have small chance to recover. "Local names are important," Allen says. "Geotags are critical. Terror spreads as fast as the epidemic itself in these communities."

He pauses. "The enemy is the unknown."

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One man's quest to put 1 billion people on a map for the first time

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Early on a recent morning, woodsmoke wafted above the murmur of village life in Gorama, Sierra Leone, as Rupert Allen sat sweating in the shade of a concrete veranda. A member of Missing Maps-a humanitarian project that maps parts of the world vulnerable to natural disasters, conflicts and disease-Allen tapped away on a small laptop next to a black goat and a small, tame monkey.

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32-bit vs. 64-bit — what’s the difference, and what does it mean for your PC?

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32-bit vs. 64-bit — what’s the difference, and what does it mean for your PC?

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You've probably seen 32-bit and 64-bit options available whenever you download an app, or install a game. Your PC might even have a sticker that says it has a 64-bit processor. But does it really matter? Most new PCs have a 64-bit processor, so what do you really need to know about 32-bit vs. 64-bit CPUs?

Well, for starters, if you're a Windows user, you've probably noticed that you have two Program Files folders - one labeled simply "Program Files" and the other labeled "Program Files (x86)." Understanding the difference between these two folders and why you have them in the first place is pretty important, especially if you've ever installed the wrong program in the wrong folder. It's the kind of thing you'll never notice until you accidentally do it and your apps start misbehaving.

The same, but different

First off, the reason you have those two folders is because there are currently two fundamentally different architectures used to manufacture computer processors, and as a result, there are two fundamentally different ways to write programs and apps for them. Applications all use shared resources on a Windows system; these are called DLL files, or Dynamic Link Libraries. They're basically just pooled libraries of common resources that many different apps will use. Windows puts them all in a single place to make things easier for software developers.

Those DLL files are written and structured in fundamentally different ways because they're meant to be used by 64-bit applications or 32-bit applications. If, for instance, a 32-bit application reaches out for a DLL and finds a 64-bit version, it's just going to stop working. Imagine going to a library to find a specific textbook, and then realizing that everything is in a foreign language. You'd likely leave and assume you went to the wrong place. The same basic principle applies here.

Wouldn't it be easier if you simply used 64-bit software on 64-bit systems, and ignore 32-bit software entirely? Well, not really. The problem is the 32-bit (x86) architecture has been around for a very long time, and there are still a host of applications that utilize 32-bit architecture. Modern 64-bit systems can run 32-bit and 64-bit software because of a very simple and easy solution: two separate Program Files directories. When 32-bit applications are sequestered to the appropriate x86 folder, Windows knows to serve up the right DLL, aka the 32-bit version. Everything in the regular Program Files directory, on the other hand, can access the other stuff, the good stuff.

So why does it even matter, why do we have these two different architectures at all?

What are bits?

The number of bits in a processor refers to the size of the data types that it handles and the size of its registry. Simply put, a 64-bit processor is more capable than a 32-bit processor because it can handle more data at once. A 64-bit processor is capable of storing more computational values, including memory addresses, which means it's able to access over four billion times as much physical memory than a 32-bit processor. That's just as big as it sounds. 64-bit processors are to 32-bit processors what the automobile is to the horse-drawn buggy.

The key difference: 32-bit processors are perfectly capable of handling a limited amount of RAM (in Windows, 4GB or less), and 64-bit processors are capable of utilizing much more. Of course, in order to achieve this, your operating system also needs to be designed to take advantage of the greater access to memory. This Microsoft page runs down memory limitations for multiple versions of Windows.

A horse-drawn cart will get you to work just as easily as a car will, barring any equine issues, but a car is a lot more capable - it can get you to work, or across the country and it can do it a lot faster than a horse can.

How many bits?

As a general rule, if you have under 4GB of RAM in your computer, you don't need a 64-bit CPU, but if you have 4GB or more, you do. While many users may find that a 32-bit processor provides them with enough performance and memory access, applications that tend to use large amounts of memory may show vast improvements with the upgraded processor. Image and video-editing software, 3D rendering utilities, and video games will make better use of a 64-bit architecture and operating system, especially if the machine has 8GB or even 16GB of RAM that can be divided among the applications that need it.

Through hardware emulation, it's possible to run 32-bit software and operating systems on a machine with a 64-bit processor. The opposite isn't true however, in that 32-bit processors cannot run software designed with 64-bit architecture in mind. This means if you want to take full advantage of your new processor you also need a new operating system, otherwise you won't experience any marked benefits over the 32-bit version of your hardware.

Operating System Differences

With an increase in the availability of 64-bit processors and larger capacities of RAM, Microsoft and Apple both have upgraded versions of their operating systems that are designed to take full advantage of the new technology.

In the case of Microsoft Windows, the basic versions of the operating systems put software limitations on the amount of RAM that can be used by applications, but even in the ultimate and professional version of the operating system, 4GB is the maximum usable memory the 32-bit version can handle. While the latest versions of a 64-bit operating system can increase the capabilities of a processor drastically, the real jump in power comes from software designed with this architecture in mind.

Software and Drivers

Applications with high performance demands already take advantage of the increase in available memory, with companies releasing 64-bit versions of their programs. This is especially useful in programs that can store a lot of information for immediate access, like image-editing software that opens multiple large files at the same time.

Video games are also uniquely equipped to take advantage of 64-bit processing and the increased memory that comes with it. Being able to handle more computations at once means more spaceships on screen without lagging and smoother performance from your graphics card, which doesn't have to share memory with other processes anymore.

Most software is backwards compatible, allowing you to run applications that are 32-bit in a 64-bit environment without any extra work or issues. Virus protection software ( these are our favorites) and drivers tend to be the exception to this rule, with hardware mostly requiring the proper version be installed in order to function correctly.
Updated on October 24, 2017 by Jon Martindale.

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32-bit vs. 64-bit - what's the difference, and what does it mean for your PC?

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You've probably seen 32-bit and 64-bit options available whenever you download an app, or install a game. Your PC might even have a sticker that says it has a 64-bit processor. But does it really matter? Most new PCs have a 64-bit processor, so what do you really need to know about 32-bit vs.

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Air traffic controllers may get a break from non-stop drone reports - Engadget

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Air traffic controllers may get a break from non-stop drone reports - Engadget

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Air traffic controllers may get a break from non-stop drone reports - Engadget

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Air traffic controllers have it bad enough managing full-size aircraft, but they face an extra headache when you throw drones in the mix. You see, controllers get calls when drone pilots want approval to fly within 5 miles of an airport -- and with an average of 250 reported close encounters per month, it's clear that some aren't even bothering with the formalities.

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How Do You Build a Competitive Racing Drone? http://flip.it/qKlIVS

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How Do You Build a Competitive Racing Drone? http://flip.it/qKlIVS

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Even a basic drone is a complicated piece of technology and machinery. A racing drone is even more high-tech, with lightweight components and custom-built parts inside. Here's what goes into the drones currently racing at the Red Bull Dr.One championships in Spielberg, Austria.
Image: Red Bull
Drone pilot Ross Kerker, who races under the name rekreK, explains in the video above how a first-person view (FPV) racing drone is different from the model you might buy off a store shelf. In a lot of ways, the racing drone is simpler: there's no GPS and no self-levelling, with every input being entirely manual and made through the controller in Kerker's hands.

Here's five points that make up the fundamentals of a racing drone:

1. A racing drone's main purpose is to go as fast as possible with maximum agility to navigate corners.

2. It has four motors which are all individually controlled. By changing the speed of each motor it allows the pilot to pitch forwards, roll left and right, swivel, and incline or decline.

3. The drone is controlled by a remote with two sticks, each which has four channels. That allows us to make the drone go anywhere we want it to.

4. Since we do 0-150kph in less than a second, you can't keep up with your normal eyes. A camera on the front films and sends a live video signal through an antenna at the back which is received by the goggles we wear. The goggles display the feed from the camera live, in first person.

5. The racing drones weigh around 500g and are all custom made. Every component is something I have selected or helped design so it will perform at its maximum.

Gizmodo Australia is gobbling up the news in a different timezone, so check them out if you need another Giz fix.

More Drones Posts:

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How Do You Build a Competitive Racing Drone?

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Even a basic drone is a complicated piece of technology and machinery. A racing drone is even more high-tech, with lightweight components and custom-built parts inside. Here's what goes into the drones currently racing at the Red Bull Dr.One championships in Spielberg, Austria.

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After Seeing These +15 Maps You’ll Never Look At The World The Same http://flip.it/.W4Lqd

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After Seeing These +15 Maps You’ll Never Look At The World The Same http://flip.it/.W4Lqd

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The reason why certain countries looks bigger or smaller than others is because of something called the Mercator Projection. Putting a 3D planet on a two-dimensional map was something of a challenge for early cartographers and so a Flemish geographer and cartographer named Gerardus Mercator came up with a solution. In 1569 he designed a map that could be accurately used for navigation purposes, but the downside was that his system distorted the size of objects depending on their position relative to the equator. Because of this, landmasses like Antarctica and Greenland appeared much larger than they actually are.

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After Seeing These +15 Maps You'll Never Look At The World The Same

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The reason why certain countries looks bigger or smaller than others is because of something called the Mercator Projection. Putting a 3D planet on a two-dimensional map was something of a challenge for early cartographers and so a Flemish geographer and cartographer named Gerardus Mercator came up with a solution.

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You need to see this footage of a racing drone zipping over the Swiss Alps http://flip.it/JVoLNw

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You need to see this footage of a racing drone zipping over the Swiss Alps http://flip.it/JVoLNw

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This footage shows what is possible with drone photography in the hands of a skilled pilot.

In 2017, footage shot by drone is nothing new. But a spectacular new first-person drone flyover of the Swiss Alps will drop your jaw - and quite possibly give you vertigo, too. Titled Elevations, the short film was shot by Gabriel Kocher, a Swiss physicist living in Montreal, who moonlights as a racing drone pilot. Having finished second in the Drone Racing League's Allianz World Championship earlier this year, Elevations is part of Kocher's Gab707 YouTube channel - designed to focus on more creative uses of drones as a way of exploring rugged landscapes.

"This shoot came about while I was hiking in the Swiss Alps in early September this year," Kocher told Digital Trends. "The drone is a small 220mm diameter custom-built racing drone made for long range that I built myself. It gets strapped to my backpack, along with all the photographic gear that I carry wherever I go. What makes this unique is that the drone is flown FPV [first-person view], through video glasses that allow me to see through a small camera placed on the drone. In contrast to regular camera rigs, this kind of machine brings through all the control movements made by the pilot, capturing much more of the sensation of flight. Its very high power-to-weight ratio - around 8:1 - allows it to get very close to obstacles and acrobatic flights."

The footage is accompanied by a second video offering an uncut, lower resolution look at the material shot by Kocher. The final edit includes an added sheen - although the only thing that's tweaked is the addition of driving background music and some footage stabilization to iron out wind-related wobbles.

"The biggest challenge in capturing this kind of footage is that it is shot at the edge of what the technology can do," Kocher continued. "Not outrunning the battery capacity is a key factor, but the hardest one is keeping the drone in view from the ground station. While I'm looking for a maximum of proximity to the terrain, dropping behind an obstacle will result in a control loss and likely a crash - so this is a constant memory and mental 3D-mapping game."

On this occasion, we think Kocher won this particular game!

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Footage of a racing drone zipping over the Swiss Alps will give you vertigo

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This footage shows what is possible with drone photography in the hands of a skilled pilot. In 2017, footage shot by drone is nothing new. But a spectacular new first-person drone flyover of the Swiss Alps will drop your jaw - and quite possibly give you vertigo, too.

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The U.S. economy is massive on a global scale, and much of the country's economic capabilities can be traced back to the innovation, knowledge, and productivity that tends to be clustered in urban areas.

The fact is that 80% of Americans live in cities - and the 10 largest metro areas alone combine for a whopping 34% of the country's total GDP.

Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

THE 10 LARGEST METRO AREAS BY GDP

Today's map comes to us from HowMuch.net, and it highlights recent data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis that estimates the GDP for each U.S. metro area in 2016:

Note: figures in chained 2009 dollars

Not surprisingly, New York City and its surrounding area is the breadwinner here with an annual economic output of $1.43 trillion - the largest for any city in the United States. Impressively, the GDP of the NYC metro area is even higher than those of most of the world's countries, including Australia, Mexico, and Spain.

It's also interesting that some metro areas punch above their weight in relation to their population figures. San Francisco is #7 on the list with a GDP of $406 billion, despite having the lowest population total of all of the top 10. Boston and D.C. can be classified similarly, each with a high economic output per capita.

TRENDING UP, TRENDING DOWN

While they can't quite compete with cities like New York and Chicago in terms of GDP or population, there are actually 300+ other metro areas in the country.

Here's a recent snapshot from the BEA of which cities are growing - and which are shrinking in terms of GDP:

Bureau of Economic Analysis via Visual Capitalist

The BEA noted that real gross domestic product (GDP) increased in 267 out of 382 metropolitan areas in 2016.

The biggest increase was a tie between Lake Charles, LA and Bend-Redmond, OR, each which had GDP climb by 8.1% from the last year. The city that saw the biggest drop was Odessa, TX, which fell -13.3%.

Read the original article on Visual Capitalist. Get rich, visual content on business and investing for free at the Visual Capitalist website, or follow Visual Capitalist on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn for the latest. Copyright 2017. Follow Visual Capitalist on Twitter.

More from Visual Capitalist:

SEE ALSO: This infographic lists all the cognitive biases humans experience

NOW WATCH: Why you won't find a garbage can near the 9/11 memorial

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MAPPED: The US cities with the biggest economies

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The U.S. economy is massive on a global scale, and much of the country's economic capabilities can be traced back to the innovation, knowledge, and productivity that tends to be clustered in urban areas. The fact is that 80% of Americans live in cities - and the 10 largest metro areas alone combine for a whopping 34% of the country's total GDP.

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Astonishing satellite images reveal islands stripped by Hurricane Irma - ABC News

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Astonishing satellite images reveal islands stripped by Hurricane Irma - ABC News

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A series of satellite images taken before and after Hurricane Irma carved a path through the Caribbean detail the extent of widespread damage left by the storm.

At least 37 people died in the Caribbean, and at least another seven in Florida, as a result of the hurricane which had wind speeds as strong as 160 miles per hour when it made landfall in Cuba.

Here's a look at the aftermath of Hurricane Irma at three locations in the Caribbean:

U.S. and British Virgin Islands

The widespread browning of the landscape across the U.S. Virgin Islands and British Virgin Islands is pictured in two images taken just over two weeks apart, before and after Irma. According to NASA, the browning is caused either by the green vegetation being ripped away or salt water being whipped up and killing leaves still on trees.

Barbuda

Homes just north of Barbuda Codrington Airport are pictured in various states of disrepair after the storm passed through the island in the eastern Caribbean. Antigua and Barbuda Prime Minister Gaston Browne compared the destruction on the island to "having a bomb literally thrown on a city."

Nanny Cay, Tortola, British Virgin Islands

Formerly lush vegetation near Nanny Cay on Tortola, the largest of the British Virgin Islands, was stripped and browned by the hurricane. Some boats docked at Nanny Cay Marina in the center of the image became unmoored.

Paraquita Bay, Tortola, British Virgin Islands

Paraquita Bay, on Tortola's southeastern coast, saw the destruction of several large structures on the left side of the image.

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Satellite images show destruction left by Hurricane Irma in Caribbean

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A series of satellite images taken before and after Hurricane Irma carved a path through the Caribbean detail the extent of widespread damage left by the storm. At least 37 people died in the Caribbean, and at least another seven in Florida, as a result of the hurricane which had wind speeds as...

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Hurricane Irma: Aerial photos show scale of devastation in Sint Maarten

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Hurricane Irma: Aerial photos show scale of devastation in Sint Maarten

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Aerial photos show enormous devastation caused by Hurricane Irma on Sint Maarten, the Dutch side of the Caribbean island of Saint Martin. The photos, released by the Dutch Ministry of Defence, show smashed hotels, a damaged marina with boats tossed into piles, submerged streets and flooded homes.

Images of the country's Juliana Airport showed the landing strips appear intact, though the navy said the airport is "unreachable" for now. Andre van der Kamp, commander of the Dutch ship Zeeland, tweeted that the Zeeland and Pelikaan would be trying to moor on Sint Maarten to deliver emergency aid on Thursday (7 September), but they needed to complete a safety check of the port first.

Dutch Interior Minister Ronald Plasterk said he briefly had contact with Saint Martin's prime minister but communications are sporadic. Sint Maarten is an independent nation within the Kingdom of the Netherlands, with a population of around 40,000 - about the same as the French side. "It is an enormous disaster, 95 percent of the island is destroyed. I am in shock," Daniel Gibbs, chairman of a local council on Saint Martin, told Radio Caribbean International.

French Interior Minister Gerard Collomb said eight people were killed and the toll was likely to rise. "We did not have the time yet to explore all the shores," Collomb told Franceinfo radio, adding that 23 people were also injured.

Irma, a Category 5 storm packing winds of 185 miles per hour (295 km per hour), is the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean and one of the most powerful storms to hit the Atlantic basin in a century.

In all, at least 10 people were reported killed by Irma on four islands. The island of Barbuda is a scene of "total carnage" and the tiny two-island nation will seek international assistance, said Gaston Browne, prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda. Browne told the BBC about half of Barbuda's population of some 1,800 were homeless while nine out of 10 buildings had suffered some damage and many were destroyed.

The hurricane is on track to reach Florida, becoming the second major hurricane to hit the US mainland in as many weeks after Hurricane Harvey. There are another two major storms, named Jose and Katia currently swirling in the Atlantic.

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Hurricane Irma: Aerial photos show scale of devastation in Sint Maarten

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Aerial photos show enormous devastation caused by Hurricane Irma on Sint Maarten, the Dutch side of the Caribbean island of Saint Martin. The photos, released by the Dutch Ministry of Defence, show smashed hotels, a damaged marina with boats tossed into piles, submerged streets and flooded homes.

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Satellite images show before and after Harvey - CNN

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Satellite images show before and after Harvey - CNN

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Satellite images show before and after Harvey - CNN

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Satellite images show before and after photos of the flood devastation in Texas cities following Hurricane Harvey.

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Satellite images show Harvey's impact on Texas towns - CNN

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Satellite images show Harvey's impact on Texas towns - CNN

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Satellite images show Harvey's impact on Texas towns - CNN

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Satellite images show before-and-after photos of the flood devastation in Texas communities following Hurricane Harvey.

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The countries most likely to survive climate change in one infographic

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The countries most likely to survive climate change in one infographic

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Climate change is real, and it's coming.

The leaders of 150 nations, along with thousands of representatives of nearly 200 countries, meet today in Paris for the 20th time to try and come up with a master plan to stave off the global catastrophe ahead.

Scientists have known for decades that the problem on our generation's hands is serious, but recent reports find that even those dire warnings likely underestimated the scope of the issue.

Of course, all of us will be affected in different ways. How will your country fare?

The folks at Eco Experts put together a great infographic in June based on data from the Notre Dame Global Adaptation (ND-Gain) Index, an annual ranking of which countries are best poised to adapt to a warming world.

While the maps provide a great zoomed-out perspective of what will happen globally as the earth warms, there are a few caveats to keep in mind when checking it out:

The map is based on rankings, not comprehensive evaluations of each country. In other words, the best-ranked countries are only as great as they seem compared against the countries that aren't performing so well.

The map looks only at the country-level. All of the state-specific, region-specific, or city-specific data is somewhat lost in this zoomed-out perspective. While the US gets a green light on this map, for example, specific parts of the country are far less equipped to handle climate change, including Miami and New York City.

Developed countries as a whole have far more infrastructure to adapt to a warming planet. The government can force people in coastal cities such as Miami Beach to move inland; we can also build new airports and transit hubs closer to the center of the country. The map reflects countries' abilities to do just that.

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Erin Brodwin and Matt Johnston, Business Insider

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The countries most likely to survive climate change in one infographic

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Climate change is real, and it's coming. The leaders of 150 nations, along with thousands of representatives of nearly 200 countries, meet today in Paris for the 20th time to try and come up with a master plan to stave off the global catastrophe ahead.

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FAA warns to keep drones out of the sky as Tropical Storm Harvey rescues mount - Chron.com

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FAA warns to keep drones out of the sky as Tropical Storm Harvey rescues mount - Chron.com

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FAA warns to keep drones out of the sky as Tropical Storm Harvey rescues mount - Chron.com

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Houstonians with drones mounted with cameras might want to use their machines to get footage of flood waters but the Federal Aviation Administration has bad news.

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Where are the most diverse parts of the US? - Business Insider

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Where are the most diverse parts of the US? - Business Insider

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Tomasz Stepinski

The United States is sometimes billed as a melting pot of racial and ethnic diversity.

But a new map created by astrophysicist Tomasz Stepinski shows how much racial segregation persists in many American towns, cities, and suburbs.

Using census data and NASA satellite maps, Stepinski created a detailed map that shows racial composition levels in nearly every neighborhood in the US.

Six categories of race - non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic black, American Indian, Asian, Hispanic, and other - are represented by six different colors on the map (as indicated on the key to the right).

Tomasz Stepinski

If an area has a high density of a particular race and low overall diversity, it is shaded a dark tone of that color (from the left column in the key to the right).

If an area has a high density of a certain race but medium overall diversity, it's shaded in a less dark color (from the right column in the key). For example, neighborhoods with a high density of white residents and low overall diversity are shaded orange. Places with a high density of Hispanic residents are dark purple. The lighter the shade, the less densely populated that group is.

Areas with high racial diversity levels overall are shaded gray.

The interactive map chronicles data from 1990 to 2010, so users can zoom in and see how areas have changed over time. Stepinski presented his work in April at the annual Population Association of America conference in Chicago.

Here is the state of diversity in seven US cities as of 2010, according to Stepinski's map.

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Fascinating maps show where the most and least diverse parts of the US are

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The United States is sometimes billed as a melting pot of racial and ethnic diversity. But a new map created by astrophysicist Tomasz Stepinski shows how much racial segregation persists in many American towns, cities, and suburbs. Using census data and NASA satellite maps, Stepinski created a detailed map that shows racial composition levels in nearly every neighborhood in the US.

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UK to tighten rules on drones after near-misses with planes

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UK to tighten rules on drones after near-misses with planes

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LONDON (AP) - British officials announced plans Saturday to further regulate drone use in a bid to prevent accidents and threats to commercial aviation.

The new rules will require drones that weigh eight ounces (226.79 grams) or more to be registered and users will have to pass a safety awareness exam.

The government acted because of concerns that a midair collision between a drone and an aircraft could cause a major disaster. Pilots have reported numerous near-misses in the last year alone in Britain. Earlier this month London's Gatwick Airport briefly closed its runway over safety concerns when a drone was spotted in the area and several planes had to be diverted.

The British Airline Pilots Association said independent tests show even a small drone could cause severe damage to a helicopter or an airline windscreen. The union's general secretary, Brian Strutton, said pilots "have been warning about the rise in the number of cases of drones being flown irresponsibly close to aircraft and airports for some time."

He said a new report "clearly shows that readily available drones which can be flown by anyone can shatter or go straight through an aircraft windshield or shatter a helicopter rotor. And those impacts would have catastrophic consequences."

British police have also reported a sharp rise in complaints from the public about intrusive drone use.

Aviation Minister Martin Callanan said drones are providing many useful services but that the new regulations are need to prevent the technology from being misused.

"Our measures prioritize protecting the public while maximizing the full potential of drones," he said.

The new rules will make it easier for the government to track drones that have been flown in an allegedly risky manner or that infringed on protected airspace. Details of the registration plan haven't yet been worked out.

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UK to tighten rules on drones after near-misses with planes

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LONDON (AP) - British officials announced plans Saturday to further regulate drone use in a bid to prevent accidents and threats to commercial aviation. The new rules will require drones that weigh eight ounces (226.79 grams) or more to be registered and users will have to pass a safety awareness exam.

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Feuding neighbor gets revenge you can only see on Google Maps

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Feuding neighbor gets revenge you can only see on Google Maps

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Revenge is best served via satellite.

Finding little gems on Google Earth and Google Maps is a great way to explore the world from the comfort of your home. In the past, people have discovered shipwrecks, a lost forest, and even minefields. Recently, people creeping around on Google Earth have found a person that really, really hates their neighbor.

If you zoom in on the satellite shot of Google Earth to a home in Sequim, Washington, you will see a hidden message cut into a field, directed towards another house.

Craftily carved into the field, the words "A Hole" can be clearly seen. Just in case anyone poking around was confused as to who the message was for, the neighbor included an arrow pointing directly at a home.

Nice.

It seems as if people started noticing the secret message this year, though this photo was snapped in July of 2016. Going back into the historical imagery function on Google Earth, it appears as if the earliest version of the message was carved sometime between November 2011 and July 2013.

We just hope the A Hole neighbor has no idea, and will find out themselves when they wander onto Google Earth one day.

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Google Earth reveals hidden message from feuding neighbors

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Revenge is best served via satellite. Finding little gems on Google Earth and Google Maps is a great way to explore the world from the comfort of your home. In the past, people have discovered shipwrecks, a lost forest, and even minefields.

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Climate Change Map Shows Where Huge Floods Will be Normal by 2050 | Inverse

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Climate Change Map Shows Where Huge Floods Will be Normal by 2050 | Inverse

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Thanks to climate change, the frequency of major flooding events is increasing at an alarming rate. While many cities are doing what they can to prepare for the upcoming deluge, new research suggests that they might not be prepared soon enough: In a new study in Nature Communications, scientists report that a flood level with a one-percent chance of occurring this year (also known as a 100-year flood) will, in some parts of the world, have a 50- or even a 100- percent chance of occurring in 2050.

That's astonishing. And what's worse still is that previous predictions have drastically underestimated how quickly flooding rates are changing on many of the world's coastlines, including the United States' Pacific coast.

In the new study, published Friday, scientists at the University of Central Florida used a new modeling technique to examine the future likelihood of extreme floods. "The likelihood increases faster than we previously understood," Thomas Wahl, a civil engineer and the lead author of the research, tells Inverse.

Wahl and his research team, looking to improve on the predictive ability of existing flood models, developed a more flexible statistical model to estimate rates of future flooding. While previous projections only took into account the uncertainties around how sea levels will behave in the future, Wahl's model also considers the uncertainties of what we think we know about extreme floods today.

With the new method, the outcome shifts dramatically The old model underestimated predicted flood rates, in particular along the West Coast of both North and South America, in Southern Europe, and in Australia. But with Wahl's new assessment, it appears that people on many more coastlines of the world will see extreme floods become common within a few decades.

Each year, the United States loses 82 lives and $8 billion to floods. If those numbers are bound to rise, we need to know how quickly that will happen in order to prepare for and prevent those damages. Getting it wrong, we've learned, has expensive and disastrous consequences. Unfortunately, many cities are equipped only with flooding protection systems that are already strained by 100-year floods. In areas where the floods are coming faster than previously thought, disaster managers won't have much time left to react.

"Once policymakers decide to adapt, that does not mean that it is in place tomorrow; it takes a long time," says Wahl. Major flood protection systems can take decades to plan and implement. "If we can show that by 2050 things are already so critical, that means we should probably not wait until 2045 to start thinking about it."

Abstract
One of the main consequences of mean sea level rise (SLR) on human settlements is an increase in ﬂood risk due to an increase in the intensity and frequency of extreme sea levels (ESL). While substantial research efforts are directed towards quantifying projections and uncertainties of future global and regional SLR, corresponding uncertainties in contemporaryESL have not been assessed and projections are limited. Here we quantify, for the ﬁrst time at global scale, the uncertainties in present-day ESL estimates, which have by default been ignored in broad-scale sea-level rise impact assessments to date. ESL uncertainties exceed those from global SLR projections and, assuming that we meet the Paris agreement goals, the projected SLR itself by the end of the century in many regions. Both uncertainties in SLRprojections and ESL estimates need to be understood and combined to fully assess potential impacts and adaptation needs.

Photos via Wahl et al. / Nature Communications

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New Maps Reveal Cities That Will Get Flooded by Climate Change by 2050

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Thanks to climate change, the frequency of major flooding events is increasing at an alarming rate.

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18 maps that explain America - Business Insider

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18 maps that explain America - Business Insider

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A series of maps illustrating various aspects of American life.

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This Map Shows How Badly Climate Change Will Impact Each County In The US

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This Map Shows How Badly Climate Change Will Impact Each County In The US

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US counties face steep economic damages tied to future global warming, with the poorest counties to be hit hardest, according to a county-by-county analysis published on Thursday.

The warmer it gets, the worse that farms, businesses, and people will be hammered.

"As temperatures goes up, the economy gets damaged," study author Amir Jina of the University of Chicago told BuzzFeed News, adding that "for each additional degree, there's increasing damages done."

The world has already warmed more than 1 degree Celsius in the industrial era, and scientists say manmade climate change is largely to blame. How much warmer it gets in this century depends on how quickly humans can bring down their greenhouse gas emissions. Most countries have set a shared goal of limiting future global warming below 2 degrees Celsius to prevent the worst climate impacts, under 2015 Paris climate accord. The Trump administration announced his intention to withdraw from that accord in May.

The new findings, published in the journal Science, offer the most detailed breakdown available of the local economic impacts of climate change in the US.

The negative economic impacts won't be felt equally by everyone. Poorer counties, which are largely clustered in the southern half of the US, are expected to experience the brunt of the damages. Unless country's meet their Paris goals, the poorest third of US counties could potentially see damages between 2% to 20% of their income in the second half of this century, according to the study.

One surprise, Jina said, "is the fact that the southern counties, which are already on average poorer, are going to suffer large damages." Northern counties, in contrast, see only some damages and potentially even benefit from global warming.

Jina and his 11 colleagues analyzed how a changing climate would impact six area of the US economy-agriculture, crime, coastal properties, electricity demand, human mortality and labor supply-on a county-by-county level. The researchers focused on economic areas where the most complete data was available.

"This is truly an amazing study," said Don Fullerton, a finance professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "It's the most detailed, comprehensive analysis anywhere ever of climate change damages in the United States."

In the study, the scientists used real-world data to measure how weather and climate currently affect key areas of the economy. Using this same relationship, and holding population and economy constant at 2012 levels, they turned their attention to the future. They calculated different future warming scenarios using global climate models and projecting possible economic impacts.

When it comes to what sector is driving future damages, "the major impact is on mortality from heat," said Fullerton, where higher temperatures can lead to more heat exhaustion and strokes. This largely explains the glaring gap between economic damages predicted for northern US counties versus southern US counties.

In many southern states, for example, summer daytime temperatures can frequently reach or exceed 95 or 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Those are already life-threatening temperatures for some people. With continued climate change, summer days there will get hotter and more deadly. In contrast, summer temperatures in the North are lower and won't reach the same high temperatures as quickly.

Hsiang, Kopp, Jina, Rising, et al. (Science)

Estimated total direct damage to US economy due to temperature rise.

While Fullerton doesn't dispute the finding that soaring temperatures will threaten human health triggering negative economic impacts, he suggested the study may be overstated. That's in part because it does not account for how communities can-and likely will-adapt to future climate changes. More families and businesses may invest in air conditioning, for example, to handle the heat.

For countries in southern states such as Florida, Georgia and Texas, it's not just the impacts of rising temperatures on human health that threaten to take a high economic toll. It's also how sea level rise and increasing storm intensity threatens the economies of coastal communities. Jina described these places as facing a "perfect storm" of climate risks.

Meanwhile, in the Midwest, where Jina now lives, the big threat to the economy is how climate change impacts local agriculture.

"If you want to avoid the worst effects, we should aim to keep warming as low as possible," Jina said.

Zahra Hirji is a science reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in San Francisco

Contact Zahra Hirji at zahra.hirji@buzzfeed.com.

Got a confidential tip? Submit it here.

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These Scientists Mapped How Badly Climate Change Will Impact Each County In the US

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US counties face steep economic damages tied to future global warming, with the poorest counties to be hit hardest, according to a county-by-county analysis published on Thursday. The warmer it gets, the worse that farms, businesses, and people will be hammered.

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The US Shot Down a Mysterious Enemy Drone Over Syria - VICE

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The US Shot Down a Mysterious Enemy Drone Over Syria - VICE

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The US Shot Down a Mysterious Enemy Drone Over Syria (VICE)

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A US Air Force F-15 jet fighter has shot down a large, armed drone that attacked pro-US forces near At Tanf, a strategic town in southeastern Syria near the border with Iraq.

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The Mercator projection distorts countries - Business Insider

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The Mercator projection distorts countries - Business Insider

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Maps shape our understanding of the world - and in an increasingly interconnected and global economy, this geographic knowledge is more important than ever.

The funny thing is, almost everyone actually has a skewed perception of the true size of countries thanks to a cartographic technique called the Mercator projection.

Used just about everywhere, from textbooks to Google Maps, the Mercator projection map is the way most of humanity recognizes the position and size of Earth's continents.

Visual Capitalist

In 1569, the great cartographer, Gerardus Mercator, created a revolutionary new map based on a cylindrical projection. The new map was well-suited to nautical navigation since every line on the sphere is a constant course, or loxodrome. In modern times, this is particularly useful since the Earth can be depicted as seamless in online mapping applications.

That said, the true sizes of landmasses become increasingly distorted the further away from the equator they get. Mercator's map inadvertently pumps up the sizes of Europe and North America. Visually speaking, Canada and Russia appear to take up approximately 25% of the Earth's landmass, when in reality they occupy a mere 5%. When Antarctica is excluded (as it often is), Canada and Russia's visual share of landmass jumps to about 40%!

Canada is the second largest country in the world, but not by much. Here is an " at scale " look at Canada, the United States, and Mexico.

Visual Capitalist

Africa, South Asia, and South America all appear much smaller in relation to countries further from the equator.

And from a North American perspective, countries such as Australia and Indonesia appear much smaller than they actually are. Comparing the landmasses on the same latitude as Canada helps put sizes into perspective.

Visual Capitalist

Greenland is the world's largest island, but looking at its hyper-exaggerated depiction in the map below, you'd be forgiven for wondering why it isn't a stand-alone continent. In reality, Greenland is about fourteen times smaller than Africa.

Visual Capitalist

IS BIGGER BETTER?

Though Mercator's map was never intended for use as the default wall map in schools around the world, it has shaped the worldviews of billions of people. Critics of the map - and similar projections - suggest that distortion reinforces a sense of colonialist superiority. As well, the amount of territory a country occupies is often correlated with power and access to natural resources, and map distortions can have the effect of inadvertently diminishing nations closer to the equator.

A prime example of this argument is the "True Size of Africa" graphic, which demonstrated to millions of people just how big the continent is.

Visual Capitalist

Growing awareness of map distortion is translating into concrete change. Boston public schools, for example, recently switched to the Gall-Peters projection , which more accurately depicts the true size of landmasses.

Visual Capitalist

Visual Capitalist

THE ROAD TO EQUAL-AREA MAPPING

In 1805, mathematician and astronomer, Karl Mollweide, created a namesake projection that trades accuracy of angles and shape for accuracy of proportion. The Mollweide projection has inspired many other attempts at a user-friendly equal area map.

Visual Capitalist

John Paul Goode's attempt, known as the Goode Homolosine Projection, took this concept a step further by adding interruptions at strategic locations to help reduce the distortion of continents. The resulting shape is sometimes referred to as an "orange peel map".

Visual Capitalist

Another evolution in cartography was the Dymaxion map, invented by Buckminster Fuller and patented in 1946. In this version, the continents are no longer in their familiar positions - however, there is more spacial fidelity than in previous projection methods. We're able to see the true proportions of Africa, Northern Canada, Antarctica, and other distortion hot spots.

The Dymaxion map wasn't created for purely practical purposes. Fuller believed that humans would be better equipped to address global challenges if they were given a way to visualize the Earth's continents in a contiguous manner.

Visual Capitalist

THE AUTHAGRAPH MAP

Using a new map-making method called AuthaGraph, Japanese architect, Hajime Narukawa, may have created the most accurate map of the world yet. AuthaGraph divides the globe into 96 triangles, transfers them to a tetrahedron and unfolds into a rectangle.

The end result? Landmasses and seas are more accurately proportioned than in traditional projections.

Visual Capitalist

The biggest downfall of the AuthaGraph map is that longitude and latitude lines are no longer a tidy grid. As well, continents on the map are repositioned in a way that will be unfamiliar to a population that is already geographically challenged.

That said, depicting our round world on a flat surface will always come with some trade-offs. As demand grows for a true equal-area map, it will be exciting to see what the next generation of map projections have to offer.

Read the original article on Visual Capitalist. Get rich, visual content on business and investing for free at the Visual Capitalist website, or follow Visual Capitalist on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn for the latest. Copyright 2017. Follow Visual Capitalist on Twitter.

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SEE ALSO: 15 overlay maps that will change the way you see the world

NOW WATCH: Here's why the American flag is reversed on military uniforms

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Maps shape our understanding of the world - and in an increasingly interconnected and global economy, this geographic knowledge is more important than ever. The funny thing is, almost everyone actually has a skewed perception of the true size of countries thanks to a cartographic technique called the Mercator projection.

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NASA just released this eye-popping photo of the Grand Canyon

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NASA just released this eye-popping photo of the Grand Canyon

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CLOSE

NASA has released an incredible photo of the Grand Canyon taken from a camera controlled by students aboard the International Space Station.

The photo was taken from low-Earth orbit on April 3 by the Sally Ride EarthKAM, a Nikon digital camera named after the first American woman in space and attached to a window on the space station.

Working through their teachers, students can request images of specific locations on Earth during the camera's four scheduled missions each year. They can request pictures of the Earth's coasts, mountain ranges or other geological features.

Think you can top this image?

The next EarthKAM mission begins in fall 2017.

Teachers can get information on how to get their students involved at the EarthKAM website.
READ MORE:
Read or Share this story: http://azc.cc/2sfd4EY

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NASA just released this eye-popping photo of the Grand Canyon

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CLOSE NASA has released an incredible photo of the Grand Canyon taken from a camera controlled by students aboard the International Space Station. The photo was taken from low-Earth orbit on April 3 by the Sally Ride EarthKAM, a Nikon digital camera named after the first American woman in space and attached to a window on the space station.

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Where Is America’s Heartland? Pick Your Map - The New York Times

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Where Is America’s Heartland? Pick Your Map - The New York Times

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Thanks for your vote!

The heartland is, by definition, somewhere central. But where the center begins and ends - what it encompasses and excludes - is harder to say. Here's how your answer compares with those of other Times readers:

What the maps actually show, and what other Times readers thought

Illinois? Definitely the heartland. The South Side of Chicago? Not so clear. Philadelphia? Too close to the coast. But coal country, 120 miles inland, may be. Cumberland County, Tenn., is in the South, not the Midwest. But is it also in the heartland? What about Detroit, with its demographics and politics that little resemble rural Iowa? Or the Standing Rock Indian Reservation straddling the Dakotas?

The word captures an idea that is more expansive than the Midwest, harder to map than Appalachia, more evocative than the Great Plains. But now we are searching for its boundaries, after an election that pundits proclaimed cast the heartland against the rest of America.

"It's much more a state of mind than an actual place," suggests the historian William Cronon (who teaches in Madison, Wis., which is surely the heartland, unless your heartland omits liberal college towns). "It describes a deep set of beliefs about places that somehow authentically stand for America."

In that sense, the word is not purely about geography. It's a value judgment. "Who's authentically from the middle? Who's from implicitly the heart? Who represents the core?" Mr. Cronon said. Any of those questions could have a dual meaning. Who's mainstream? Whose traditions are "traditional"? Who claims the political center? "There's a slippage here," Mr. Cronon said.

To pin down this elusive place, we used data from the presidential election, the census, the Bureau of Labor Statistics - even data about television preferences from Facebook - to map the many meanings of the word, if we're really being honest about what we mean. This map is our point of departure:

The heartland as a synonym for "the Midwest"

That's roughly the Midwest, a contiguous though still contested place. The black line captures the region as the Census Bureau defines it. The shaded states beyond add data from 1,357 respondents who said they identified "a lot" or "some" as Midwesterners in a survey for FiveThirtyEight. Even Midwesterners can't agree on what's in the Midwest.

The idea of the heartland is closely linked to the Midwest, although the earliest use of "heartland" in this sense had nothing to do with America. Halford Mackinder, a British geographer, coined the word in 1904 to refer to the heart of the Eurasian land mass: a strategic center of industry, natural resources and power. Whoever controlled that region, Mr. Mackinder argued, could control the world (a theory the Germans adopted during World War II).

Postwar, the language came to apply to the middle of America, too, not just for its centrality, but also its national importance. "In this classic European Mackinder sense, this is where the industrial heartland of the country was," said Jon Lauck, a Midwestern historian and an adviser to Senator John Thune, a South Dakota Republican. "This is where they brought all those bombers out of Willow Run to bomb Hitler and Japan," he said, referring to the manufacturing complex in Michigan. "This is where all the railroads met. This is where all the coal and iron ore came from."

It's where the grain was grown and the cars were built. The region has since lost some of that might, with deindustrialization and the depopulation of family farms. But Mr. Lauck argues that the heartland and the Midwest remain synonymous, in large part because of this history.

The heartland as "far from the coasts"

The heartland can also be defined by what it's not - the coasts. And in many ways its cultural values have been framed in opposition to that Other America. "The suspicion persists," wrote the English professor and critic Barry Gross in 1977, "that what goes on at either coast is the extreme, the perverse and bizarre, the grotesque and the Gothic, unreal and worse, unAmerican."

The center of the country is the normal against which the coasts are abnormal, or merely peripheral. The above map defines the heartland by this relationship to the coasts, counting inland by county from the ocean on both sides.

But where the interior lies has shifted historically, and it has long been the hardest part of the country to map precisely because it lacks the clear natural boundaries of the coasts. "The West" was once west of the Appalachian Mountains. Today's Illinois once sat in the "Northwest Territory." The "middle" moved as white settlers and cartographers did. And this process of revision still hasn't halted.

"These things aren't absolute," said James Akerman, the curator of maps at the Newberry Library in Chicago, describing how we conceive of "region" in America. "And the electorate is showing these things change constantly."

The heartland as "America's breadbasket"

Look through newspaper articles, and references to the American "heartland" proliferate in the 1980s with stories about the struggles of the middle part of the country. Toby Higbie, a U.C.L.A. historian who has traced the word's use over time, pegs its growing prominence to the farm crisis of the 1980s and the economic shifts that began to turn parts of the Midwest into the "Rust Belt."

"To me, the very ideological or cultural formulation that people are using - whether they're aware of it or not - comes out of that moment of confronting globalization," Mr. Higbie said. "And it's a reaction to that, to sort of say: 'We are the authentic, quintessential American location. And we want to reinvest in that.' "

To the extent that the heartland conjures an America of wheat fields and barns in graceful decay - two images prominent in political ads - it's capturing the geography mapped above. That picture, which encompasses much of the Great Plains, shows a swath of land down the center of the country, from the Dakotas to Texas, east into Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, and south along the Mississippi River. It also includes California's Central Valley, which produces about a quarter of the nation's food.

Add in Manufacturing America, and you pull in more of the Great Lakes states, farther east into Pennsylvania and across much more of the rural South:

The heartland as "home to American manufacturing"

It's notable, though, Mr. Higbie adds, that stock images of heartland America tend to turn up few faces of color, whether on the farm or in nostalgic manufacturing. When people use the term, he suspects, they're often envisioning a white version of the Midwest without its most diverse pockets, circumscribing Detroit, Chicago and St. Louis, and its Native American reservations.

Map America by at least part of its European heritage (German Americans are the nation's largest ethnic group, at about 46 million), and you get a patchy Midwest that looks more like this:

The heartland as German-settled America

By that definition, the heartland becomes much harder to map than the Midwest. It's not just the borders that are in dispute, but the redactions as well. Is the heartland really the middle of America minus the minorities? Or the middle, rural parts only? Or the middle, in an election year, discounting its islands of blue?

Expand the heritage map to include what are today the whitest parts of the country, and you get this:

The heartland as predominantly white America

That map overlaps significantly with the places where Donald J. Trump fared well this fall (and excludes those Midwestern cities where he did poorly). And, in fact, in its loosest definition postelection, the heartland has been used to describe virtually anywhere in America that tilted toward the Republican candidate.

Breitbart, the site formerly run by Mr. Trump's campaign chief executive and adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, declared in a viral headline and misleading map after the election that Trump won a "7.5 million-vote popular landslide" in the heartland. The contorted math behind that figure counted Trump's margin in 3,084 of 3,141 American counties, excluding big urban centers like New York and Los Angeles - a convenient way of defining nearly all of the country's land area (if not all of its people) as heartland.

In that context, the word heartland was used to suggest that Mr. Trump won the popular vote in authentic America - or, put another way, the true American vote. Taken to this extreme, the word loses all geographic meaning; it no longer even describes the interior. This is what the heartland looks like as Trump's America:

The heartland as "Trump's America"

That last map recalls a 1969 book by the Republican strategist Kevin Phillips, " The Emerging Republican Majority." In it, he predicted Republican success from a new coalition of the interior "heartland" - "the land of Methodist church suppers, mile-high mining camps, county fairs, steamboats, round the bend, cattle drives, waving wheat" - with suburbia, the South and the Sun Belt.

"His heartland strategy only works if you close your eyes and imagine any urban space or place with significant people of color as not part of the heartland," Mr. Higbie said. Geographically, that definition falls apart. Politically, Mr. Higbie says, it was genius, tying to the Republican Party deeply rooted ideas about "real" America. "You take a regional name, detach it from the actual physical region," Mr. Higbie said, "and move it around the country selectively to the places that match your electoral strategy."

That is essentially what Breitbart did.

These maps highlight how the heartland is usually about more than geography - whether it's also about demographics, economics, ideology or history. And so we close with a couple of maps that seek, in the end, to define this place through cultural ties. The first brings us most closely back to Mr. Lauck's Midwest:

The heartland as sports fandom

There's no box to check on the census for which team you root for, but millions of fans make their preferences public on Facebook. In 2014 we mapped the borders of baseball fandom, and the map above uses the same data with a small twist. It shows where the league's "Central" divisions - that is, the American League Central and National League Central - hold the most regional sway.

That picture neatly reflects much of the Midwest without need for state borders and creeps over the state lines, as with Pennsylvania, where the Midwest grows hazy. It offers the cleanest, most compact idea of the heartland of any map shown here. As with the others, it reveals a place that is whiter and more Republican than the country as a whole.

Of course, the heartland is about more than baseball, should you believe in the heartland at all. But seemingly trivial maps - think too of soda vs. pop in our dialects - can capture much more complex differences among us. With that in mind, here is the map we at The Upshot believe comes closest to capturing what many people mean by the heartland in this hyper-partisan moment:

The heartland as a cultural taste test

With thanks to our colleague Josh Katz, that's a map of where people are most likely to prefer television shows like "Duck Dynasty," "N.C.I.S." and "The Voice" most distinctly. It's messier than the Midwest. It clips out major metro areas. It pulls in a big stretch of the Great Plains and some of the South, unifying through cultural taste places that are variously rural, red and for the most part interior. Maine, admittedly, is something of an anomaly.

* Midwest maps are defined by the U.S. " Regions and Divisions of the United States"; survey data from a FiveThirtyEight/SurveyMonkey survey of 1,357 people who identified "somewhat" or "a lot" as a Midwesterner.

* Distance from the coast data based on this demonstration.

* Farm maps from the U.S.D.A. Census of Agriculture.

* Manufacturing data is the share of manufacturing jobs among all the employed population age 16 and older from the 2015 American Community Survey (five-year estimates).

* Ancestry data is people reporting single ancestry from the 2015 American Community Survey (five-year estimates).

* Race and ethnicity data from the 2015 American Community Survey (five-year estimates). Race/ethnicity categories are mutually exclusive (i.e., white non-Hispanic, black non-Hispanic and Hispanic any race).

* Election results are from The Associated Press.

* Baseball fan zones are estimates based on how many Facebook users "liked" each team in a ZIP code in April 2014. We applied an algorithm to smooth the data and fill in gaps where data was missing.

* Television show preference is based on how many Facebook users "liked" a television program in a ZIP code in June 2016. We found that the 50 most-liked shows clustered into three groups with distinct geographic distributions; the one shown here represents the rural white cluster.

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Where Is America's Heartland? Pick Your Map

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Thanks for your vote! The heartland is, by definition, somewhere central. But where the center begins and ends - what it encompasses and excludes - is harder to say. Here's how your answer compares with those of other Times readers: What the maps actually show, and what other Times readers thought Illinois?

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The power of geography. The power of maps.

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The power of geography. The power of maps.

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If Americans Can Find North Korea on a Map, They’re More Likely to Prefer Diplomacy (Published 2017)

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Most Americans could not identify the country in a survey, and those people tended to view military action more favorably.

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The Bubble Is Real: Half of US Population Lives in Less Than 5% of Nation's Counties

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The Bubble Is Real: Half of US Population Lives in Less Than 5% of Nation's Counties

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In the aftermath of the 2016 election, the narrative of 'Two Americas' was validated. One red, one blue. One right, one left.

While Trump ended up winning a vast majority of the land mass in the country, along with the Electoral College, Hillary carried the popular vote by a couple million. She did this by winning decisively deep blue counties in deep blue states, particularly on the coasts of the country. These counties carried by Clinton have an enormous population advantage compared to the middle of the country.

A series of maps, produced by the website Dadaviz, show the extreme variance of U.S. population. The creators sought to break the country up evenly by population and where it tends to live. Below, you can see the U.S. population split evenly, 159.5 million vs. 159.3 million, between the most and least populated counties.

The data shows that one-half of the population is packed into only 5% of America's counties.

If you get rid of the less-populated half of the country, our nation becomes unrecognizable:

The data becomes even more compelling when you balance the most populated county in America, Los Angeles county, against similar pools of the population around the country.

Los Angeles county equals the population of 11 states combined:

Los Angeles county has the same population as nearly 1,200 other smaller counties across the nation combined:

Combine the fact that Hillary Clinton won Los Angeles county by nearly 2 million votes and it begins to becomes clear how Clinton could walk away with the popular vote, by sweeping just a handful of counties across the country, while still losing the election in stunning fashion.

As SNL put it, The Bubble is real.

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The Bubble Is Real: Half of US Population Lives in Less Than 5% of Nation's Counties

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In the aftermath of the 2016 election, the narrative of 'Two Americas' was validated. One red, one blue. One right, one left. While Trump ended up winning a vast majority of the land mass in the country, along with the Electoral College, Hillary carried the popular vote by a couple million.

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World's Smallest Satellite Created for NASA by 18-Year-Old Indian Teen | Teen Vogue

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World's Smallest Satellite Created for NASA by 18-Year-Old Indian Teen | Teen Vogue

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Although the space shuttle program may have been temporarily halted in the United States, NASA is still alive and well - and now, thanks to 18-year-old Rifath Sharook of India, are launching their smallest-ever satellite into space. The satellite is called 'KalamSat,' named after Indian nuclear scientist, pioneer in the aeronautics field, and former president, Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam, and is the first-ever to be manufactured by 3-D printing, a tech trend we don't see disappearing (or even going away a bit) anytime soon. NASA is planning on launching it off of Wallops Island, Virginia, on June 21, according to the Business Standard.

Rifath's satellite beat out of a slew of other inventions at a competition jointly sponsored by NASA and 'I Doodle Learning' called 'Cubes in Space,' in an effort to bring new technologies and devices to space and solve current quandries as well as new ones. "The main role of the satellite will be to demonstrate the performance of 3-D printed carbon fibre. We did a lot of research on different cube satellites all over the world and found ours was the lightest," he told the Times of India. Despite being from a small town in Tamil Nadu called Pallapatti, Rifath does have bigger than big-city dreams for the 240 minute-long mission and his aeronautics career - and has proved his scientific prowess in the past, too.

When he was just 15, he invented a two-and-a-half pound helium weather balloon from a ground in Kelambakkam, as a part of the Young Scientist India-2015 competition held by Space Kidz India. (Plus, in the past, NASA's also had assistance from other teens, like the 17-year-old Brit who noticed an error in the International Space Station data.)

But it was this victory that has Rifath particularly stoked about his future in space. " One of the scientists from [the] Colorado Space Grant Consortium has appreciated us using an idiom, saying 'we nearly fell out of the chair,' because he was so excited and amazed, Rifath said. And if scientists are falling out of their chairs over this invention, we're beyond impressed. We can't wait to see what you do next, Rifath!

Related: NASA Asked Twitter to Help Name 7 New Planets
You might also like:

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NASA's Smallest Satellite Ever Was Built by a TEEN

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Although the space shuttle program may have been temporarily halted in the United States, NASA is still alive and well - and now, thanks to 18-year-old Rifath Sharook of India, are launching their smallest-ever satellite into space.

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Scientists can now count endangered birds from space

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Scientists can now count endangered birds from space

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Scientists have a new solution for counting endangered birds -- using satellite images from space.

A team of researchers from the British Antarctic Survey and the Canterbury Museum in New Zealand showed that high-resolution satellite imagery can see albatross birds from space, according to a paper published in the journal "Ibis" on Thursday.

Albatrosses-- large, mostly white seabirds with wingspans of up to 11 feet -- are one of the most threatened groups of birds in the world. They are hard to study, partially because they breed on remote and inaccessible islands.

This is the first time that satellites have been used to count individual birds from space, according to the researchers. Previous studies with other animals have been small and a "proof of concept," whereas this team counted the whole northern royal albatross species in a single breeding season. Counting a species is key to conservation efforts.

The researchers were able to count albatrosses using imagery from the WorldView-3 satellite, which can see objects as small as 30 centimeters. The birds show up as white dots on the satellite images.

"We can see them really well," Peter Fretwell, lead author of Thursday's paper, told CNNTech.

Related: Google Earth gets a mobile-friendly makeover

The researchers know the white dots are albatrosses and not another type of bird because they usually don't breed near other species and typically there are no other large, white birds where they live. While albatrosses could be confused for white rocks in the satellite imagery, this is unlikely as they tend to breed on flat, vegetated areas, Fretwell said.

To test the accuracy of the satellite method, the team counted individual birds on a well-studied colony of wandering albatross on South Georgia, a remote island southeast of Argentina. They found that the satellite-based counts were comparable to previous counts made on the ground.

"We found [satellite imagery] was a really good means of counting," Fretwell said.

They also applied the method to the northern royal albatross that live on the Chatham Islands, east of mainland New Zealand. Their recent population status was unknown due to the remoteness and limited accessibility of where they live. "One of the colonies was stable, but the other one was much lower than we thought," Fretwell said.

Out of the 22 albatross species recognized by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, 10 are considered endangered or critically endangered. The remaining species are categorized as either vulnerable or near threatened.

Counting birds by traditional methods can be difficult and expensive -- researchers can either count them on the ground manually or charter a plane and take aerial photographs. Both methods also depend on good weather.

"[The satellite] only takes imagery when the weather is fine. We can literally get it almost any time of year," Fretwell said.

Fretwell believes satellite-based methods can now be used routinely to count other large birds, such as flamingos, pelicans, swans and geese. The technology is also starting to be used to see large mammals, such as polar bears and wildebeests.

"This technique will be an invaluable global conservation resource that can give us near real-time information about the status of endangered species," added Paul Scofield, a coauthor of the paper.

CNNMoney (New York) First published May 4, 2017: 4:51 PM ET

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Scientists can now count endangered birds using satellite imagery from space

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A team of researchers from the British Antarctic Survey and the Canterbury Museum in New Zealand showed that high-resolution satellite imagery can see albatross birds from space, according to a paper published in the journal "Ibis" on Thursday.

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NASA satellite photo shows eerie dark streak across Arabian Sea - CBS News

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NASA satellite photo shows eerie dark streak across Arabian Sea - CBS News

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The forces of darkness seem to be coalescing in the Arabian Sea in a spooky satellite image taken from space.

But the eerie supernatural effect, in which the tentacles of darkness seem to be intruding into regions of light, has a completely ordinary cause: normal weather patterns in the area.

The image was taken on April 11 using the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer aboard NASA's Terra satellite. When satellites gather light from above smooth waters, the light reflects upward like a mirror. But once water gets wavy, light hitting the water's surface reflects up toward the satellite at many different orientations - meaning less light reaches the satellite's photodetectors, according to NASA's Earth Observatory. When the sun, the satellite and the water are all aligned, the water appears much brighter. The phenomenon is known as sunglint, agency officials said.

When someone is looking at satellite images of Earth, sunglint typically appears as a streak of bright light that shows up in the middle of the satellite image. In this image, the sunglint appears most pronounced in the bottom central area of the image, which shows the Arabian Sea.

While some of the most spectacular examples of sunglint may appear in space photos, the phenomenon is also terrestrial: Anyone sitting on the beach who has looked out at a bright line of sunlight hitting the ocean has seen a similar process, known as a glitter path.
Originally published on Live Science.
Editor's Recommendations

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NASA satellite photo shows eerie dark streak across Arabian Sea

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The forces of darkness seem to be coalescing in the Arabian Sea in a spooky satellite image taken from space. But the eerie supernatural effect, in which the tentacles of darkness seem to be intruding into regions of light, has a completely ordinary cause: normal weather patterns in the area.

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New map shows the world hidden beneath Tacoma and our feet | The News Tribune

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New map shows the world hidden beneath Tacoma and our feet | The News Tribune

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Puget Sound is grooved like an old record.

That's one of the Earth's secrets that can be found on a new interactive map produced by the state.

Using Lidar technology, the Washington State Department of Natural Resources has mapped a good third of the state revealing the smallest of details hidden beneath trees, buildings and other obstructions.

The grooves, carved by ancient glaciers, can be seen from Whidbey Island to south of Olympia. Tacoma is etched with a series of subtle north-south lines. The grooves become most prominent around Lake Tapps.

Toggling between "Bare Earth" and "Top Surface" is the best way to view the map.

In Top Surface view, buildings and trees become visible. The detail is so great, even individual trees can be seen.

Bare Earth - when all those distractions are removed - is the most revealing. Road beds, volcanic flows, gulches, glaciers and slopes of every kind can be seen.

The process makes the Mima Mounds in Thurston County look like dimples on a basketball.

In Bare Earth mode, Tacoma's Stadium Bowl can be seen. In Top Surface mode, Stadium High School, homes and trees that surround the bowl can be seen.

Washington is not lacking in spectacular geology and geography. The two come together in stunning detail around Mount St. Helens.

The blowout from the volcano's 1980 eruption can be seen in detail, while on the south side ancient volcanic flows look like they oozed yesterday.

Lidar (light detection and ranging) uses lasers mounted on airplanes to cut (visually) through foliage and take precise measurements.

The technology is so efficient that it has led to massive discoveries in archaeology. Scientists studying Lidar maps have found lost cities in Central America and Asia that are hidden by jungle vegetation.

The map can be found at fortress.wa.gov/dnr/protectiongis/geology/?Theme=wigm

Hit the "Clear All" button and then scroll down and click on the "Lidar Hillshade" box and one or both of the boxes below it.

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New map shows the world hidden beneath your feet

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Puget Sound is grooved like an old record. That's one of the Earth's secrets that can be found on a new interactive map produced by the state. Using Lidar technology, the Washington State Department of Natural Resources has mapped a good third of the state revealing the smallest of details hidden beneath trees, buildings and other obstructions.

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Scientists are armed with the truth. But to win this culture war, they’ll need more than that | Anne Perkins | Opinion | The Guardian

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Scientists are armed with the truth. But to win this culture war, they’ll need more than that | Anne Perkins | Opinion | The Guardian

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There is an old joke about being able to tell an extroverted scientist: instead of staring at their shoes when they talk to you, they stare at yours. This is no longer true. Scientists are the new rock stars. Tonight Einstein gets the full soft-focus Crown-style treatment as National Geographic launches a 10-part series about the man described by hte actor Geoffrey Rush, who portrays him in Genius, as a "stud-muffin theoretical physicist".

The scientist as hero is familiar enough. What's less familiar is scientists demonstrating, thousands of them around the world, with placards and banners declaring "Science improves decisions" and other inflammatory assertions, such as "Science belongs to no country because knowledge belongs to humanity". "Evidence not arrogance," they demanded.

But you don't have to be anti-science to see that there is an inevitability about its difficult relationship with politics. It is the point where knowledge and belief collide, which is why it is now the crucible of the culture wars.

Scientists can't but be the villains of the Brexit narrative. They are highly educated in the ultimate transferrable skills. They are the quintessential citizens of the world, people who keep their passports in their back pockets, and often work not just in towns where they were not born but in countries their parents never imagined visiting. They might dream of a Nobel prize, but they may also have an eye on a job in Silicon Valley. Intellectual property is the new alchemy.

More challenging than their lifestyles, however, is their insistence on the sanctity of evidence and the importance of making decisions based on established fact. Expert-deniers trade on the natural resistance to uncomfortable truth by asserting that the truth is a negotiable quality. Donald Trump thinks windfarms are bad for your health, and low-energy lightbulbs give you cancer. He has linked childhood immunisation with autism. Although he tweeted yesterday that "rigorous science is critical to my administration", he has yet to appoint a scientific policy adviser.

In one way, this is an argument that was already well rehearsed when Pope Paul V took on Galileo 400 years ago. Science and belief have always rubbed up against each other. They find compromise positions. Popes die. In the end, science emerges victorious.

Yet there are differences. Trump is not arguing from some alternative, God-centred perspective. He is not defending a belief system subscribed to by most of the known world. He just doesn't like facts that contradict what he wants to say. The expert-deniers rest their case on experts sometimes being wrong. They refuse to recognise that to know something properly, it must be capable of being proved wrong. If it is, that in fact constitutes the advancement of knowledge.

There is another reason science is at the heart of this argument. Scientists are all very well when they are discovering penicillin and working out how to transfer great quantities of data instantaneously. Science is good when it makes life longer, easier, richer and more comfortable and convenient. It is also wonderful when it is makes discoveries concerning the metabolism of naked mole rats, or negative-mass fluids - mind-boggling discoveries that are basically irrelevant to most people's lives.

It is a harder sell when it points to unacceptable realities. It's disagreeable to stop smoking or to drink less alcohol or to avoid sugary drinks. The people who make cigarettes, booze and fizzy drinks are often unscrupulous in defence of their products and their profits. Accepting that our way of life threatens the sustainability of the planet was never going to be easy. Donald Trump is not a new version of a 17th-century pope, but there are millions of US voters who believe he can preserve their world: a world that depends on coal and cars.

There was plenty to admire about the scientists' protest. But it's increasingly clear that their greatest skill - unearthing the truth - is not enough to win a culture war.

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Scientists are armed with the truth. But to win this culture war, they'll need more than that | Anne Perkins

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There is an old joke about being able to tell an extroverted scientist: instead of staring at their shoes when they talk to you, they stare at yours. This is no longer true. Scientists are the new rock stars.

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Earth Day: Photos of human activity on the planet - INSIDER

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Earth Day: Photos of human activity on the planet - INSIDER

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April 22 is Earth Day.

Humans have already changed the face of the planet we call home.

Fascinating images from NASA and other sources taken years apart show just how much we have changed the shape of our world.

April 22 is Earth Day, a world holiday celebrating our planet - the only home we've got (so far).

Humans have had an unmistakable impact on Earth - one that pops out in sharp relief when you look at this collection of images comparing what specific areas look like now to how they appeared in the past.

In some cases, the images (mostly from NASA, unless otherwise noted) were taken as far as 50 years apart; in other cases, they were snapped with just 10-15 years in between.

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20 images that show how much we've reshaped planet Earth in the past 70 years

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April 22 is Earth Day. Humans have already changed the face of the planet we call home. Fascinating images from NASA and other sources taken years apart show just how much we have changed the shape of our world. April 22 is Earth Day, a world holiday celebrating our planet - the only home we've got (so far).

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50 years ago, continental drift began to gain acceptance | Science News

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50 years ago, continental drift began to gain acceptance | Science News

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Excerpt from the April 29, 1967, issue of Science News

Drifting theories shake up geology

Continental drift, a theory often considered amusing but rarely important, seems about to become the focus of a revolution in geology. At the least, it has already split the geological community into those who find the evidence for it "formidable" and those who think it is not yet formidable enough to constitute a proof. - Science News, April 29, 1967

Update

That continents shift is now widely accepted and explained by plate tectonics. Plenty of evidence supports the idea that the Earth's outer layer is divided into large slabs that gradually move over the mantle. But researchers don't agree on when the plates first began shifting. New evidence from ancient rocks found in Canada suggests the slipping and sliding didn't get going until Earth was at least a billion years old (SN: 4/15/17, p. 8). In about 250 million years from now, the continents may drift together into a supercontinent called Amasia (SN: 1/21/17, p. 18).

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50 years ago, continental drift began to gain acceptance

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Excerpt from the April 29, 1967, issue of Science News Drifting theories shake up geology Continental drift, a theory often considered amusing but rarely important, seems about to become the focus of a revolution in geology.

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The ‘new Google Earth’ will be revealed on April 18

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The ‘new Google Earth’ will be revealed on April 18

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The 'new Google Earth' will be revealed on April 18

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Google is sending out press invites to attend a media event on April 18, where the company will reveal the new version of Google Earth.

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Africa from the air, captured by NASA - CNN

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Africa from the air, captured by NASA - CNN

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Africa from the air, captured by NASA - CNN

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Updated 12:46 PM EDT March 30, 2017 15 Photos Cairo, Egypt - The pyramids at Giza can be seen in the center of this image taken from the International Space Station in 2012, with the modern Cairo metropolitan area to the left and the Sahara desert on the right.

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100-year-old frost maps show how climate change has shifted the growing season in America - Business Insider

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100-year-old frost maps show how climate change has shifted the growing season in America - Business Insider

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Published in a 1936 Atlas of American Agriculture, put together by the United States Department of Agriculture, these 1916 maps of the average dates of first killing frosts in fall and last killing frosts in spring were initially intended to help farmers plan their planting schedules. Now, the maps offer a rough gauge showing how much these dates have shifted over a century.

The preparers of these maps, William Gardner Reed, Charles Franklin Brooks, and F.J. Marschner, compiled data from a then-relatively-new network of Weather Bureau stations and agricultural colleges. The trio notes that of 4,000 such stations, 700 were able to offer data that covered every year between 1895 and 1914. Insets show dates of the first and last killing frosts in the year of 1914.

On a website charting indicators of climate change, the Environmental Protection Agency offers a few graphs showing how the growing season in the continental United States has lengthened between 1895 and 2015, with most of the upswing taking place in the past 30 years. While stipulating that a lengthening growing season could have positive effects on yield for some farmers, the EPA notes that "overall, warming is expected to have negative effects on yields of major crops." A long season "could limit the types of crops grown, encourage invasive species or weed growth, or increase demand for irrigation."

Of course, a shift in frost dates affects the life cycles of nonagricultural flora and fauna, as well. Longer summers, writes the EPA, could change "the function and structure" of a region's ecosystems, encouraging some species to reproduce more vigorously, and inhibiting the success of others.

David Rumsey Map Collection via Slate

David Rumsey Map Collection via Slate

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100-year-old frost maps show how climate change has shifted the growing season in America

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Published in a 1936 Atlas of American Agriculture, put together by the United States Department of Agriculture, these 1916 maps of the average dates of first killing frosts in fall and last killing frosts in spring were initially intended to help farmers plan their planting schedules.

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Boston Students Get A Glimpse Of A Whole New World, With Different Maps : The Two-Way : NPR

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Boston Students Get A Glimpse Of A Whole New World, With Different Maps : The Two-Way : NPR

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Students throughout Boston are getting a radically different view of the world, one laminated 24-by-36-inch sheet of paper at a time.

Beginning last Thursday, Boston Public Schools administrators have been sending social studies teachers in the second, seventh and 11th grades new maps for their classrooms - depictions that more accurately portray the sizes of Earth's continents.

When many people picture a map of the world, what they're probably thinking of is a Mercator projection, a representation that despite its apparent distortions has been around more than 400 years. It's that map that hangs in most classrooms throughout the U.S., including those in Boston.

By contrast, the map known as the Peters projection, which city authorities are now meting out to many of the city's classrooms, is a relative fledgling. Introduced at a conference in Germany in 1974, historian Arno Peters' map aims to fix the Mercator's inaccuracies, which vastly exaggerate the size of land masses approaching the north and south poles - and in doing so, help prop up a decidedly eurocentric worldview.

Therein lies the rub.

"This is the start of a three-year effort to decolonize the curriculum in our public schools," said Colin Rose, assistant superintendent of opportunity and achievement gaps for Boston Public Schools, tells The Guardian.

"Eighty-six percent of our students are students of color," Hayden Frederick-Clarke, director of cultural proficiency for BPS, tells member station WBUR. "Maps that they are presented with generally classify the places that they're from as small and insignificant. It only seems right that we would present them with an accurate view of themselves."

The issue rests partly in the problem of how to transpose the 3-D shape of Earth onto a two-dimensional sheet of paper. For Gerardus Mercator - the Flemish cartographer who in 1569 came up with the map still most commonly used today - the central goal was to support navigation along colonial trade routes. And the central point on the globe for him was, of course, Europe.

The trouble is that his projection, which places northern Europe at the heart of the world and shrinks Africa and South America, is far from precise. The Guardian breaks down some of the most notable discrepancies:

"South America is made to look about the same size as Europe, when in fact it is almost twice as large, and Greenland looks roughly the size of Africa when it is actually about 14 times smaller. Alaska looks bigger than Mexico and Germany is in the middle of the picture, not to the north - because Mercator moved the equator."

In an email to NPR after this story was published, Bob Abramms, founder of map publisher ODT, clarifies that shift in the equator's position is not Mercator's doing, exactly, but rather a function of just how massive his projection unintentionally renders Antarctica.

"The Mercator 'projection' does have the equator at the mid-point," Abramms writes. "Only map PUBLISHERS made a decision not to waste paper and ink on a huge Antarctica, so the publishers frequently crop off the continent and then re-center the map ... resulting in the equator being 2/3 the way down the map."

All this adds up to a view of the world that sets one set of cultures center stage, while marginalizing and even radically shrinking others. And that can have a real effect on students of all backgrounds.

This is about maps, but it isn't about maps. It's about a paradigm shift in our district. We've had a very fixed view that is very Eurocentric. How do we talk about other viewpoints? This is a great jump off point.

"Once students feel like the school isn't being truthful, there's a tendency to shut down and reject information," Frederick-Clarke tells WBUR.

Enter Peters' projection - which is also known as the Gall-Peters projection, since it's virtually identical to a projection put forward by the Scottish cartographer James Gall in the 19th century. This vision of the world harbors its own fair share of inaccuracies, but generally it comes closer to depicting the continents as they are.

"The Peters projection has created a lot of controversy over the years because it distorts shapes," Abramms tells the Guardian, "but it's enormously visually important in terms of the scale and position of the terrain on the Earth, showing correct size and proportion of the continents."

"So this is about maps, but it isn't about maps," Rose tells the Boston Globe. "It's about a paradigm shift in our district. We've had a very fixed view that is very Eurocentric. How do we talk about other viewpoints? This is a great jump off point."

Natacha Scott, Boston Public Schools history and social studies director, believes the 125-school district is the first in the U.S. to make the formal shift. And while the Mercator projections are not getting removed, she tells the Guardian that the influx of Peters projections is already having an effect on the students who encounter them.

"Some of their reactions were quite funny," she says, "but it was also amazingly interesting to see them questioning what they thought they knew."

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Boston Students Get A Glimpse Of A Whole New World, With Different Maps

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Students throughout Boston are getting a radically different view of the world, one laminated 24-by-36-inch sheet of paper at a time. Beginning last Thursday, Boston Public Schools administrators have been sending social studies teachers in the second, seventh and 11th grades new maps for their classrooms - depictions that more accurately portray the sizes of Earth's continents.

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Snow Blankets Northeastern U.S. : Natural Hazards

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Snow Blankets Northeastern U.S. : Natural Hazards

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Snow Blankets Northeastern U.S. : Natural Hazards

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After a late winter snowfall, clouds moved out and offered a clear view from space.

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NYTimes: High Above, Drones Keep Watchful Eyes on Wildlife in Africa

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NYTimes: High Above, Drones Keep Watchful Eyes on Wildlife in Africa

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Liwonde has lost about 50 elephants and two rhinos since 2014 to poachers. In August 2015, the Malawi Department of National Parks enlisted the help of African Parks, a nonprofit that specializes in rehabilitating struggling protected areas.

Since taking over operations here, the group has confiscated upwards of 18,000 illegal snares, made over 100 arrests, installed more than 60 miles of electric fencing and removed 261 elephants to another reserve.

But African Parks also has embarked on an unusual high-tech experiment, calling in a drone team from South Africa. With funding from the World Wildlife Fund, including a $5 million grant from Google, drones are being tested here in the first systematic evaluation of their potential to combat poachers.

UAV & Drone Solutions, the company that employs Ms. Dudley and Mr. De Necker, is the first licensed drone operator in Africa, a certification that permits the company to fly drones up to 15 miles away and to operate at night - crucial advantages, given that the vast majority of poachers are active after dark and few parks are able to carry out effective nocturnal patrols.

The group now operates in South Africa, Malawi and Zimbabwe, and soon will expand to Botswana. Their fixed-wing, bespoke BatHawk drones are outfitted with cameras, video transmitters and telemetry, and with battery changes they can fly for more than eight hours.

"U.D.S. does this better by far than anyone else," said John Petersen, the board chairman of the Charles A. and Anne Morrow Lindbergh Foundation, a nonprofit. "There's no one else in the world we know of that are flying regular missions almost exclusively at night."

The idea of using drones to combat poachers is not new. Conservationists enthusiastically embraced the devices as a silver bullet a few years ago - but disappointment was swift.

Industry-grade equipment and software are needed, but they tend to be well beyond the budgets of strapped conservation organizations. Park managers opted for inappropriate models, too fragile for wild landscapes and lacking the necessary flight capabilities and cameras.

"I don't think the world of conservation has the money to spend that would be needed to make an anti-poaching drone effective," said Richard Vigne, the chief executive of Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya.

Conservationists failed to do the homework needed to see if drones were actually suitable for their needs, said Nir Tenenbaum, the director of Wildeas, a conservation technology consultancy.

"So many groups want technology to solve all their problems, but usually they don't understand the tech," he said.

Government officials haven't helped. In Namibia, trial flights and training undertaken by the W.W.F., supported by the Google grant, were cut short when the government suspended the use of drones. Other nations have banned unmanned aerial vehicles entirely or have strictly limited their use.

Only recently has that begun to change. In 2015, South Africa established some of the first formal drone legislation, and other countries have started making limited exceptions for their use.

The Lindbergh Foundation's Air Shepherd program, along with the South Africa-based Peace Parks Foundation and the W.W.F.'s Google grant, have covered about half U.D.S.'s $100,000 monthly operational costs.

Despite these resources, Otto Werdmuller Von Elgg, the company's co-founder, has discovered that drones are far from the blanket solution everyone had hoped for.

"I am very convinced that we are onto something, but we're only beginning to understand how this tool can be used effectively," he said. "The challenge now is determining how we integrate drones into existing anti-poaching operations."

So far, no arrests of poachers have been made solely based on drone surveillance, and pilots have only spotted poachers a handful of times. Drone teams often don't get ground support in the form of rangers able to follow up on leads, and must frequently fly without guidance on where poachers might be, according to Mr. Werdmuller Von Elgg.

During trials in South Africa's Kruger National Park, a protected area roughly the size of Israel, "we were told to go find people in this vast area based on no intelligence - it was an absolute waste of time," Mr. Werdmuller Von Elgg said. "We were just turning batteries into noise."

When the drone team at Kruger finally did detect a group of rhino poachers, they called park officials. But officials said that there were no rangers available for deployment.

"It was very frustrating," said Ms. Dudley, who had spotted the intruders. "You get upset with people because they say they want you there and you deliver the service, but then they don't back you up."

But Otch Otto, formerly the mission area operations manager of ranger services at Kruger, believes that limited resources were better spent on proven techniques and technologies, not experimental flying drones.

"The technology is in the research phase, and to dedicate a reaction capability to something unproven does not serve the rhino," he said.

Data analysis has also been a challenge. Currently, drone operators must watch live video feed to detect intruders and it is all too easy to miss the poachers.

"It could be numerous reasons - the operator looks away for 20 seconds, or goes to grab a cup of coffeeand misses it," said Cedric Coetzee, the general manager for rhino security at Ezemvelo KwaZulu-Natal Wildlife in South Africa. "It's not going to go beep-beep-beep, and off you go. You have to spot it."

Indeed, pilots at a reserve managed by Mr. Coetzee missed a group of trespassers briefly picked up by their drone. The poachers were discovered only later in a review of the video feed.

Serge Wich, an ecologist at Liverpool John Moores University in Britain and co-founder of the nonprofit Conservation Drones, is collaborating with colleagues from the astrophysics department to develop drone software that differentiates between humans and animals.

"Once this is finalized, instead of having hours and hours of video to look at that doesn't have meaningful information, rangers will get a ping when there's a high chance that a poacher has been detected," Professor Wich said.

Perhaps the biggest challenge is that conservationists do not know how to most effectively put anti-poaching drones to use, because there have been no rigorous long-term evaluations.

South Africa's Council for Scientific and Industrial Research conducted a two-month trial with U.D.S. and concluded that the technology is "a remarkable support tool," but officials have yet to release the data supporting those findings.

Most evidence supporting drones is anecdotal: Mr. Coetzee said he has seen a significant reduction in park incursions when and where drones fly, but added that other factors could have been at play. Drones may deter trespassers, he said, but they may simply go elsewhere in the reserve.

W.W.F. plans to tease out the answers to these questions by evaluating the drones' effectiveness against poachers here in Liwonde. Trials with two Bathawks and three DJI Phantom drones began in August. The foundation also has begun a test in Zimbabwe.

Whether drones also can help reduce animals' contact with humans is also on the agenda. One unexpected discovery: DJI Phantom drones can steer elephants away from park boundaries - likely because they sound like a bit like bees, and elephants hate bees.

"At the end of the experiment, hopefully we'll be able to say here's some good things you can do with drones and here are the things you shouldn't try because they probably won't work," said George Powell, W.W.F.'s director of wildlife technology.

"We're going to do this as scientists, and hopefully we'll save some elephants in the meantime."

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High Above, Drones Keep Watchful Eyes on Wildlife in Africa

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Liwonde has lost about 50 elephants and two rhinos since 2014 to poachers. In August 2015, the Malawi Department of National Parks enlisted the help of African Parks, a nonprofit that specializes in rehabilitating struggling protected areas.