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Geopsychology: Your personality depends on where you live
The Big Five personality traits, a.k.a. the CANOE model. There is also a geographic component to their distribution, research suggests. (Credit: MissLunaRose12 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0) Does...
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Where Americans prefer to eat and drink coffee in each U.S. state
A McDonald’s restaurant in the Kingdom Mall in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. America’s biggest burger chain is usually the first one to enter foreign markets. (Credit: Lynsey Addario / Getty...
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Alt history: What if the U.S. lost a World War?
Famed aviator Charles Lindbergh (top left) addresses a crowd of 3,000 at an America First Rally in the Gospel Temple of Fort Wayne, Indiana. (Credit: Library of Congress / Public domain) By the late...
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No, the Gulf Stream isn’t going to collapse
There’s a perverse joy in reading (and writing) about catastrophic climate change. You could say that it’s a secular version of the yearning for the Apocalypse, and perhaps proof that such apocalyptic...
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The skull maps that quantified racism
Most people who read these century-old maps today will pass through three stages of interpretation: honest curiosity, morbid fascination, and intellectual disgust. A landscape of human skull shapes...
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The medieval mapmaker remembered for the wrong map
If you know one thing about 12th-century Arab cartographer Muhammad al-Idrisi, it is that he is the author of this wonky world map, which is often included in modern atlases as a prime example of...
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Lemuria, the weirdest continent that never existed
Philip Sclater should have stopped writing in 1858. That’s when he published one of the foundational texts of biogeography, the science that studies the distribution of species and ecosystems across...
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Umami: You never say its name, yet you taste it every day
Because glutamate is one source of umami, it is often associated with Asian foods enriched with monosodium glutamate (MSG). However, as this map shows (and despite its Japanese name), umami is a truly...
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Study: The Indo-European language family was born south of the Caucasus
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is a language that gave rise to many others. About 46% of humans, well over three billion people, are native speakers of an Indo-European language. But where did PIE first...
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Germany to legalize cannabis — but not here, there, or just about anywhere
In 2024, Germany could become the first major European country to legalize the recreational use of cannabis. But just because it will be allowed in theory, doesn’t mean you will be able to light up a...
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The Indian Ocean has the world’s largest gravity hole. Now we know why
Dear Indian Ocean, please don’t take offense, but: Why is your gravity hole so big? That question had been baffling scientists ever since the hole was discovered back in 1948. Now a team from the...
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The loneliest roads in America
Sukakpak Mountain, a landmark at milepost 203 on the Dalton Highway, the real “loneliest road in America.” (Credit: Bureau of Land Management Alaska / Karen Deatherage, CC BY 2.0) Go road-tripping...
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The “Roof of the World,” in eight simple lines
For ages, the mountain people of the Pamir had been calling their homeland Bam-i-Dunya. Only by the mid-19th century, after British explorers had reached Asia’s rugged interior, did the translation...
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You can drink the tap water in these 50 countries — maybe
You turn on the tap in your kitchen, and without a second thought, you drink a glass of the water that comes out. Where are you? Most probably in one of the countries marked blue on the map. If you can...
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Warmer climate, spicier food. But which country is the spiciest?
Trendlines don’t lie. As this chart shows, in warmer countries, people eat spicier food. Conversely, the colder the climate, the fewer spicy ingredients in your cuisine. There are of course outliers...
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The surprisingly relevant history of royal summits, in three maps
For most of history, international summits were royal affairs. And from the 16th to the 18th centuries, Rome was the favorite meeting place for Europe’s princes, kings, and emperors. As this map shows,...
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Why Wyoming doesn’t exist, but Bielefeld does (again)
Wyoming is right there on the map. It sends two senators to DC. And although it is alphabetically last on the list, you cannot reach the canonical complement of 50 U.S. states without it. Beyond that,...
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Derinkuyu: Mysterious underground city in Turkey found in man’s basement
A hot air balloon emblazoned with the Turkish flag sailing past some fairy chimneys, a rock formation typical for Cappadocia in central Turkey and one of its main tourist attractions. Another are its...
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Mapping Middle-earth: The lopsided demographics of Tolkien’s universe
Wizards and Trolls, Elves and Hobbits, not to mention the occasional Ent or Ringwraith…Middle-earth teems with the strangest creatures. What the place lacks, unfortunately, is the one life form that...
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Europe’s busiest airport? Heathrow and Istanbul battle for the title
Squint at this map and you’ll see the Blue Banana: the European megalopolis that stretches from Manchester to Milan. It’s home to 100 million people and represents the developed world’s largest...
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In case you missed it: America just effectively got much bigger
Did you get a little bit bigger over the holiday season? Well, so did America. You may not have noticed in the pre-Christmas rush, but on December 19, 2023, the U.S. added an area of about 1 million...
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Mapped: The deadly geography of Mount Everest
For almost 20 years, “Green Boots” was a creepy landmark near the summit of Mount Everest. Mountaineers ascending via the north face would invariably pass by this frozen body, huddled into a limestone...
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Why are America’s oldest and youngest states 13 years apart?
Maine has the highest median age of any state in the country: 45 years. That’s two years more than retiree magnet Florida and fully 13 years more than Utah, the state with the lowest median age (32...
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CERN proposes accelerator 3 times as long as Large Hadron Collider
Built inside a 27-kilometer (17-mile) circle-shaped tunnel near Geneva, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. But now CERN — the French acronym...
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Westarctica: The micronation with a real-world purpose
Marie Byrd Land, in Antarctica, was named after the wife of the American explorer Richard E. Byrd Jr. He must not have liked her very much, because even by the harsh standards of the South Pole, this...
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Was the “Odyssey” originally set in the Baltic?
Had he not wrapped himself in a discarded cloak, Ulysses would have frozen to death at Troy. Our hero’s host, Eumaeus the swineherd, hears the story and gets the hint: He loans Ulysses a cloak, because...
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Ohio’s Circleville ditched the grid system. Then it got squared.
When you’re “squaring the circle,” you’re attempting the impossible. Yet in the mid-19th century, that’s just what the good citizens of Circleville, Ohio, did: They straightened out the circular grid...
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Dewey Decimal: The sorting system that revolutionized libraries
Peculiar sets of numbers populate this 1936 map of the U.S. Each state is labeled with a number that is about the same order of magnitude as the others: Nebraska is 978.2, West Virginia is 975.4, and...
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East Coast quakes are felt farther than West Coast ones. Here’s why
Earthquakes in New York are even rarer than snowfall in Los Angeles. The one that struck the East Coast last Friday was one of the largest in the region in a century. And yet on the grand scale of...
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America’s news deserts are growing
Paper is to news what vinyl is to music: an outdated medium decimated by its digital replacement. Except that vinyl records have finally found their niche, and sales are up again. Newspapers haven’t...
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