Right now, there about 1,100 satellites whizzing above our heads performing various functions like observation, communication, and spying. There are roughly another 2,600 doing nothing, as they died or were turned off a long time ago.
How did each of these satellites get up there? And what nations are responsible for sending up the bulk of them?
The answers come in the form of this bewitching visualization of satellite launches from 1957 – the year Russia debuted Sputnik 1 – to the present day. (The animation starts at 2:10; be sure to watch in HD.) Launch sites pop up as yellow circles as the years roll by, sending rockets, represented as individual lines, flying into space with one or more satellites aboard.
Read Full article at CityLab
Sarin, allegedly used by the Syrian regime to kill more than 1,400 people on Aug. 21, is one of the most toxic and rapidly acting nerve agents. Developed in 1938 by Germany as a pesticide, sarin is, in its pure form, a clear, colourless, tasteless liquid that has no odour. Even at low concentrations, sarin can be fatal within one minute and those who survive will have permanent neurological damage.
Text and Image via National Post
“You know, this explains a lot. Because all my life, I’ve had this unaccountable feeling in my bones that something sinister was happening in the universe and that no one would tell me what it was.” Arthur Dent.
Via Crispian Jago
A visualization of women as academic authors over the years, based on the percentage of academic papers published on JSTOR, by the Chronicle of Higher Education.
See the full infograph HERE
Nancy Duarte analyzes Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech using principles from her book, Resonate. Mapping the speech to her “presentation form”, Duarte reveals the magic that makes it memorable.
The Human Microbiome Project has spent two years surveying bacteria and other microbes at different sites on 242 healthy people. The chart below hints at the complex combinations of microbes living in and on the human body.
See a larger infographic at the NYT
Perhaps applicable to all time-based practices. Thank you Eric Stewart. Via ecstatic-erratic.com
Connectograms are circular representations introduced by LONI researchers in their NeuroImage article “Circular representation of human cortical networks for subject and population-level connectomic visualization:
“This article introduces an innovative framework for the depiction of human connectomics by employing a circular visualization method which is highly suitable to the exploration of central nervous system architecture. This type of representation, which we name a ‘connectogram’, has the capability of classifying neuroconnectivity relationships intuitively and elegantly.”
Details of the graphic are explained in the PLoS article. The outermost ring shows the various brain regions by lobe (fr – frontal, ins – insula etc.). The left (right) half of the connectogram figure represents the left (right) hemisphere of the brain and the brain stem is at the bottom, 6 o’clock position of the graph.
Phineas Gage Skull with reconstructed steel rod pathway and damage (Source: PLoS ONE). Based upon this geospatial model of the damaged brain overlaid against the typical brain connectogram from the healthy population they created another connectogram indicating the connections between brain regions lost or damaged in the accident.
Excerpts of an article via Visualign
The Scale of the Universe is a visualization created by Cary Huang. This interactive scale of the universe shows the relative sizes of “everything” from the micro to the macro.
With the publication of ‘On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection’ on the 24th November 1859, Charles Darwin not only explained how and why we have the diversity of life we see all around us, but also showed how all life is connected.
Since then we have continued to gather evidence from a range of different disciplines including physiology, biochemistry and DNA analysis. The evidence indicates that all organisms on Earth are genetically related, a genealogical relationship that can be represented as an evolutionary tree known as the Tree of Life.
The Tree of Life illustrates how different species arise from previous species via descent with modification, and that all of life is connected. The diagram above shows the relationship between the major biological groups. The center represents the last universal ancestor of all life on earth, the outer branches the major biological groups.
The tree is based on research carried out by: David Hillis, Derrick Zwickl and Robin Gutell from the University of Texas. It is based on analysis of small sub-unit rRNA sequences sampled from about 3,000 species from throughout the Tree of Life.
Via BBC. Download a Tree of Life poster in .pdf format to print out and keep HERE
W.W. Norton & Company is the oldest and largest employee-owned publishing house in the U.S., and we are thrilled to have the opportunity to collaborate with their college textbook department on a variety of incredibly inspiring projects. One of those collaborations has just been published, and is hitting campuses across the country as we write this case study.
The 8th edition of Introduction to Sociology features a series of 20 full-page information graphics designed by Kiss Me I’m Polish, covering a vast array of topics such as internet connectivity, incarceration rates, and gender empowerment. As an added bonus, a few our initial concepts for a timeline of key sociological works, ultimately led to the design of the book’s cover, the accompanying poster, and a set of promotional buttons featuring prominent sociologists. The poster and cover are, respectively, text and non-text representations of a conceptual map delineating all of the topics and sociologists featured in the textbook.
Via Kiss Me I’m Polish
Understanding where technology is heading is more than guesswork. Looking at emerging trends and research, one can predict and draw conclusions about how the technological sphere is developing, and which technologies should become mainstream in the coming years.
Envisioning technology is meant to facilitate these observations by taking a step back and seeing the wider context. By speculating about what lies beyond the horizon we can make better decisions of what to create today.
Envisioning technology is a work in progress by London-based technologist/designer Michell Zappa.
A Study on Pseudo-Scientific Expressions of Metaphysical Awareness
Human beings have acknowledged mental world for a long time, that is, ‘metaphysical awareness’, and endeavored to make it attainable. The purposes of this study are to examine how invisible and abstract figures that people can feel in their daily routine are expressed as art particularly in drawings and how I illustrated them in my drawings.
With a historical consideration of metaphysical expressions in drawings, the research aims at finding that its subjects have been an incantation, religion, eternity, rank, divinity, subjective emotion, and abstract from the primitive age to the present, and proving the metaphysical expressions of mine by pseudo-scientific method on the basis of the previous metaphysics. However, the desire to scientifically express metaphysical awareness eventually becomes mock science at the scientific point of view. This is rather the drawing combined with individual and scientific theories. It looks very dry and scientific but its inner world exceptionally contains author’s own emotional and footloose imagination. Mental world that cannot be scientifically demonstrated is ultimately proved as pseudo-scientific way combined with irrational opinions, and its pseudo-scientific evidence makes another drawings. The collision derived from science and art forms a different dimensional metaphysical abstract drawing. — Minjeong An