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ScienceBiggest political donors so farScienceMusic generated through live freeway traffic feedScienceIncome and spending inequalityScienceWhen the economy seems good in numbers but feels bad in realityScienceAnnoying agents that ruin the internetScience✚ When the visual trade-offs are worth itScienceWhat it’s like when a data center moves inScienceHand-drawn illustration library
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45 recent items
BAGANBAZAR GRAPHSource-attributed newsSCIENCE desk
Science

Biggest political donors so far

Using data from the Federal Election Commission, the Washington Post called out the fifty biggest donors in 2026 and categorized them by the parties they donated to. The gray rectangles are donations from organizations, which happen to be related to cryptocurrency, gambling, AI, and guns. Together, this small group of donors have donated $1.7 billion. Tags: donors, election, politics, Washington Post

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BAGANBAZAR GRAPHSource-attributed newsSCIENCE desk
Science

Music generated through live freeway traffic feed

A live Caltrans feed of the southbound 101 highway in California is translated to music-ish tones. Each vehicle that passes is a note. Select the instruments you want. It doesn’t compare to actual composition, but the live aspect is interesting. You might want to view it on a computer that is younger than a decade, as mine buckled under the pressure. Tags: highway, music, traffic

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BAGANBAZAR GRAPHSource-attributed newsSCIENCE desk
Science

When the economy seems good in numbers but feels bad in reality

When you think about how the economy is doing these days, it can seem bad when you know people out of work and wages are not keeping up with inflation. The economy can seem good though when the unemployment rate is relatively low and spending is up. For Reuters, Prinz Magtulis and Ann Saphir use a set of line charts to show two perspectives of the economy. The icons for happy and sad feel like corporate PowerPoint, but hey, if it works it works. Tags: economy, perspective, Reuters

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BAGANBAZAR GRAPHSource-attributed newsSCIENCE desk
Science

Annoying agents that ruin the internet

For 404 Media, Jason Koebler collated the dumb emails they receive from dumb AI agents that are ruining the internet experience. Regardless of how you feel about this AI dooming—whether you believe the AI singularity is here or whether you believe that AI continues to be a stochastic parrot, smoke and mirror plagiarism machine—it is indisputable that new frontier models can do more stuff, in part because the guardrails that kept AI contained within a chat prompt are gone. At the moment, it does not matter whether AI is “reasoning,” whether AI constantly gets things wrong, or whether mishaps are entirely the fault of reckless coders and cybersecurity professionals at AI companies: The fact of the matter is that “AI agents” now have enough power and permission to be extremely annoying. I get a lot of these emails. I assume it’s a volume game like sending a million Nigerian prince emails, but that at least had a payoff for scammers, right? The pretend emails feigning interest in people’s work (or promises of rare datasets in my case) is just volume annoyance. Tags: 404 Media, annoying, bot, email

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BAGANBAZAR GRAPHSource-attributed newsSCIENCE desk
Science

What it’s like when a data center moves in

For the Verge, Lauren Feiner visited Loudoun County, Virginia, which used to be the location of AOL headquarters. After the dot-com bust, the county opened the empty AOL buildings and infrastructure to data centers. The plan worked and was humming along, until the past couple years when hyperscalers suddenly needed a lot more space and resources. Loudoun County residents are also starting to take notice. Within the past few years, data centers have been elevated from an unremarkable part of daily life in Loudoun to something that many residents now think about every day. For some, it’s the constant hum they hear from their decks; for others, it’s the transmission towers that loom over their favorite green space, or the surprise call from their energy utility that one of those towers could go up in their own backyard. While residents recognize that data centers have brought a lot of prosperity to the county, they’re beginning to wonder how much more they can take. The residents interviewed in this story seem about as conflicted as the people using generative AI. On the one hand, the technology brings benefits to the community in the form of jobs, reduced property taxes, and increasing home values. On the other hand, some neighbors get a giant tower built in front of their home’s sight line or light shining through their windows all night. Tags: data center, reality, Verge

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BAGANBAZAR GRAPHSource-attributed newsSCIENCE desk
Science

Hotter days and more of them

Summer 2026 is likely the hottest summer on record since 1895. The NYT editorial board describes the warming days and warns of what is to come. In many parts of the country, extreme heat affects much more of the year than it once did. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Fulton County, Ga., which includes Atlanta, spent about 47 days a year with a heat index (a measure that combines temperature and humidity to estimate how hot it feels) exceeding 90 degrees. In recent years, Fulton County’s residents have typically endured 79 such days, an increase of a month. There are several charts and maps by graphics editor Gus Wezerek. The introduction chart, shown above, looks like radiant lines rising off a hot surface. It’s a clever use of a connected scatterplot. The x-axis is the average days per year with a heat index above 90 degrees Fahrenheit, using a 10-year moving average. The y-axis is the difference between points in time. Points are connected from 1995 through 2025. Tags: climate change, heat, New York Times

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BAGANBAZAR GRAPHSource-attributed newsSCIENCE desk
Science

Consuming more than the Colorado River provides

The Colorado River is at risk due to drought and states using more than the river provides. For Reuters, Travis Hartman and Andrew Hay mapped and charted how volumes have changed over time. Water use peaked in the late 20th century. Consumption has eased since, but the U.S. still draws more from the Colorado than the river provides — a gap widened over the past two decades by a megadrought that has pulled reservoir levels sharply lower. This is a very flow-centric piece. It starts with a moving water line, which ends up being the top of a Sankey diagram. The bar chart uses the same water pattern that moves a little bit at the top. Then there’s a map of the actual river. Tags: Colorado River, consumption, drought, Reuters, water

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BAGANBAZAR GRAPHSource-attributed newsSCIENCE desk
Science

Japan requests revision to UN-supported map

The United Nations voted to support the Equal Area map projection, which more accurately shows the size of Africa than the Mercator projection. However, Japan has requested a revision, because the Kuril Islands is shown to belong to Russia. For the Guardian, Agence France-Presse reports: Japanese government spokesperson Minoru Kihara on Thursday said the new map – known as the Equal Earth cartographic projection – “contained a depiction contradicting the Japanese government’s position”. “We lodged a protest with the map site’s operator through our diplomatic channel to demand the correction of this depiction,” Kihara told reporters. He declined to say when the issue was brought to government’s attention but said Japan “needs to prevent misconceptions of our territories and geographical names from spreading”. The disputed islands were seized in 1945 by the former Soviet Union, which then expelled the Japanese population. There are those trade-offs again when abstracting reality. Tags: cartography, Guardian, Japan, world

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BAGANBAZAR GRAPHSource-attributed newsSCIENCE desk
Science

9/11 in Realtime

9/11 in Realtime, developed by Robbie Byrd, replays the news on the day of the attacks through television broadcasts, radio stations, and traffic control. Students entering high school this fall were born more than a decade after the attacks, and many of their teachers have no first-hand memory of the day. The 9/11 Realtime Archive was built for them: rather than summarizing history, it replays the primary record itself, alongside curriculum guidance for classroom use and clear content advisories. “I started this project because, as a college student pulling an all-nighter on September 10, 2001, I slept through most of the next morning,” said Robbie Byrd, the independent developer who created the project. “I created this site to help others who didn’t–or couldn’t–experience the day as it happened.” This was tough to watch and listen to, but it is an extensive and interactive archive that accurately represents what the country was witnessing on September 11. Tags: 9/11, news, real-time, Robbie Byrd

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BAGANBAZAR GRAPHSource-attributed newsSCIENCE desk
Science

Cultural trends through kid drawings

Riley Walz charted drawing trends on student art portfolio Artsonia. Kids shape culture, and their drawings show what captures their attention. I scraped over 100 million drawings and paintings from Artsonia, an online student art gallery, to explore almost 20 years of favorite characters, passing obsessions, and everyday life. Just search for a topic and you can see the trend line for the past couple decades along with charming artwork. I think Baby Yoda’s appeal is just about worn. Tags: Artsonia, drawing, Riley Walz, trends

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BAGANBAZAR GRAPHSource-attributed newsSCIENCE desk
Science

Terence Tao on the paradox of solving mathematical problems

Mathematician Terence Tao, a 2006 Fields Medal winner and professor at UCLA, discusses with Big Think solving problems with AI and the process of finding solutions without. By using AI to effectively skip over the mistakes, challenges, and learning towards a solution, our creative thinking skills could diminish. On the other hand, real progress can be made. Tao uses the tools for “secondary tasks like doing literature searches or checking a proof or writing some code, proof reading something that I wrote to see if there’s any opportunity to make things a little bit tighter.” This seems to be a common workflow among experts in their respective fields. I keep thinking back to my graduate school days when I didn’t know what I was doing a lot of the time. The struggle was the most valuable part of the experience. I don’t know if I get as much out it if today’s tools were available then. Tags: Big Think, math, paradox, Terence Tao

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BAGANBAZAR GRAPHSource-attributed newsSCIENCE desk
Science

UN votes to support map projection that accurately shows the size of Africa

Last year, the African Union pushed for wider adoption of the Equal Area map projection so that the size of Africa is more accurately shown around the world. A few days ago, the United Nations voted in favor of the more accurate projection. For the Guardian, Eromo Egbejule reports: At the session, 164 countries voted in favour of the resolution. Only the US voted no, with its representative saying the resolution was “superfluous”. There were six abstentions. UN resolutions are non-enforceable, so countries and institutions will not be mandated to use only the new projection or forbidden from using the old one. However, the outcome is expected to result in an update of classroom curriculums and everyday technology given the wide usage of the Mercator projection in education, technology and governance. The Mercator projection, which is good for local directions, makes Africa appear much smaller. See also from last year: a primer on projections and the math that affects how regions are perceived. Tags: Africa, area, cartography, Guardian, projections

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BAGANBAZAR GRAPHSource-attributed newsSCIENCE desk
Science

Estimating a much stronger than usual El Niño

For Climate.us, Emily Becker explains why it looks like El Niño is going to break records this year. Current estimates from NOAA adjusts for the ocean warming overall. Our old yardstick was telling us whether the El Niño region was warmer than average, but not if it was significantly warmer than other parts of the tropical oceans. Now we made a new yardstick: the Relative Niño-3.4 index, which is the original-flavor Niño-3.4 anomaly minus the average anomaly over the entire tropical oceans. Subtracting out the tropics-wide anomaly helps us understand El Niño’s true strength in a warming world. It’s very likely that this year’s action in the tropical Pacific is El Niño plus some climate change. To get just the ENSO part of the signal, we look at the Relative Niño-3.4 index. It’s not obvious at a glance, but with the new model (top), you can see the stronger difference between blue on in the west and red on in the east. More variation leads to stronger El Niño. Tags: Climate.us, El Niño, estimation, NOAA

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BAGANBAZAR GRAPHSource-attributed newsSCIENCE desk
Science

Form a curve, make a pot

Imagine a pottery wheel that turns clay on an axis. A potter forms the sides and the shape goes all around. Karim Douieb made an interactive that shows how different curves look as a family of pots. Potters don’t design bowls and vases, they design one curve. That single line, rotated around the axis, becomes the entire form. In Line, you draw that curve. One side, shaped with a handful of control points, and the app grows a family of proportions around it: each variant keeping the radii and angles that make your line recognizably yours. Taller, wider, slender, grand: different vessels, same gesture. Tags: curve, Karim Douïeb, pottery

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BAGANBAZAR GRAPHSource-attributed newsSCIENCE desk
Science

Logistics of fueling aircraft and feeding sailors with a limited supply chain

There are thousands of crew members aboard U.S. warships in the Middle East. They need a regular food supply. Aircraft on the ships need fuel to lift off. For the New York Times, Simon Ducroquet and John Ismay illustrate the challenges for the U.S. Navy when a base is destroyed and carriers need to navigate outside the range of Iranian missiles and drones. I appreciate the maps and illustrations to show how fuel and ships must flow for the fleet to remain functional. Tags: Iran, logistics, New York Times, war

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BAGANBAZAR GRAPHSource-attributed newsSCIENCE desk
Science

Observable notebooks get a rewrite

Observable, known for visualization-centric notebooks to share code, restarted fresh to adjust for this new chapter in making things with computers. We obviously cannot pretend that AI does not exist; large language models are astonishingly capable and are profoundly changing the world, and this change appears to be only accelerating. Likewise we cannot do nothing, “watching and waiting, observing from afar and merely hoping for the best” as Pope Leo writes. We therefore seek, in what little way we can with our humble notebook, to apply this technology in a way that encourages human understanding, collaboration, and creativity. Years ago, the best way to learn how to visualize data with code was to study one-off snippets via Mike Bostock’s code blocks. Observable notebooks spun off this joy of sharing and learning code, and you can see bits in visualization across the web. Of course, the work is different now, so this update seems inevitable. I’ve never been much into code notebooks, but I’ll have to kick the tires on this. Tags: notebook, Observable

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BAGANBAZAR GRAPHSource-attributed newsSCIENCE desk
Science

India enlists 3 million people to count the full population

Due to Covid, India’s census count is overdue by five years. But they’re getting things going, which involves hiring 3 million people to count around one and a half billion. For Bloomberg, Satviki Sanjay describes the challenge. The first order of business was to find enough people — more than 3 million — to knock on every door in the country. Teachers and low-level bureaucrats were ordered to participate and offered 25,000 rupees ($262) for a task that will likely take several weeks. “We knew we’d have census duty, but I had no idea what exactly that might entail,” says Priyanka Yadav, a 35-year-old primary school teacher from Gorakhpur, a district of about 4 million (she’ll be able to give you a more precise figure next year) 13 hours east of Delhi by train. In contrast, the U.S. Census Bureau hired about 500,000 workers for the decennial count. Tags: Bloomberg, census, India, population

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BAGANBAZAR GRAPHSource-attributed newsSCIENCE desk
Science

Cooling down less in the evening

The summer of 2026 will most likely be the hottest summer on record since 1936. Part of that is hot days, but more significantly it’s cooling down less at night, which raises the overall average. For the Washington Post, Ben Noll reports. In the U.S., one of this summer’s most consequential trends unfolded while most people slept. Nighttime temperatures smashed records, reaching their highest levels — 2.37 degrees above average — across the U.S. as a whole, on track to beat the previous record set in 2021 by almost half a degree. That’s important because warmer nighttime temperatures not only make it more challenging to sleep, but also to recover from the heat of the day. The values in the charts above are compared to average temperature between 1991 to 2020. That seems kind of arbitrary? But the trend for low temperatures is clear. Tags: global warming, temperature, Washington Post

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BAGANBAZAR GRAPHSource-attributed newsSCIENCE desk
Science

Uncounted heat-related deaths

The U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention count causes of death, and heat is included in the tabulations. However, it is likely that the reports for heat are undercounts. NPR, in collaboration with researchers at Boston University, modeled mortality due to heat and estimate the true counts are five times higher than reported. Years are getting hotter, so it grows more important to understand the effects, even if there are people who refuse to believe the data. Tags: Boston University, climate change, estimation, heat, mortality, NPR

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BAGANBAZAR GRAPHSource-attributed newsSCIENCE desk
Science

A third of new webpages written with AI

It is trivial to generate bodies of text on infinite topics, so of course the web is filled with the stuff. Pew Research tried to estimate how much. To explore this question, we used the Common Crawl web archive to collect almost half a million English-language webpages from the past five years – starting a couple of years before the release of ChatGPT. We then ran the text of those pages through an AI detection tool called Open Pangram to see how many of them were likely written or substantially edited by AI. In a random sample, 9% of English language webpages were marked as having signs AI authorship. When looking at only pages that went live after the release of ChatGPT, they found a much a higher rate of 1 in 3. Caveats considered, such as the accuracy and false positives with Open Pangram, the upward trends are clear. I am not sure how I feel about this, but I do not like that the em dash and Oxford comma are now a mark of AI usage. Tags: Internet, Pew Research, writing

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BAGANBAZAR GRAPHSource-attributed newsSCIENCE desk
Science

Amazon shutting down Mechanical Turk

Annie Palmer for CNBC: “We regularly evaluate our programs, tools and services and make adjustments based on those assessments,” a notice posted to the Mechanical Turk, or MTurk, website said. “Following an assessment, we’ve made the decision to close AWS Mechanical Turk, effective September 30, 2026.” Launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk matches legions of workers with simple digital jobs, or “Human Intelligence Tasks,” that typically pay out a few cents per task. They include labeling data, transcribing audio or video or answering surveys. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos described the service as “artificial artificial intelligence,” as it farmed out tasks that could be easily completed by humans but proved too challenging for computers. In its heyday, Mechanical Turk was a great way for visualization folks to gather data for specific tasks from real people. Kind of sad to see it shutdown, but so it goes on the internet. Tags: Amazon, CNBC, Mechanical Turk, shutdown

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BAGANBAZAR GRAPHSource-attributed newsSCIENCE desk
Science

When politicians turned against data centers

For the Washington Post, Jeremy B. Merrill analyzed newsletters and social media posts from politicians to estimate messaging around data centers. Democrats were negative since last year and have grown more negative since. Republicans were focused on the upside of data centers but messaging flipped in the beginning of 2026. Although based on the chart above, it looks like Republicans could trend back up. Tags: data center, politics, Washington Post

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BAGANBAZAR GRAPHSource-attributed newsSCIENCE desk
Science

Mathematical rivers

There is a simple law from John Hack that says the length of a river is proportional to its drainage area. For Quanta Magazine, Natalie Wolchover describes how this law applies everywhere. In 1957, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist named John Hack discovered the most important law of river networks. In rivers and streams in Virginia and Maryland, Hack measured the length of each stream and the area of the land that slopes toward that stream and therefore drains into it, called its basin or drainage area. What he discovered is now known as Hack’s law: Any stream, from the littlest brook to the mightiest river, has a length that’s proportional to its drainage area raised to the power of 0.6. (In symbolic form: L ~ A^0.6.) There’s a bit of variance around that 0.6 value — Earth is, after all, a complicated place — but “the general regularity of the relation is nevertheless remarkable,” Hack wrote. “Stream lengths tend to increase proportionally to the 0.6 power of the drainage area, regardless of the geological or structural characteristics of the area.” Tags: drainage, Quanta, rivers

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BAGANBAZAR GRAPHSource-attributed newsSCIENCE desk
Science

Trustworthy data visualization

Kieran Healy, a professor of sociology at Duke University, gives an enjoyable lecture on the limits of trust in data visualization. We were already approaching a place where people could say what they wanted with charts, regardless of what the data really showed. Recent technology has only sped up the process. I just kept wondering where this ends up in five or ten years. Tags: Kieran Healy, trust

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BAGANBAZAR GRAPHSource-attributed newsSCIENCE desk
Science

Steep rise in electric vehicle sales

For the New York Times, Mira Rojanasakul and Brad Plumer report on the rise in electric vehicle registrations around the world. The snippet of a chart above shows the change between 2020 and 2025 with a faded arrow. This provides a point of comparison showing the more recent jump this past year. I like it. The U.S. is much farther down the list showing a decrease in registrations year-over-year. Tags: electric vehicle, New York Times

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BAGANBAZAR GRAPHSource-attributed newsSCIENCE desk
Science

How the U.S. national debt got to $40 trillion

When you spend more than you make, you get debt. For the Washington Post, Youyou Zhou, with illustrations by Kyle Ellingson, visualized the difference over time for the United States. A long stacked bar chart provides a backdrop of revenue and spending, and the animations give a little something to highlight significant spikes. The debt has been running up for decades. It’s as if the government doesn’t even care. Tags: debt, government, revenue, spending, Washington Post

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BAGANBAZAR GRAPHSource-attributed newsTECHNOLOGY desk
Technology

Trillions of dollars in AI spending not in the balance sheet yet

For the Wall Street Journal, Peter Rudegeair and Peter Santilli report on the trillions (with a t ) of dollars slated for later spending by big tech : Nine top tech companies had some $3 trillion of off-balance-sheet commitments mostly related to AI, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of footnotes in their most recent securities filings. Those obligations are growing faster than traditional “capex,” which totaled about $600 billion over the past year they reported, and were about triple what the companies owe under their outstanding leases and long-term borrowings. That is a lot of money. Mostly, the triangle Voronoi treemap caught my eye. It’s been a while since I’ve seen one of those. I wish they had shown all $3 trillion of commitments to match the headline instead of just the four companies. The math threw me off for a second. Tags: spending , technology , Wall Street Journal

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BAGANBAZAR GRAPHSource-attributed newsSCIENCE desk
Science

Amazon buying rare books in bulk for training

Suspecting that an anonymous order of 1,000 books was headed to an AI company to scan for training data, 404 Media stuck an Apple AirTag in the shipment to track its location. The books landed at an Amazon training facility in Las Vegas called VGT3. Emanuel Maiberg reports: That employees are scanning the barcodes or ISBNs on books — a unique serial number given to every published book — before scanning their content gives further credence to another theory put forth by booksellers: AI companies are trying to methodically scan every printed book in the world by working through the list of ISBNs. One bookseller told me they suspected this was the case because the very large orders they were getting never included very rare books that do not have ISBNs. Amazon (and probably other AI facilities) strips the binding to make scans easier, so the books are destroyed in the process. Not ideal. Tags: 404 Media , Amazon , tracking , training

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BAGANBAZAR GRAPHSource-attributed newsSCIENCE desk
Science

Tariff avoidance in solar manufacturing from China

To avoid heavy solar tariffs, China allegedly moved manufacturing to other countries. When the U.S. caught a whiff, they’d impose new rules to the other countries, and imports would plummet, but then China would move elsewhere. For Bloomberg, Nadja Popovich and Mark Chediak report on the practice and a new effort to address the challenge . Tags: Bloomberg , China , solar , tariff

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BAGANBAZAR GRAPHSource-attributed newsSCIENCE desk
Science

Where to see the total solar eclipse in Europe

The last total solar eclipse over Europe was in 1999. One will be visible on Wednesday. For Reuters, Adrián Blanco Ramos mapped where tomorrow’s path will be and historical context with where previous paths were. The 2026 eclipse is the first of three successive solar eclipses visible from Spain. It will be followed by another total solar eclipse on August 2, 2027, with the path of totality crossing southern Spain before continuing across Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and then by an annular solar eclipse on January 26, 2028, which will also be visible from Spain. I’ve heard good things about the experience of totality. Maybe take advantage if you’re in or near the path. Tags: eclipse , Europe , Reuters

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BAGANBAZAR GRAPHSource-attributed newsTECHNOLOGY desk
Technology

Emoji usage and age generations

For NYT’s the Upshot, Eve Washington, Larry Buchanan, and Claire Cain Miller examined the most commonly used emojis and how it changes by generation . reached the top by leapfrogging and on the leaderboard. A big reason: Young people decided the other emojis were overused, according to linguists and a New York Times analysis of Reddit posts. The new data comes from an anonymous sample of 665 million emojis used by people worldwide on Gboard, a Google keyboard built into most devices using Android, the most widely used operating system. Google shared the data with The Times, with 2025 being the latest available. My emoji usage sadly reflects my age apparently. I mostly only use or with a sprinkle of . My emoting evolution kind of stopped at :). Tags: emoji , New York Times

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