A Data Visualization Newsletter

Want to explore the Earth’s atmosphere from the comfort of your couch? Neal Agarwal’s latest project is the perfect means by which to do just that. Check out all of the things that hover above our planet’s surface — including bar-headed geese, passenger jets, and the world-record skydive — in this interactive experience.

If you’ve been using ChatGPT or any of the other AI chatbots over the last few months, you may feel like they have an uncanny ability to hold lucid conversations. So where do they get their knowledge from? It comes from a gargantuan amount of text, mostly scraped from the internet. The Washington Post set out to document the various sources that tech companies are using to train these sophisticated models.

From Naples, NY to Paris, IL, the U.S. is filled with towns that are named after foreign places. This didn’t happen by coincidence; most of these cities were named by immigrants after the area that they originally called home. For this project, Axios compiled a comprehensive database of American cities that share a name with other towns across the globe.

According to most estimates, India will surpass China as the country with the largest population by the middle of 2023. So what does that mean for the rest of the world? As The New York Times shows, India’s fast-expanding young workforce and impressive economic growth could define the next century.

This project from the University of Tübingen documents the 21 million academic papers that live in PubMed, a public database maintained by the United States National Library of Medicine. The viz is intended to facilitate exploration of how biomedical research has evolved over time on topics like COVID-19, neuroscience, and others. It’s an impressive effort to catalog so much scientific literature in a single view.