Power of Data Visualization

Humans have proven themselves remarkably adept at learning to do what other animals can do naturally. We have taught ourselves to fly like birds, climb like monkeys and burrow like moles. But the one animal that has always proven beyond our reach is the fish.

The invention of scuba diving has allowed us to breathe underwater but only at very shallow depths. Diving below 70m still remains astonishingly dangerous to anyone but a handful of experts.

Now an inventor in the United States believes he has solved the riddle of how to get humans down to serious depths – by getting us to breathe liquid like fish. Arnold Lande, a retired American heart and lung surgeon, has patented a scuba suit that would allow a human to breathe "liquid air", a special solution that has been highly enriched with oxygen molecules.

Liquid ventilation might sound like science fiction – it played a major role in James Cameron’s 1989 sci-fi film The Abyss – but it is already used by a handful of cutting-edge American hospitals for highly premature babies.

read more at www.independent.co.uk
(Click above link to read about "How it works")

In general, asking what happened before the Big Bang is not really considered a science question. According to Big Bang theory, time did not even exist before this point roughly 13.7 billion years ago. But now, Oxford University physicist Roger Penrose and Vahe Gurzadyan from the Yerevan Physics Institute in Armenia have found an effect in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) that allows them to "see through" the Big Bang into what came before.

read more from www.physorg.com

Measured a different way, the correlation between money and happiness is surprisingly strong

via www.economist.com

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Last week Chris McDowall informatics researcher from New Zealand hooked a computer up to the Twitter data firehose and, over the course of a day and a bit, grabbed every tweet that had geographic coordinates. I wrote a Python script to parse the 2GB of JSON files and used Matplotlib with the Basemap extension to animate 25 hours of data on a world map. The resulting animation plots over 530,000 tweets — and remember these are just tweets with geo-coordinates.

He recommend you full-screen this video, turn scaling off and high definition on.

via Chris McDowall

UNAIDS, the UN body charged with combatting the AIDS epidemic, released its latest report. This carries good news. Though some 33m people are infected, the rate of new infections is falling—down from 3.1m a year a decade ago to 2.6m in 2009. Moreover, as the map shows, the figure is falling fastest in many of the most heavily infected countries. The reason is a combination of behavioural change, a big reduction in mother-to-child transmission at birth and through breast-feeding, and the roll-out of drug treatment for those already infected.

via www.economist.com

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No surprise here, compared to people born before 1975, people born after 1984 are twice as likely to breakup via the digital world, twice as likely to breakup over the phone and far less likely to decide to talk it out over coffee.

This information was collected using the publicly accessible, now defunct, polling app on Facebook, on which the question was asked to single members: "How did you end your last relationship"

via Lee Byron

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Here is a organized statistical look at the 10 most popular pets in the United States, and the estimated price range of each. Rank is based on an estimated percent of households owning each animal, not on animal population. (Cats outnumber dogs, but since cat owners often have two cats or more, cat households remain in second place.)

produced by New York Times illustrator Megan Jaegerman

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Using county-level data, this is spatially and temporally interpolated presidential vote returns for the two major party candidates in each election from 1920-2008. The result illuminates the sometimes gradual, sometimes rapid change in the geographic basis of presidential partisanship.

via James B. Duke

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via clues.yahoo.com
(Click above link and search for current trend)

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Everyone knows that it’s expensive to raise a kid. Just how expensive is it to raise a child?

via www.visualeconomics.com

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