Each month, we look back on the best of the month’s Best of the Blogs.
Amidst the recent discovery of super-Earth LHS 1140b – one of the “most exciting” exoplanets found in the last decade – a unique scientific crowdsourcing project is about to begin to further advance the search for new Earths. To speed up the discovery process, the initiative will allow players of EVE Online to sift through real-world astronomical data and discover new exoplanets. Now that is some serious gaming. [Big Think] (Image source: Artist’s impression of two of the seven TRAPPIST-1 planets. Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
The cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab created an interesting project called Earth 2050 for their 20th birthday. The goal is to map how the life on our planet will look like in the future. The project accumulates predictions about social and technological developments for the upcoming 30 years. Everything is served on the futuristic looking 3D globe. You can explore predictions per geography and time (2030, 2040 and 2050). [Geoawesomesness]
According to Wikipedia’s List of Terrorist Incidents, in 2017 over 2,000 people have already been killed in terrorist attacks this year. You can see where those terrorist attacks took place on the 2017 Terrorist Attacks map. This map from PeaceTech Lab uses the data from Wikipedia’s chronology of terrorist attacks to show where attacks have taken place around the globe. [Maps Mania]
What makes the world go round? Not love or money. Except if it’s the love of oil, and the money to pay for it. This world map shows each country’s main export, excluding services. The results are colour-coded. Australia stands out like a sore thumb for its greatest export, coal. [Big Think]
On March 16, 2017, US aircraft attacked the Omar Ibn al-Khatab mosque in Syria, killing at least 38 people. In separate investigations of the same attack, Bellingcat analysed open source information and Forensic Architecture created an impressive three-dimensional model of the mosque and an animated recreation of the attack, as shown in the excerpt above and detailed in this here story: [Human Rights Watch].
