It’s September in Australia, which means the magpies are out in force. Not even our Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex is safe (see above). Is rampant magpie testosterone to blame or is it the magpie impulse to protect their young? CSIRO Blog is here to dispel the myths.

For those of you living in constant fear, the Magpie Alert maps where in the country you might suddenly come under magpie attack.

2015 marks Queen Elizabeth becoming the longest reigning monarch in Britain. In her 63 years and 7 months reign, the Queen has visited 128 countries a staggering combined total of 270 times, as shown by Esri’s map story.

The recent reactions to the washed up body of refugee toddler Aylan Kurdi highlighted the invisibility of refugees migration to wider audiences. The Migrant Files has published an interactive map showing the many tragic boat accidents that have occurred in Europe– so many that each year is best displayed on its own.

With a recent deathbed confession, the rumour of an undiscovered Nazi treasure trove worth millions lives on as strong as ever. Big Think took out the map to assess the many possibilities.

Gone are the days of static maps of limited extent and scale: these days we have dynamic data, big data and stories to tell. The Esri blog shared an insightful list of six amazing things that modern maps can now do.

Flickr Cities is an amazing platform that maps the location of Flickr images around the world, enabled with the ability filter the dataset by location, date and time, topic, photographer’s nationality.

“Cities are like Jekyll and Hyde. They’re the origin of the world’s biggest problems, such as water scarcity, pollution, and wobbly financial markets. But they’re also the solution,” according to Prof Geoffrey West of the Sante Fe Institute, who was featured on the HERE blog.