GIS Lounge has a post that highlights a site that hosts a map of every single photo taken from the International Space Station – that adds up to a staggering 1,129,177 photos. The maps itself is almost as beautiful as the photos it illustrates. Well worth a look.

The Atlantic has a story in honour of the latest exhibit at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum, which teaches us about 8 tools that were used to navigate the world before GPS and smartphones.

The Daily Mail has a story on a new chip developed by the US Military, which is small enough to fit on a 5c coin, yet can track its location without the need for GPS satellites. Very clever.

Andy Woodruff outlines in a post on the Cartographer Blog just why choropleth maps are a bad idea on a Mercator projection.

Google Maps Mania has a post that looks at a sort-of early version of Street View – an artist in the 70s took continual photographs of the streets of LA, and a new exhibit now compares the streets of the 1973 to the streets of 2002. Quite interesting.

Microsoft recently previewed a new thematic mapping feature in Excel that allows geo data to be visualised. GIS now as a standard office product? Very interesting.

And, to wrap up this week, The Guardian’s data blog has a map that shows every incident between North and South Korea since the end of the Korean War.