Humpback Whales in the Cook Islands, as shown on Street View. Credit: Google Maps.

To celebrate World Oceans Day on Monday, Catlin Seaview Survey and Google Maps took Street View to the sea, where you can now swim with sharks, whales, turtles and dolphins. Visit the Maps Mania post to start swimming.

Last week Propublica made a strip map on overdevelopment of the Colorado River, and this week their equally innovative map has shown the rapid urban growth in Las Vegas over the decades.

They’ve also run a piece on the growth in use of animated GIFs. However you choose to pronounce them, they’ve proven their efficiency in explaining complex phenomena like “the breathing Earth”, how a globe is made, or the ability to hypnotise someone through “GIFnosis.”

With the new Star Wars film on the way, you can expect to see more Star Wars-related maps from us. We can’t help it. The Esri blog has run a piece on the Star Wars Galaxy map – a 3D smart map where you can travel through the entire galaxy far, far away.

US researchers have combined international radar observations and LiDAR measurements to create vegetation height maps for the entire tropics at very fine spatial scales. The potential for ecology studies is huge, as LiDAR news revealed.

New research shows that there’s an alternative to GNSS that requires no satellite infrastructure, is cheaper and more accurate. The method uses the signals of stars in a process called “Pulsar Navigation,” as shown by Extreme Tech.

The ID Blog have shared the first in a series of insightful visualisations on the variation in population densities across Australia’s capital cities, based on the latest figures. This issue covers Perth, Hobart and ACT.

Here blog has once again dissected a topic to the bone with their perspective on the Nobel Prize winning research into the human brain’s “inner GPS”.