Data visualization expert John Nelson uses graphic design to illustrate risk. In his latest infographic, he plots the perilousness of driving — something many of us will be doing a lot of in the coming weeks. Using traffic fatality data collected between 2006 and 2010, Nelson set out to look for daily, weekly,…

Holy crap this is cool. Over on Brain Pickings, Maria Popova has an exclusive English version of a visualization (originally designed for La Lettura, a Sunday cultural supplement to the Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera that features a weekly column dedicated to data visualization) that compares Nobel Prizes and…

Are you a Liberal? Do you like Heineken? Congratulations, so do a bunch of other self-identified left-wingers.

Three weeks ago, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (aka JPL) landed the Curiosity rover on Mars. It was a monumental achievement, but only the most recent in a long and impressive string of missions in which JPL has played a major part.

Early longevity studies led scientists to the conclusion that a creature's lifespan was proportional to its body mass and heart rate; "the big, slow elephant outlives the quick, small mouse," explains Fred Guterl in a recent piece for Scientific American.

Data visualization expert John Nelson likes to illustrate risk. Usually he focuses on individual events, but in recent months he's directed his design talents towards a series of bigger projects, in the interest of communicating information about "general geographic trends in existential risk." Translation: beautiful…

Remember a few weeks ago when XKCD put out that killer infographic depicting all 786 of our galaxy's confirmed exoplanets in one convenient visualization? Well, thanks to some data from Planetary Habitability Laboratory and some handy codework by Lane Harrison, that infographic just got even cooler.

If we've learned anything from the Waldo Canyon fire in Colorado, it's that major wildfires are devastatingly powerful. They're so intense, in fact, that their energy output can actually be represented in terms of nuclear power plant output. Now, data visualization wizard John Nelson has done exactly that.

You're looking at the latest work of John Nelson, who is becoming well known for combining natural-disaster data with brilliant visualizations. The Michigan-based designer first captured our attention with a series of fantastic maps of U.S. tornado data. Now, he's used his talents to chart a century's worth of…

It's Friday. For many people the weekend will bring two things: Sunday services and late-night booze-fests. Which does your corner of the country hold most dear?

How do you turn your pizza delivery bike into a TRON light cycle? Simple: slap a GPS tracker on the back, run your delivery routes, then add the light ribbons in later. Do that with enough bicycles, and you get the beautiful view of nighttime delivery routes featured here.

Chris Johnson is a master of representing 3D scientific information related to air currents, heat, and the physics of light. In other words, he creates highly-accurate virtual explosions like the one you see above breaking out of a container. At the AAAS conference today, he gave a presentation about the latest cool…