mapping

Recon 2: The Google map of the human body

What if you could "street view" the human body, navigating its interactive components all the way down to a metabolic level? An international group of scientists is working on that right now with a map of the human metabolism, which they call Recon 2.

Metabolism plays a key role in many diseases, and while scientists have already managed to reconstruct several models of it, each "represents only a subset of our knowledge" with "only partially overlapping content," the team writes in the journal Nature Biology.

"It's like having the coordinates of all the cars in town, but no street map," Bernhard Palsson, a professor of bioengineering at the University of California San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and one of the authors of the paper, said in a statement. "Without this tool, we don't know why people are moving the way they are."… Read more

Google curates points of interest with Field Trip for iPhone

Field Trip (Android|iPhone) helps you find out more about your current location by sending you notifications when you're near landmarks, restaurants, historical sites, and other noteworthy spots. The app draws information from several sources, including Arcadia, Historvius, Food Network, Zagat, Atlas Obscura, Daily Secret, and others to enrich your experience of locations you wouldn't know were uniquely interesting otherwise. You can use it as a personal tour guide or share interesting locales over Facebook and Twitter.

The app also lets you set the frequency of notifications from none to an Explore mode that gives you all the … Read more

Cat Map: Like Google Maps, but for felines

It's like Google Maps, but for finding cats: Cat Map, a Web site set up by the London Zoo.

Have you ever wanted to stare at a global map of cats? Just hang out on a world map, seeing where all the cats are? Well, now you can.

The Zoological Society of London set up the Web site to promote tiger conservation and its tiger sanctuary, opening March 22, but the map lets you see beloved felines, not just from London, but everywhere. … Read more

Google Maps for iOS gets first big update

Google today pushed out its first update to its mapping software on Apple's iOS, adding a few new features.

Chief among them is integration with a user's Google contact list, a feature that will pull up any addresses you have stored with Google, and not just on your phone.

The update (iTunes) also adds a new option in the search menu that will quickly look for nearby points of interest, including restaurants, gas stations, movie theaters, and coffee shops. You could search for these things before, but the new menu means you don't actually have to type … Read more

Google courts Apple developers with new Google Maps tools

Google has updated its developer tools so that any iOS developer can access its Google Maps data and integrate the features into apps.

The updated software developer kit, or SDK, is now available to all iOS developers, not just developers the company had previously granted access to, Google developer advocate Paul Saxman said in a video demonstrating the new tools.

The new version includes support for ground overlays, gesture control, and geodesic polylines. Giving access to all developers may mean that more third-party app developers will choose to use Google's mapping data instead of Apple's.

The two companies … Read more

Unfaithful fiance exposed on Russia's Google Street View

Please prepare your tissues and handkerchiefs. For this is a tale of a woman's woe.

It is the tale of a woman in love, a woman who adored her man. One day, this woman decided to go to Russia's equivalent of Google Maps. It's called Yandex. She wanted to look for an address in her home town of Perm.

As NBC's Today Show reveals, Marina Voinova found herself going to the Street View mode and looking curiously at a couple in front of a building.

They seemed to be in canoodling mode. And one of them … Read more

Map shows every meteorite impact since 2,300 B.C.

Want to find out where every meteorite recorded since 2,300 B.C. has fallen on Earth? A new map will help you out.

Javier de la Torre, co-founder of software companies Vizzuality and CartoDB, has posted a heat map showing where the meteorites have fallen over the last several thousand years. According to The Verge, which first reported on the map and spoke with de la Torre, 34,513 individual impact points are recorded on the map.

De la Torre claims that it took him only 30 minutes to record the impacts. He used OpenStreetMap, a crowdsourced platform, for the map, and then input impact sites from data collected by the Meteorological Society.… Read more

Street View comes to Indianapolis Colts' stadium

And now, a way to explore an NFL stadium without paying the $100 average ticket price: Google Maps today introduced Street View for Lucas Oil Stadium, better known as the home of the Indianapolis Colts.

It is the first U.S. sports venue to get the Street View treatment. Previously, Google created the 360-degree, interactive maps for World Cup stadiums in South Africa.

To bring the Colts' stadium to Google Maps, the Street View team showed up on a day where no sporting events were planned and proceeded to document using two key tools: the proprietary Street View trolley, a … Read more

Desktop search declined for the first time in 2012, report says

Looks like those reports last year suggesting that desktop search is in decline were correct: Total searches dropped 3 percent in 2012, according to a new report from ComScore.

The main reason for the decline, according to the report, is that individuals are searching less: about 7 percent fewer searches per user. That's enough to cause the decline, even though the number of searchers is up 4 percent.

Of the major search engines, only Bing saw an increase in searches per user: 6 percent, ComScore said.

ComScore names two possible reasons for the decline: the move toward vertical search … Read more

Montana for badasses? The USA according to Search Assist

Poor Missouri. The Show Me State is also "The Worst State," according to Yahoo Search Assist, as compiled in the above map by FlipCollective.

We've seen other such fun stabs at merging Google's autocomplete with digital cartography, but the results gathered from FlipCollective's methodology are the most entertaining and nonsensical yet. For example, while I have no idea why Yahoo thinks my home state of New Mexico is best described as "stretching," it does explain why I've been feeling so limber lately.… Read more