We've just launched the Atlas of Global Development, an online publication presenting interactive stories and data visualizations (95 of them!) on key global trends In this thread I give some background and highlight some parts of the Atlas that I find noteworthy data360.worldbank.org/en/atlas/ 1/n

Sometimes I really… Really would like to get the reciprocal of the current situation in the world 🫩

I had the immense honour of being invited to work on the World Bank's Atlas of Global Development 2026 project last year and today it finally launched. I couldn't be more excited, it has been a career highlight to work with such an amazing team on this.

Border Message xkcd.com/3236/

A bit of a different take on the amazing Artemis II launch footage. Here I stitched clips from the four Solar Array Wing Cameras to make this panoramic video. This is during the later part of the Core Stage burn until MECO and stage separation, sped up to 10x. 🔭🧪 #Artemis

The inaugural FIFA Peace Prize recipient and FIFA World Cup 2026 host on Easter Sunday, 67 days prior to the first game of the World Cup.

Oh my. It's taken from the right side of an aircraft flying past Cape Canaveral just as the Artemis II mission was taking off. Source: Reddit (posted by u/Spook_485; I don't know if that's the person who took the video)

🔴 🟡 ⚠️ 🌵 😷 Whole evolution of the #haboob that from southern Algeria and Marocco has crossed Northwestern #Africa, as well as engulfing #Canary Islands, reporting more than 1300ug/m3 of PM10 in #Tenerife ⬇️ 24hrs animation from Meteosat-12 on 30-31 March, with GeoColor and Dust RBG.Data via #EumetView

In awe of the dust storm we saw earlier today. Just an epic view.

An 800+ mile long haboob sweeping across northwest Africa. My oh my...

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #Onthisday #OTD 📊 🎂Mar 5, 1512 Gerardus Mercator born in Rupelmonde, Flanders, Belgium 🇧🇪 1569: he Invented of cylindrical projection for portraying the globe on maps, to preserve straightness of rhumb lines (for better or worse, but it helped Europeans navigate the seas)

NEW MARSUPIALS

Satellite images from NASA Worldview on March 5 reveal the extent of the blackout in Cuba. A failure at the most important power plant, combined with the US blockade on fuel shipments in the country has left nearly 70% of the island's inhabitants without power.

I made an animated map of ship movements in the Straights of Hormuz using data from marinetraffic.com. Ship track frames rendered using #ggplot, base map created using #gdal, video editing using #ffmpeg, video player written in #svelte. 🎁 www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2...

If anyone is friends with any Georgian air traffic controllers, buy them a nice bottle of wine. As guardians of pretty much the only narrow gap still available between Europe and Asia that avoids both Iran, the Gulf, Ukraine and Russia, they are under some substantial pressure.

Trump's trying to find the guy who did this.

I built a free tool that shows how night-time lights have changed anywhere on Earth. Here's how it works and why it's useful for monitoring conflict, disasters, development and growth. 👇

What a difference a year makes! In mid-February 2025, northeastern Morocco was affected by severe drought. One year later and after 2 months of rain, these Copernicus Sentinel-3 images show that the region has been transformed into an expanse of green vegetation.

using LLMs for certain types of coding tasks has made me crank output faster but I can actively feel my understanding and my sense of craftsmanship diminishing, and I don't like that feeling at all

“We have all been here before We have all been here before…”

1. Dataviz package author closes PR from a bot 2. Bot angry, writes hit piece on package author 3. Tech news site reports 4. Tech news site needs to retract article: contains hallucinated quotes from package author 5. Me: seriously questioning career choices theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-...

The robot apocalypse hasn't happened yet, but still I can't escape the feeling that something has gone horribly wrong... Cartoon for Dutch newspaper @trouw.nl. More of my work for Trouw: www.trouw.nl/cartoons/tje... #ArtificialIntelligence #creativity #work #GenerativeAI

Grazalema, Spain, received over 2,000 mm (78 inches) of rain in just the last 20 days. Over a year’s worth of rain — and it’s only early February. This is hydrologically absurd.

The CIA just stopped publishing their World Factbook and took every page, including the archived copies of previous versions! This sucks. It was public domain, so I recovered the 2020 edition (the last one published as a zip file) and shared it to GitHub simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/5/t...

RIP www.cia.gov/stories/stor...

Top 10 bird family names: 10. Irenidae Means "peaceful". Has three members, the Fairy-bluebirds, which are just A++ birds and I would squee if I saw any of them.

I'd like to report a y-axis crime…

This #map title could be "Retirement with a sea view in Belgium". See online version on Eurostat website: tinyurl.com/2ps59n6a

India's electrification shortcut! ⚡️🇮🇳 Solar, wind, batteries, electric vehicles...India's economy has different tools available than the US and China did at the same stage in their economic development. The result? An early turn away from fossil molecules towards electrons.

Or, according to their position in the Economist Democracy Index: Trump's "Board of Peace": 152, 91, 133, 118, 55, 82, 129, -, 125, 75, 66, 146, 138, 117, 59.

Trump’s Board of Peace logo is basically the UN logo, except dipped in gold and edited so the world only includes America.

One of the better decisions in my past couple of weeks was to start following Good Trailcams

This is gold (but also old, and not attributed mixedidioms.co.uk/belgian-whis...)

For the first time, #Copernicus Sentinel-2A has captured night‑time images of Earth, spotting gas flares in the Middle East, wildfires in India and even fishing boats in South Korea. The results from these tests are being used to prepare for Sentinel‑2 Next Generation.

Daily reminder. #Greenland #Mercator

A broken part of iceberg #A23a with a lot of melting water. Looks amazing 🤩 #Antarctica About 11km long and about 2km wide 📸🛰#Sentinel2 2026.01.09 Click to enlarge ↔️↕️

Coincidently, I just created my Proton mail account, proton.me This AI nonsense was not the reason, but it adds up to the list. I plan to move away from US based services and platforms as much as I can

This is insane. www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

Please share - @pewresearch.org wants to hire a data archivist who will be an advocate for data users, helping to ensure that our datasets are easy to discover and reuse by researchers, journalists, and the public. pewtrusts.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/CenterExtern...

A high resolution zoomable version of the 2025 keogram was made by @tammo80.bsky.social, which also shows the motion of clouds, stars and planets from day to day. astron.nl/~dijkema/keo...

Happy new year! My all sky camera imaged the sky every 15 seconds and this picture shows what happened in the sky in 2025. It shows the length of the night and day with the hourglass shape, the monthly lunar cycle with the diagonal bands, the elevation of the Sun at local noon, and lots of clouds.

BREAKING: Multiple oil tankers hit by U.S. sanctions appear to be making a coordinated attempt to break the U.S. naval blockade on Venezuela’s energy exports by departing all at once. w/ Anatoly Kurmanaev www.nytimes.com/2026/01/05/w...

The 🟦 in the middle is not an Atoll in the Pacific, it is the iceberg #A23a on which meltwater can be seen. A very surreal sight I think. 🙏Sentinel3 BTW to the right of it, approximately at 16:00h, we see South Georgia. 📸🛰#Sentinel3 2026.01.04 #Antarctica Footage: @sentinelonline.bsky.social

Days after his third dementia screening in six months the president of the United States, who is an open pedophile, abducts a foreign head of state

"international law must be followed" is european for "thoughts and prayers"