01.11.2016 by Anete Ezera
Data visualizations do a fantastic job of distilling complex information into simple, easy to understand visuals. This is why many scientists and data journalists choose to use charts and maps to convey complicated datasets.
With data visualizations, you can explore the universe, our planet, and the amazing technological advances we’ve made as a society. We’ve selected some of the coolest science and tech data visualizations to prove that learning can be fun.
Every Active Satellite Orbiting Earth
There are more than 1,300 active satellites orbiting earth right now, taking pictures, broadcasting communication, and housing humans. Explore each active satellite sized by mass and colored by country.
The Entire History of Kickstarter Projects
Pretty much all existing attempts to map creative communities use census and jobs data. But creative efforts are often side-jobs and not accounted for. A different approach? Use Kickstarter data!
All Known Exoplanets and Their Host Stars
This gorgeous, interactive visualization shows all known exoplanets and their host stars as explained by the Goldilocks principle.
Ed Hawkins created a spiral chart GIF depicting global temperature change. It is the most convincing climate change visualization on the web.
This interactive map visually plots global outbreaks of measles, mumps, whooping cough, polio, rubella, and other diseases that are easily preventable by inexpensive and effective vaccines.
Life Expectancy & Probability of Death
View the life expectancy and probability of death by country and gender using this colorful map.
The Environmental Performance Index and the Map of Life have partnered to produce this map to illustrate the intersection of endangered ecosystems and endangered species, and to show where species and habitat protection might overlap.
200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes
In this spectacular section of ‘The Joy of Stats’ Hans Rosling tells the story of the world in 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers – in just four minutes.
This visualization is for people who are curious about the common and not so common trees planted in the five boroughs of New York City.
The name says it all. This fun visualization investigates selfies using a mix of theoretic, artistic and quantitative methods. They analyzed city, gender, and poses for over 3,200 self-portraits (selfies).
Carbon Emissions: Past, Present, Future
Here is a timeline of the world’s top 20 emitters of carbon dioxide since the dawn of industrialization dominated by UK and US.
This slick, interactive visualization explains the tricky concept of machine learning. Using a data set about homes, they created a machine learning model to distinguish homes in New York from homes in San Francisco.
August 2016 was the warmest August in 136 years of modern record-keeping, according to NASA. This animated chart GIF went viral, sweeping social media sites, blogs, and online newsrooms.
This beautiful map shows every earthquake since 1898. Here, data from NCEDC.org and the USGS and UC Berkeley have been sliced out into veneers based on magnitude, then glued together.
This is an illustration of the human genome. This graphic layers a variety of data types (links, heat maps, tiles, histograms) and is a good example of a Circos image.
Zoom and pan the map to view water levels in the west since 2000. Click a point to view the water levels for a particular reservoir. Hover over the line graphs to see the levels for a particular month.
This map shows the week by week spread of Ebola in West Africa. Zoom in on the map to learn more about specific counties and districts.
Do you have scientific data you’d like to visualize? Infogram has over 36+ chart types, 200+ regional maps, and beautiful infographic templates. You can copy and paste your data into our easy-to-use editor, import data, or connect to a live data source.
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