Some people sneeze very loudly. For the Washington Post, Teddy Amenabar, Álvaro Valiño, and Artur Galocha used animated illustrations to show what brings that on, along with tips on how to sneeze quietly.

Maggie Appleton is at the point in her pregnancy when there’s a lot of waiting, so she’s her downtime to look at pregnancy statistics. Based on a 2001 study, she made an interactive chart that lets you enter a due date to see the probability that the baby is born on a given day.

Taking key metrics from that, I made a tiny tool that shows a probability distribution graph of spontaneous labour starting on each day of your pregnancy. I’ve found this helped ground my expectations of when babies normally tend to arrive, and how long I can wait until I need to start worrying about induction. You can enter your own due date, and whether you’re a first-time mum, to see your own stats.

The Science & Community Impacts Mapping Project (SCIMap) estimates the impact of proposed funding cuts to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) across the United States:

We source our data from a public database of NIH grants that were active in 2024. We estimate the economic impact of NIH grants (or reductions in NIH funding) based on a recent report, which found that every dollar invested in NIH generated $2.56 in new economic activity in 2024. To estimate the number of jobs that would be lost if NIH funding is cut, we used the ratio of the number of jobs supported / research funds awarded in the 2024 fiscal year. We also use Census data on where U.S. commuters live and work to estimate how economic activity generated in each county can spread to adjacent counties.

Nationally, the estimates sum to $16 billion and 68,000 jobs lost. This is in addition to lost research and advances in science, of course.

Secret Base offers a much too complete history of slipping on banana peels, dating back to May 28, 1867.

Beware of banana peels. They are capable of inflicting great physical harm. Even worse, they might own you so badly that you’ll need to make a 33-minute documentary about them several years later simply to purge yourself of the abject shame and humiliation.

As Jon Bois narrates, a map and timeline show the place and time of each documented incident. A running tally for the types and affected body area supplies the cumulative totals.
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Here are tools you can use, data to play with, and resources to learn from that flew across my desk in March.

Charles-Joseph Minard was born on March 27, 1781. Most who know the name associate it with Minard’s map of the Napoleon Russian campaign, but that work came later in life, post-retirement, at the ripe age of 88 years old. He had already been making flow maps for decades as a civil engineer.

From The Minard System by Sandra Rendgen:

Tarbé de Saint-Hardouin, who published a collection of biographies on the engineers of the Corps des ponts et chaussées in 1884, described Minard as a person of independent spirits: “The slowness of his advancement, compared to his contemporaries, was without doubt the result of the independence of his mind, and of the occupations he chose, with the single goal of satisfying his affinity for research and without considering the progress of his administrative career too much.”

Slow and curious is my jam.

See also Michael Friendly’s collection of Minard resources and inspiration.

I guess we’re going to learn a good bit about tariffs over the next few years. Bloomberg is keeping track by target and possible impact. While WaPo used four tariff stages, Bloomberg goes with three: imposed, threatened, or suspended.

Tariff announcements seem to waver in tone and finality depending on the day. It’s hard to keep track of what might happen and what is actually happening. For the Washington Post, Alyssa Fowers, Leslie Shapiro, and Amaya Verde provide a scrolling timeline to show where we’ve been and where things are at.

The icons, with tariff percentages attached, move between four stages: proposed, delayed, enacted, and dropped. There seems to be a lot of switching.

Any Map Puzzle by Ahmad Barclay lets you search for a location and play the location as a slide puzzle. Choose the map tiles (Stamen Watercolor, OpenStreetMap, and ESRI World Imagery) and grid size and puzzle away.

You’re familiar with AD and BC, but you probably haven’t heard of AiP for after iphone or ATP for after toilet paper. Jonny Thaw made a fun interactive that shows a given year compared against a lot of other things in history. So dumb, yet so informative.

23andMe, the business predicated on people sending cheek swabs to have their DNA analyzed, exposed the personal data of half of customers in a data breach a couple years ago. The company filed for bankruptcy. Lily Jamali for BBC reports:

Founded in 2006, the company went public in 2021 but has never turned a profit.

In September, the firm settled a lawsuit alleging that it failed to protect the privacy of nearly seven million customers whose personal information was exposed in a 2023 data breach.

In some cases, hackers gained access to family trees, birth years and geographic locations, by using customers’ old passwords. The data stolen did not include DNA records, according to the company.

If you used the service, maybe keep an eye on what happens to your data if the company goes under or is sold off. The California attorney general issued a customer alert with instructions on how delete your data, destroy your sample, and revoke data permissions.

Spring officially started last week here in the Northern Hemisphere. For Axios, Jacque Schrag mapped the hours of daylight gained in between the spring equinox on March 20, 2025 and summer solstice on June 20, 2025.

This is based on sunrise and sunset times from NOAA.

I started spring this weekend with yard work in a warm but not too hot low 70s. Not too shabby.

What if the game Asteroids used Wikipedia edits to drive the volume and size of the objects hurling towards your ship? Kevin Payravi makes your dreams into reality with WikiAsteroids:

I recently launched WikiAsteroids (asteroids.wiki), a browser game that takes the classic arcade space shooter concept and adds a Wikipedia twist: each time someone makes an edit on Wikipedia, a new asteroid spawns. The size of the asteroid corresponds to the size of the edit. Blue asteroids represent edits with a net increase in content, while red ones indicate a net decrease. A new article creation spawns an extra life, and new user registrations spawn one of several possible power-ups (such as a shield, faster shooting, or slow-motion).

For the Washington Post, Emily Giambalvo, Kati Perry, and Jesse Dougherty analyze the playing time for players who transferred from another program.

To understand the phenomenon and its impact, look no further than the men’s and women’s NCAA tournament fields. On the men’s side, 53 percent of all rotation players previously logged minutes at another Division I school, according to a Washington Post analysis. Roughly one-third of these key contributors — the top eight players in total minutes on each roster — played for another D-I program just last season.

Now I want an analysis for academics and research prowess. “I will be taking my statistical talents to the University of California, Berkeley this semester.”

This is how the mortality simulation machine gets made.

For Letterform Archive, designer Angie Wang examines a collection of chopstick sleeves as it relates to Japan:

Paper chopstick sleeves emerged at the turn of the 20th century when disposable chopsticks and packaged meals gained popularity with the advent of train travel. In addition to ensuring cleanliness, printed paper chopstick sleeves became vernacular advertisements for shops and restaurants.

The latest addition to the Archive’s holdings of Asian ephemera is the hashibukuro collection of Mr. Susumu Kitagawa of Fuji City, Japan. While individually modest in their design and messaging, when considered as a whole the sleeves that comprise this collection map a singular history of Japanese ideology and aesthetics.

The purpose of onomatopoeia is to imitate sounds with words, so you might expect the words for animal sounds to be similar across languages. For the Pudding, Vivian Li shows that this is not always the case.

Onomatopoeia offers a fascinating glimpse into the interaction between sound and language. The way humans mimic animal sounds reflects not only shared biological instincts but also distinct cultural filters. Although onomatopoeia intends to imitate faithfully, its differences are ultimately far from arbitrary. In trying to capture the same auditory essence, English interprets a pig’s sound as [ojŋk], yet Hungarian hears [røf], and Vietnamese hears [ʔut it]. Even among the three animals discussed, cats are more consistent in their sound interpretation, while pigs are more variable — whether because pigs’ vocalizations are innately more complex, or because they call upon different phonotactic rules.

All the words are clickable so that you can hear pronunciations for different languages. Colors indicate phone groups, such as nasal consonants and mid central vowels.

I like this chart set from Bloomberg that shows the top brands, ranked by market share in 2024. Faded lines show true estimates, and thicker lines in the foreground provide the trends. Tick labels are limited to the first column on the left to avoid busyness. Straightforward but effective.

In the U.S., we usually see BYD, an electric vehicle car brand, mentioned in the context of Tesla as the competition. But it doesn’t look like much of a competition. BYD has rapidly gained market share in China over the last five years.