For the past ten years, researchers have been tagging hump back whales in the Gulf of Maine with a temporary tracking device called a D-tag. Whereas old tech only recorded location at the surface, the D-tag records depth and orientation allowing researchers to record feeding and diving patterns, which turns out to be pretty unique for each whale.

Scientists hope to use the data to shift fishing and boating policies in the area. Kelly Slivka for the New York Times reports. Be sure to watch the video with the scientists pointing at their computer screens.

James Cheshire, a geography lecturer at the University College London, mapped common surnames in London.

This map shows the 15 most frequent surnames in each Middle Super Output Area (MSOA) across Greater London. The colours represent the origin of the surname (not necessarily the person) derived from UCL’s Onomap Classification tool. The surnames have also been scaled by their total frequency in each MSOA.

A slider lets you browse through the most common down to the 15th most common, revealing clusters of cultural majorities, down to minorities.

We’ve seen a lot of network charts for Twitter, Facebook, and real people. Screw that. I want to see social networks for movie characters. That’s where Movie Galaxies comes in.

Movies are important artefacts, bringing together vision and zeitgeist of our society. Embodying dreams, trends and other perspectives, they are a cultural vanishing point for millions of people in the world, that is worth to be explored. Just think about how your personal life and worldwide network with their single sub-clusters and side-stories are structurally represented in motion pictures. You might be surprised. We have a hunch that the “holy grail” of good movies is far more about social network structures than budget, cast and theme.

With movie scripts as the data source, Movie Galaxies quickly shows main characters, the extent to which they interact, and hints at a movie’s timeline. For example, in the first Lord of the Rings movie, the central plot was tied to a lot of characters, whereas in Forrest Gump, everything was tied to one character.

There are metrics, such as density and clustering, associated with each network, which could be made less technical sounding, but it’s fun to browse and search your favorite movies. I clicked around for a good half hour.

Along the same lines as Jessica Hagy’s indexed charts, Coolness Graphed charts only one thing: coolness. I got a good chuckle out of it.

Botanicus Interacticus from Disney Research turns plants into multi-touch surfaces, simply by placing an electrode in the soil.

Botanicus Interacticus has a number of unique properties. This instrumentation of living plants is simple, non-invasive, and does not damage the plants: it requires only a single wire placed anywhere in the plant soil. Botanicus Interacticus allows for rich and expressive interaction with plants. It allows to use such gestures as sliding fingers on the stem of the orchid, detecting touch and grasp location, tracking proximity between human and a plant, and estimating the amount of touch contact, among others.

And then botany education changed forever.

[via Boing Boing]

From the department of old-but-new-to-me, Pop Chart Lab charted the evolution of video game controllers. There are 119 of them pictured in total.