Here’s the good stuff for April.

For Bloomberg, Zahra Hirji and Denise Lu on the electrification of the national school bus fleet:

Most school buses today run on diesel. The climate footprint of a diesel school bus is about 3.3 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) per mile, more than double the per-mile footprint (roughly 1.5 pounds of CO2e) for a bus powered on the average US electric grid, according to Argonne National Laboratory. If a large share of the American school bus fleet — the largest mass transportation system in the country — electrifies, that would translate to a significant emissions cut.

They used a LEGO school bus to show how a diesel school bus is retrofitted as an electric one, which is a plus in my book.

Saving for retirement is a slow process with an end goal that can seem far away, especially if you’re young. So we put it off until later. Then time sneaks up on us, for many it seems, and we’re stuck having to work longer and rely heavily on Social Security. Over at USAFacts, we looked at how much Americans save and show how your savings compare.

Disney began more layoffs, and data-centric FiveThirtyEight, which is owned by Disney, was part of the round. Nate Silver, founder and editor-in-chief of the site, also announced he is likely to be leaving soon:

Disney layoffs have substantially impacted FiveThirtyEight. I am sad and disappointed to a degree that’s kind of hard to express right now. We’ve been at Disney almost 10 years. My contract is up soon and I expect that I’ll be leaving at the end of it.

I had been worried about an outcome like this and so have had some great initial conversations about opportunities elsewhere. Don’t hesitate to get in touch. I am so proud of the work of FiveThirtyEight staff. It has never been easy. I’m so sorry to the people impacted by this.

Feels like a shift in data and stories.

Daniel Wolfe for The Washington Post looked at the similar word choices across cannabis business names:

To check if companies are distinguishing themselves, we analyzed every dispensary listing from WeedMaps, a map directory for local cannabis distributors. Here’s what patterns emerged when we examine the company’s name through a language model.

The premise is that businesses should aim for brand differentiation, and if all the dispensaries have similar names, it’s tough for any one to stand out.

I guess that’s true, but all I could think about was all the Chinese restaurants that I’ve been to, which also have similar names, even in the same city. People definitely are still able to pick out the good places.

Based on the United Nations’ world population report, it is estimated that India’s population will increase past China’s some time this year. For The New York Times, Alex Travelli and Weiyi Cai have charts to show how and why.

You know what they say about assumptions.

Neal Agarwal is up to his wonderful ridiculousness again. Imagining an elevator that goes up to space, a long scroll through the skies gives you a sense of elevation up until you leave Earth. See how high birds fly, where the wild yak resides, and who was the first person to break the sound barrier in a free fall.

Maybe you’ve wished you could quickly grab the data on a webpage and instantly have it in a structured format. But you don’t know how to program or you do, but don’t want to go through the trouble of writing another one-off script. Samantha Sunne provides a short guide for scraping without programming, mainly with Google Sheets.

When you have a lot of noisy data, it can be helpful to detect signals in some sort of quantitative and automated way rather than just eyeballing it. Signal detection theory can provide some of the pieces to this puzzle. Adam Krawitz has a detailed interactive guide:

This site approaches SDT from multiple complementary points of view. First, we use SDT to fit your empirical data from an example task, and consider how well the theory accounts for the data. Second, we use SDT to make predictions by running simulations with an SDT-based model performing the task and generating synthetic data. And third, we explore the space of possible results that can be generated by SDT, providing an existence proof for its capabilities.

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inOYC2cM27o” /]

A straightforward lineup of animals that fly provide a sense of scale, from tiny to very big. I feel like some everyday objects like a car or a helicopter would’ve really driven the point, but it’s neat to see.

Reuters dug in to the science of sleep and how paying attention to our rhythms affect our health. On dreams:

Sleep itself has cycles, in which the brain and body move through phases, marked by varying brain activity. In the deepest phases of sleep, the brain waves are slowest. The lighter phases have more rapid bursts of activity.

Our most intense dreams usually happen during Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, when brain activity, breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure all increase, the eyes move rapidly, and muscles are limp. Scientists believe dreams in REM and non-REM sleep have different content – the more vivid or bizarre dreams usually happen during REM stages.

See also: our actual sleep schedules.

Looking for what it means.

For The New York Times, Josh Holder and Marco Hernandez show the areas still controlled by Ukraine and the areas captured by Russia. But instead of a single map, they split up the regions into multiples and arranged them by time.

It rained a lot more than usual this winter in California. Diana Leonard and Dylan Moriarty, for The Washington Post, explain the science behind all the water falling from the sky.

Despite available vacation days, it appears that American workers are taking less and less vacation. Andrew Van Dam, for The Washington Post’s Department of Data, has the demographic breakdowns:

It does not seem to be a matter of vacation-day supply. It is true that the United States is the only advanced economy without guaranteed paid vacation. However, BLS data on employee benefits suggests that more than 90 percent of full-time, private-industry workers have access to paid vacation time, a figure that has remained relatively steady for decades. And the number of paid vacation days offered by the typical employer has ticked up in recent years.

So we looked instead at vacation-day demand: Who uses the most? Has that changed?

If you don’t use a colorblind-safe color palette in your maps and charts, a significant percentage of people will get nothing out of your work. For The Verge, Andy Baio, who is colorblind, discusses the experience across the web:

Because red and green are complementary colors opposite one another on the color wheel, they’ve become the default colors for every designer who wants to represent opposites: true and false, high and low, stop and go.

Inconveniently, these are also the two colors most likely to be mixed up by people with color vision deficiencies.

I wish every designer in the world understood this and would switch to, say, red and blue for opposing colors. But I know that won’t happen: the cultural meaning is too ingrained.

They used a slider mechanism to show what people with normal vision see and then what Baio sees. I’m usually not into the slider, which often shows a before-and-after view that is meant to highlight contrast. In this case, the views are so different that the contrast works.

For FiveThirtyEight, Geoffrey Skelley digs into the ongoing trend:

What’s behind these increasingly older Congresses? The country’s aging population as a whole is chiefly responsible, which is most apparent in the disproportionate influence the baby boomer generation has on Capitol Hill. Coupled with longer-running trends that have made it more likely for members of Congress to win reelection and stick around, this has all helped make Congress older than ever before. And the overrepresentation of boomers doesn’t just produce moments like those of the TikTok hearings — it also has real effects on the type of policies passed by the federal legislature.

This clever chart by Lazaro Gamio shows changing interest rates set by the Fed and changing projections. The animation makes it.