You’ve probably never heard of Baltoscandia. It sounds like a made-up country, and that’s because it is a made-up country. But even without a government, a flag, and most other trappings of actual nationhood, Baltoscandia has a history, a raison d’être, and perhaps even a future. Narva Castle in Estonia (left) facing the medieval fortifications of Ivangorod in Russia (right). In recent weeks, Russia has contested the exact course of the border separating both countries in the Narva river (in between). (Credit: LHOON, CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED) As the name suggests, and the Euler diagram illustrates ..read more

Imagine it’s 2050 and the old countries of Europe are gone. In their place are entities based not on history, language, or ethnicity, but on the type of renewable energy they’re best at producing. A centralized power grid redistributes these variously sourced types of energy throughout the continent to even out temporary gaps and seasonal imbalances. Welcome to Eneropa, Europe’s hypothetical energy utopia, where the power supply is stable, sustainable, and locally sourced. There’s no need to depend on shady suppliers of dirty hydrocarbons, such as Russia or sellers in the Middle East. Enerop ..read more

Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden. As usual, the country ranking in the annual World Happiness Report is topped by Nordic countries. This map does something extra: It shows happiness levels in their regional and global context. At a glance, we see that happiness levels are relatively high across the Americas, in Europe and Oceania, and generally lowest across Africa and South Asia. In North America, Canada (6.9) came out on top, happier than the U.S. and Mexico (both 6.7). The least happy country in North America is the Dominican Republic (5.8) — perhaps unfairly, as its bad-to-worse neighbor ..read more

There was no internet during the Enlightenment, but something surprisingly similar did exist in the 17th and 18th centuries. This was the Republic of Letters: a virtual, global community of scientists and intellectuals who exchanged information using the fastest technology available at the time — the postal service. 15,000 letters The clue is in the name: letters tied this self-proclaimed, transnational society together. Lots of letters. What this “metaphysical republic” lacked in speed, it made up for in volume. Take Leibniz and Voltaire, for example. In their lifetimes, these great minds wr ..read more

Look toward Sagittarius. Beyond lies the Central Molecular Zone (CMZ): the cold, dusty heart of our Milky Way. The CMZ contains 60 million solar masses’ worth of particles at -432 degrees Fahrenheit (-258°C). This dust is the stuff from which planets and stars are built — a process that depends on the interaction between the dust and the CMZ’s magnetic fields. The image below is a major step toward better understanding that process. For the first time, it maps the CMZ’s various magnetic fields and structures of dust. A detailed look at the dust clouds and magnetic fields in the CMZ. (Credit ..read more

Paper is to news what vinyl is to music: an outdated medium decimated by its digital replacement. Except that vinyl records have finally found their niche, and sales are up again. Newspapers haven’t yet worked out how to deal with all the advertising money that has fled online, and are still in freefall. Compared to 20 years ago, there are now 3,000 fewer newspaper titles in the U.S. and 43,000 fewer newspaper journalists. Total newspaper circulation declined from more than 50 million in 2005 to just over 10 million in 2023. The decline is still accelerating. In 2022, an average of two newspa ..read more

Earthquakes in New York are even rarer than snowfall in Los Angeles. The one that struck the East Coast last Friday was one of the largest in the region in a century. And yet on the grand scale of things — no longer the Richter scale, by the way, but the Moment Magnitude Scale — it was relatively minor, with a magnitude of 4.8. The MMS is exponential: A 5.0-magnitude quake is the equivalent of 475 tons of TNT exploding, while 6.0 equals 15,000 tons, and 7.0 is 475,000 tons. While this quake and its aftershocks left people and buildings rattled, nobody was hurt and no serious damage was report ..read more

Peculiar sets of numbers populate this 1936 map of the U.S. Each state is labeled with a number that is about the same order of magnitude as the others: Nebraska is 978.2, West Virginia is 975.4, and so on. Similar numbers show up next to the local product or industry shown for each state, such as cars (629.2) in Michigan (977.4), mining (622.2) in Colorado (978.8), and cattle (636.2) in Texas (976.4). The digits also apply internationally: to Mexico (972), Canada (971), and the Panama Canal Zone (986). Know thy shelf Bookish types will have guessed what’s going on here even without looking a ..read more

When you’re “squaring the circle,” you’re attempting the impossible. Yet in the mid-19th century, that’s just what the good citizens of Circleville, Ohio, did: They straightened out the circular grid on which their city had been laid out a few decades earlier. Mathematically impossible So why didn’t they change its name to Squareville? Perhaps because, similar to its curious origins, strange things keep happening in and to this small town 25 miles south of Columbus. But first: What is “squaring the circle” and why can’t you do it? Da Vinci’s drawing of the Vitruvian Man shows a square and ci ..read more

Had he not wrapped himself in a discarded cloak, Ulysses would have frozen to death at Troy. Our hero’s host, Eumaeus the swineherd, hears the story and gets the hint: He loans Ulysses a cloak, because again, the night is freezing cold. This part of Homer’s Odyssey doesn’t sound very Mediterranean. Sprinkled through Homer’s twin epics, Felice Vinci spotted a heap of similar anecdotes that pointed away from the traditional setting of the Iliad, an account of the Trojan War, and the Odyssey, the story of Ulysses’ 10-year journey home to Ithaca after the fall of Troy. For Vinci, a nuclear engine ..read more