2026-04-24 01:35:45
Even if only military areas are targeted, civilian and commercial structures are also damaged, because the real world isn’t separated into discrete, selectable items on a map. Bloomberg analyzed satellite imagery to estimate the type of areas damaged in the strikes.
Each detection was classified into one of six categories: military, industrial, civilian, commercial, government, or unclassified. We separated government facilities from the broader civilian category because these buildings may serve dual military-civilian purposes. Rather than forcing a single label, the analysis preserves the full mix of land use types around each detection — a site classified as “military” might also be 20% residential and 10% commercial, reflecting the mixed-use reality of urban areas.
Sets of Voronoi diagrams are used to show the percentage breakdowns for each detection.
Tags: Bloomberg, damage, Iran, satellite imagery, war
2026-04-23 21:06:01
Lower fertility is typically pitched as a bad thing, but it can be good in some ways, such as more women going to college and building careers or fewer unplanned teen pregnancies. For NYT’s the Upshot, Claire Cain Miller reports on the other side of lower birth rates.
One of the biggest drivers of the delay in childbearing is widely considered to be a success story: the decline of teen pregnancy, which had been unusually high in the United States. It reached its recent peak in 1991, at 61.8 births per 1,000 girls and women ages 15 to 19, before rapidly declining to 11.7 per 1,000 in 2025. The change is attributed to more effective contraception, education about pregnancy prevention and less sex among teenagers.
Tags: Claire Cain Miller, fertility, Upshot
2026-04-23 20:05:34
Hi everyone. This is issue No. 385 of the Process, the newsletter for members where we aim for quality in our data graphics over adding to a stream of worthless information. I’m Nathan Yau. This week we highlight an overlay that obscures the useful bits and helps no one.
Become a member for access to this — plus tutorials, courses, and guides.
2026-04-22 15:42:41
Shri Khalpada of PerThirtySix explains how GPS works using a set of small interactive globes.
The answer is in some ways simpler than you’d expect, and in other ways more complex. GPS is fundamentally a translation tool: it converts time into distance. A satellite sends a signal, your phone catches it, and the delay between those two events tells the phone exactly how far away the satellite is. Everything else is about making that measurement precise enough to be useful: accounting for bad clocks, satellite geometry, and eventually, Einstein’s theories.
So geometry is useful. Imagine that.
Tags: GPS, PerThirtySix, satellites, Shri Khalpada
2026-04-22 04:43:30
OpenAI announced their generative model ChatGPT Images 2.0. One of the new features is that you can generate more than a single image in a prompt, which means you don’t have to generate images one-by-one and stitch them together on your own.
So now everyone can generate research posters like the one above with a quick prompt. Blessed day. Although, the robots are going to eventually do all the work for us anyways, so I’m not sure what the point is.
2026-04-21 15:37:57
Mortality varies widely by geography and demographic group. It has also changed over time with improvements in medicine or availability of resources. Our World in Data shows the differences with a treemap. Use the dropdown menus to select groups and a slider to shift time.
For low-income countries:
[N]on-communicable diseases account for 43% of deaths; that’s a much smaller share than in the world as a whole (75%). That’s not because death rates of these diseases are lower in poorer countries; adjusting for age, they’re actually higher than they are in rich countries.
The difference is that death rates from infections, injuries, and child and maternal mortality are far higher. One in three die from infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, meningitis, and tuberculosis.
Maybe the hardest number in this dataset to sit with is that one in ten deaths is a newborn or a mother leaving children behind.
Tags: mortality, Our World in Data
