A Block is the smallest area unit used by the U.S. Census Bureau for tabulating statistics. As of the 2010 census, the United States consists of 11,078,300 Census Blocks. Of them, 4,871,270 blocks totaling 4.61 million square kilometers were reported to have no population living inside them. Despite having a population of more than 310 million people, 47 percent of the USA remains unoccupied.

Data from the Census Bureau show where the poor live.

Glen McLaughlin wandered into a London map shop in 1971 and discovered something strange. On a map from 1663 he noticed something he’d never seen before: California was floating like a big green carrot, untethered to the west coast of North America. He bought the map and hung it in his entryway, where it quickly became a conversation piece. It soon grew into an obsession. McLaughlin began to collect other maps showing California as an island.

Members of the Official Loch Ness Monster Fan Club identified a shadow in the loch's waters that can be seen only in Apple Maps' satellite imagery –– the same form was not found on Google Maps.

Information Geographies at the Oxford Internet Institute turned data about the internet into beautiful images.

Russia's Minister of Communications and Mass Media noticed it first. "Google has included #Crimea to Russia on their maps," Nikolay Nikiforov tweeted on Friday, showing a screenshot of Crimea on Google Maps with a squiggly black line dividing the peninsula from mainland Ukraine.

Some jobs are disproportionately concentrated in certain states. Fashion designers flock to New York, Texas has an outsize share of petroleum engineers, and Floridians are much more likely to be motorboat operators than are other Americans. We made a map that shows the most over-represented job in each state, using the Bureau of Labor Statistics' recently released May 2013 "Occupational Employment Statistics." Each state has far more of these jobs per capita than the nation as a whole.

UPS engineers found that left-hand turns were a major drag on efficiency. Turning against traffic resulted in long waits in left-hand turn lanes that wasted time and fuel, and it also led to a disproportionate number of accidents. By mapping out routes that involved "a series of right-hand loops," UPS improved profits and safety while touting their catchy, environmentally friendly policy.

At the heart of this is the rise of Google Maps, which has come to dominate cartography today, both in terms of resources and popularity. Billions of searches are made through Google each day, and Google Maps is by far the most widely used smartphone app in the world. Thanks to Google's access to masses of data from satellites, aircrafts and camera-fitted cars, users can see aerial photographs and street maps of virtually the entire planet.

A map showing US Census estimates of deaths and births in counties.

On March 24, 1989, the Exxon Valdez struck a reef in the Prince William Sound in Alaska. Here are some of the largest oil spills ever.

Watch the death penalty evolve from 1887 until present day. 

The swift annexation of Crimea from Ukraine by Russia is one of the biggest international incidents of recent years, with global condemnation leading to sanctions and the worrying possibility of armed conflict. It raises an uneasy question: Is Crimea worth it?

These are the 634 runways where the missing Malaysia Airlines plane could have landed after a potential hijacking. Today Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said investigators believe flight MH370's disappearance is the result of 'deliberate action' by someone on the plane.

A vote that could redraw the map of central Europe by joining Crimea to Russia has professional cartographers like Juan Valdes on high alert. In the wake of a referendum scheduled for March 16, Valdes will likely convene a 10-person committee at the National Geographic Society in downtown Washington to determine how the region should be depicted on thousands of print and digital maps.

According to the NOP World Culture Score Index, readers in India are making the rest of us look bad. Don't squint!

Evidence is growing that our global footprint is now so significant we have driven Earth into a new geological epoch — the Anthropocene.

Much like a word cloud, the greater attention by media outlets to a given topic or newstory, the larger and more prominent the placement of the story in the treemap. Hover over a headline for a summary of the topic as well to see how many related articles are out there.

We all know that artists such as Jay-Z, Drake, Lorde and Kanye West are popular across the USA. What's more interesting is that Floridians listened to more Rick Ross than residents of any other state in the country. People in Washington listened to The Head and the Heart more often than music fans anywhere else, according to a recent survey.

A new global monitoring system has been launched that promises "near real time" information on deforestation around the world.