Eight years ago Samoa skipped a day on the calendar, owing to the International Date Line and some business involving its key trading partners. There just wasn't a December 30th, 2011 there! Plus: why break your back shoveling snow when you can design a radio-controlled snowplow to do the work for you?
This is Geography Awareness Week, and on our fascinating planet Mount Everest is the tallest mountain - but it's not actually the highest point on earth. That's actually Mount Chimborazo, in Ecuador. Plus: the community of New Baltimore, NY gets a spooky purple makeover thanks to Google Maps.
Randal S. Olson developed a computer algorithm to find the shortest, most efficient way to drive through all 48 contiguous United States - 13,699 miles and around 224 hours of driving. Plus: the Race Across America is a more than 3,000 mile road race from Los Angeles to New York on bicycles.
The app what3words breaks down all the spaces on earth into 3 meter by 3 meter squares and assigns each of those squares a unique set of three words. Anyone who knows the three words for a square can pinpoint it with GPS - just ask the group of lost hikers in a UK forest who got help in about a minute thanks to the system.
The website and book Sad Topographies teaches us that our planet is home to some unusually-named places, like Gloomy Lake in Ontario, Divorce Beach in Mexico, New Jersey’s Shades of Death Road (!) and a spot in Washington state known as Point No Point.
