The Satellites of Earth, Mars, and the Moon

We always forget: there are a bunch of satellites orbiting Mars and the Moon. Perigee brings it all together!

ToolUniverse

ToolUniverse is a unified ecosystem that transforms any large language model (LLM)—open or closed—into a powerful AI scientist. By standardizing how LLMs identify and call tools, it integrates over 600 scientific resources, including machine learning models, datasets, APIs, and analysis packages.

With its AI-Tool Interaction Protocol, ToolUniverse provides a common interface for seamless communication between LLMs and tools, ensuring compatibility across platforms such as GPT, Claude, Gemini, and open-source models.

More over here: ToolUniverse Documentation

Two Different Story Maps

Here are two recent examples of story maps:

1. The Internet Infrastructure Map is maybe not a 'classic' story map as such, but does tell the story of the expansion of undersea cables & more that represents the infrastructure of the Internet.
2. Battles of the American Revolutionary War (by Esri) is a class Esri Story Map = a nice way to curate a lot of information across space & time. But...ultimately...not very compelling.

The VOSviewer

From the website: VOSviewer is a software tool for constructing and visualizing bibliometric networks. These networks may for instance include journals, researchers, or individual publications, and they can be constructed based on citation, bibliographic coupling, co-citation, or co-authorship relations. VOSviewer also offers text mining functionality that can be used to construct and visualize co-occurrence networks of important terms extracted from a body of scientific literature.

The Milky Way Map

This is apparently the largest map of the Milky Way: https://archive.eso.org/scienceportal/home. Very cool, but I'm not sure what anyone can do with this...here's a little more beta from Joe Kerski.

Padlet!

Ah yes...we all used Padlet during COVID, but many of us (certainly me) have stopped using Padlet now that we are F2F again. But Padlet still works great, for example:

• Video Discussion Board where the students post one relevant video for a topic, for example ozone & global warming.
• Or, do the same with figures.
• There is also a Video Recorder where they could record a brief video of themselves talking into the camera.

Unfortunately, the free version of Padlet is limited to just 3 'padlets'...not sure how you could in-practice use that for daily teaching.

The Teacher’s Guide to Tech (2025)

The Teacher’s Guide to Tech (2025) is now available!

Destination Earth

Destination Earth is a lot of world salad at this time, but it seems to be EU version of an AI-based Digital Twin currently called DestinE. Very clever!

AI-Generated Maps

Not sure I would call these 'maps' - to me maps really need to represent reality.

• Latent Diffusion (converts text to images)
• AI-generated maps: Copyright, ownership, metadata (from Spatial Reserves)

OSS and OSH/OSHW

Here's a great paper and some of the associated resources - it's pretty cool what you can do nowadays with open-source software and hardware. That being said: I have seen too many crappy weather stations for one reason or another (see pic below) - making consistemt and high-quality environmental measurements is complex, especially in harsh environments.

• Chan et al. (2021): Low-cost electronic sensors for environmental research: Pitfalls and opportunities
• http://www.freestation.org/home
• King's College London Geocomputation on GitHub

The Teacher's Guide to Tech 2021

The Teacher's Guide to Tech 2021 is back and updated for 2021. A pretty good $25 investment, but really this is something that institutions should provide for their faculty. A couple of examples:

• Mote looks great: a Chrome extension to leave voice comments in Google Docs.
• Google Lens is just cool, but also useful for teaching: point it at text and the app will read it for you aloud.

Look: A Plotter!

This is just fun to watch: Boom & Bust: A History of Oil Prices and Consumption

Space Station Docking Sim

What an awesome waste of time: ISS Docking Sim

Dyson Engineering Challenges

These sound like fun: https://www.jamesdysonfoundation.co.uk/resources/challenge-cards.html

Kubernetes

Kubernetes (K8s) is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.

Note-Taking Matters

We all know that, but Note-taking: A Research Roundup offers a nice and concise 'meta-analysis'. Plus: Sketchnoting.

Voyages in Deep Time

Voyages in Deep Time is an exciting project which has developed free smartphone apps to encourage people to visit and enjoy learning about their local rocks and landscapes that tell us what our part of the world was like millions of years ago – in deep time! That's all I know - give the apps a try!

Voting Software

Blockchain explained

Blockchain explained is a nice viz by Reuters Graphics. I guess I get it now. Maybe.

Blockchain

I still have no idea how it works, but this video is a nice explanation of what it can do for us: