The Atlas of the Real World uses software to depict the nations of the world, not by their physical size, but by their demographic importance on a range of subjects. Here, we select a series of travel- and news-related maps.
For instance, Tourist Destinations:
The size of each country indicates the proportion of international tourist trips made there.
Western Europe receives 46 per cent of world tourist trips, while just 0.1 per cent of trips are made to Central Africa.
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It costs as little as $2 and until now has been considered little more than a toy, but a simple ping-pong ball is keeping liver transplant patient Mackenzie Argaet alive.
In a world first, a Sydney surgeon has used the radical method in a transplant operation, which has won him international accolades.
Dr Albert Shun, from The Children’s Hospital at Westmead, used the unorthodox approach when confronted with a medical problem while operating on the two-year-old.
Born with biliary artresia, Mackenzie, from Canberra, needed the life-saving operation earlier this year.
But after inserting a portion of the adult-size liver in the little girl, Dr Shun discovered it was too big and was placing pressure on her blood vessels which could have been fatal.
Having heard about the use of ping-pong balls in operations overseas, he decided to test their suitability in transplant surgery.
“I rang my wife and asked her to go to Big W and buy me some ping-pong balls,” he said.
“I was using a sponge as a back-up purpose but there was no way I could close her up the way it was.
“She is the first (transplant patient) in the world that the ping-pongs have been used for these purposes.”
The Magnetic Air Car uses three on-board substations to harness compressed air. The resulting airflow is channeled, modulated, and converted to torque that propels the car.
According to company representative Paul Donovan, the car uses a silicon salt battery that has 30% more mass power than a lead acid storage battery and can charge completely within an hour. The 95 percent recyclable battery can also can be used in a temperature range from -40 degrees Celsius to 50 degrees Celsius.
Though the Magnetic Air Car has not yet been tested, Donovan hopes to have it ready for production by 2010. The company plans on building its first prototype at Club Auto Sport in San Jose in the near future.
Of course the concept car always looks cooler.
