Now this is impressive: It's called the Atlas of True Names, and it reveals the etymological origins and translations of familiar place names whose original meanings we've mostly forgotten. Looking at it, you'd think North America was some sort of fantasy novel.

These gorgeous maps have the answer. Created by datavisualization expert John Nelson, these "Tornado Travel Maps" depict the relative proportion of more than 60 years of U.S. tornadoes by their direction of travel. Notice a pattern?

The mysterious comings and goings of our feline friends just got a little less mysterious. Researchers at the Royal Veterinary College loaded a group of cats in Shamley Green, Surrey, with cameras and GPS trackers to figure out how roaming house cats spend their days.

The most interesting thing you'll watch today is this video about the geographic border between Canada and the ol' U.S. of A. Yes, really.

Just how many rivers are there in the United States? Based on this map, a hell of a lot more than you might think.

Here now, ripe for examination, is a zoomable, aerial view of San Francisco in 1938. Despite its age, the map's resolution is very, very impressive, which makes it endlessly fascinating to explore in Google-Maps-like fashion.

Here's a graph depicting the rise and fall of American brewerdom in the last 125 years — part of a comprehensive report, issued earlier this year by the Brewers Association, containing a wealth of beer-related data.

This is what happens when texture mapping goes horribly wrong — an algorithm's failed attempt to align three-dimensional models to a two-dimensional image. The result is something only Salvador Dali would be proud of.

The British Antarctic Survey has produced the sharpest image yet of Antarctica’s rugged topography. And as you can clearly see, without its mile-thick layer of ice, the polar continent would be an incredibly mountainous terrain, indeed.

Twitter has compiled a series of maps showing geo-located Tweet volumes since 2009. The resulting maps are intricate, gorgeous — and even a bit revealing.