How National Geographic made a visualization of Cassini’s trip through the Saturn system.

Our regular biweekly roundup of journalism + code projects.

With the coming eclipse, we wanted to build a very detailed map of the parts of America that would experience totality. We also wanted to show what the shadow of the eclipse would look like as it traversed the country.

A 3D dinosaur, brought to life for National Geographic.

How our small team redesigned Source, with a design refresh and a new navigation and structure that matches the way we publish now.

The mini-series Mars, that aired on the National Geographic Channel in November 2016, imagined what it would be like to live on Mars in the near future. For the interactive narrative Rewind the Red Planet, we endeavored to show Mars as it was before it was a red desert, back to a time when liquid water may have run freely, between three and four billion years ago. We wanted to allow readers to see ancient Mars in its entirety from a planetary scale, how it may have featured a vast northern ocean, or may have had water trapped in expansive glaciers.

RioRun is an “interactive podcast” that takes you on a guided tour of the Rio de Janeiro Olympic marathon course—all 26.2 miles of it—as you run. Here’s how we made it.

The Boston Globe’s newsroom development team built “Make it Stop,” a powerful editorial statement on gun control after the Orlando shootings, in just 13 hours. Here’s how they did it — and the tools and workflows they made well in advance to enable (extremely) rapid development.

A few of our favorite bits of thinking and linking around bots.

Here’s a handful of inspiring projects that we especially loved and appreciated, these past few weeks.

At NICAR 2015 I saw Al Shaw’s talk about how he worked with LANDSAT satellite imagery to build “Losing Ground.” Al described how he and his colleagues at ProPublica built a suite of custom tools to work with LANDSAT data to tell the story of the degradation of the Louisiana coastline. I was impressed and inspired by their work, and by Al’s reminder that the decades of data and imagery produced by NASA’s satellites and probes were a public-domain treasure trove that surely held many opportunities for storytelling.

Vox’s recent interactive on teen health asks the user for their birth year and then, based on that, changes the text of the story. We thought it was a fascinatingly personal way to contextualize CDC health data, leveraging readers’ innate curiosity about how they stack up. We talked to developer Soo Oh about the process.

We made an interactive based on a government agency’s method of predicting a person’s race and ethnicity based solely on their name and address. The response from our readers was, fittingly, a little unpredictable.

On November 20, the New York Times released “Vigils in Paris”—a virtual reality film that captured a city in mourning after the terror attacks a week earlier. It was the first VR project from the Times produced completely in-house. Graham Roberts, senior graphics editor at the Times, spoke with us over email about how they made it, and what the future of VR looks like.

Whether in the Bay Area or elsewhere across the country, stories about gentrification tend to reduce the dynamics to one narrative. Newcomers displace longtime residents, erasing history, shifting the economy, and disrupting culture in the process. Focusing on West Oakland, the Youth Radio team behind West Side Stories wanted to surface the many nuanced and sometimes conflicting stories sparked by extreme neighborhood change. Here’s what they made.

Over the last several months, the New York Times R&D Lab has been thinking about the future of online communities, particularly those communities and conversations that form around news organizations and their journalism. When we think about community discussion, we typically think about comments sections below our articles, or outside forums that link to our content (Twitter, Reddit, etc.). But what comes after free-text comments? To explore this further, we developed Membrane, which is an experiment in permeable publishing. By permeable publishing, we mean a new form of reading experience, in which readers may “push back” through the medium to ask specific, contextual (and constrained) questions of the author.

On October 19, the Guardian published Homan Square: A Portrait of Chicago’s Detainees as a part of its ongoing investigation into the Chicago Police Department’s alleged abuses of detainee rights at a warehouse facility on Chicago’s west side. We spoke with the Guardian interactive team responsible for the interactive feature, both in their NYC offices and via email.

Our Tour de France 3D interactive brought users right into one of the steepest, toughest, most iconic stages of the race, using WebGL.

For several weeks, the Tampa Bay Times has been publishing Failure Factories, a series exploring the effects of the Pinellas County school district’s decision to resegregate its schools. On the web we decided to try something new: kicking off the series with a D3-powered graphic that used data to show readers how dire the situation is for black students in south St. Petersburg. We were aiming for a brief and engaging piece that would invest readers in the stories to come. In that sense, our experiment was successful. #FailureFactories was trending in the Tampa Bay region before the first day of the project ran. We heard from readers across the country that they were waiting anxiously for the series, and both the graphic and the 5,000-word first installment in the series have been among the most viewed stories we’ve published this year.