Nearly every country represented in the United Nations General Assembly recently voted in favor of promoting world maps that more accurately show the size of various continents. But the UN resolution is unlikely to change how millions of people regularly see versions of 16th-century Mercator maps depicting skewed continent sizes in navigation apps.

On September 4, the African-led resolution attracted 164 votes in favor, with six countries abstaining from voting. Only the United States voted to oppose the resolution after describing it as a “radical ideological project,” according to UN News.

The non-binding UN resolution does not impose map changes on anyone. Instead, it “encourages governments, schools, international organizations, and technology companies to use the Equal Earth projection and other so-called equal-area maps when relative size matters,” UN News reported. The resolution also encourages teaching about the trade-offs that arise from depicting a spherical planet on a flat map.

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© UN Photo/Loey Felipe

A fruit fly hunting a piece of rotting fruit or a mate navigates by smell, following plumes of odor. Out in the wild, turbulent air swirls these plumes into a chaotic, broken landscape—dense chemical filaments laced through long stretches of clean air. A fly trying to find the source gets the smell in stutters, from constantly shifting directions, with no guarantee that a next whiff is coming at all.

Scientist had little idea of how fruit flies manage this chaotic signal with a brain the size of a pinhead. For a long time, biologists stood by the “surge and cast” model, which posited that insects solved this with hardwired reflexes. The idea was that, when a fly registers the plume with olfactory neurons in its antennae, it simply flies upwind until it’s gone and then flies side to side attempting to catch it again. But now a team led by Vanessa Ruta, a neuroscientist at the Rockefeller University, has shown that fruit flies do something far more advanced.

A treadmill for flies

The trouble with the traditional surge and cast model is that it struggles to explain how an insect tracks a meandering plume across long distances. Chemical cues floating in the air in the natural environment are often sparse and unreliable. But those same features make the mechanism behind olfactory navigation notoriously difficult to test. "Odors are invisible," Ruta says, "and often they're carried along by turbulent airflow." We’ve got no way of knowing what the animal is smelling from one moment to the next.

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© Joao Paulo Burini

Navigation is dying—and it's not by accident. As interfaces shift toward intent-based design, users no longer click; they expect the UI to read their minds. But when software anticipates our every move, are we creating seamless experiences—or designing invisible cages?