Geography gives us a starting point, but the actual idea of Eastern Europe comes from centuries of changing borders, politics, and shared traditions. We look at different maps, from the CIA to time zones, to show why this region is so hard to define.
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Canada looks like a country of snow and endless winter on the map, yet its six biggest cities land at the same latitude as London, Paris and even Florence.
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23 states don’t require a front license plate, and the list keeps growing. Utah joined most recently in January 2025, and a bill to make Virginia the next one died in the legislature earlier this year.
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The oldest gambling dice are over 5,000 years old. The global gambling market hit $650 billion in 2026. Whether a bet is legal where you are is a completely different question. Five world maps break down casino gambling, online casinos, sports betting and online betting for all 195 countries, plus a Gambling Friendliness score for each.
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Most of the world writes its official languages in alphabets that arrived from outside, whether Latin from Roman colonialism or Cyrillic from 9th-century Byzantine missionaries. Only about 44 of 195 countries use a script that grew from within their own tradition.
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About one million species are currently sliding toward extinction, and most of what remains is concentrated in a surprisingly small slice of the planet. This map traces 33 of the regions carrying that weight, from California’s redwood groves to the volcanic forests of Chile and the islands of Wallacea.
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A single map tracking the world around 7500 BCE lines up eighteen sites tied to the origins of farming, from Göbekli Tepe in Turkey to Jericho in the West Bank. Only one of them still has people living on it today.
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A palm has no bark, no growth rings, and only one growing point for its whole life, yet roughly 2,600 species have found ways to survive everywhere from rainforest floors to Mediterranean cliffs.
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Taiwan is a mountainous island about the size of Belgium off the coast of mainland China, and for most of its history nearly all of it belonged to indigenous Formosan peoples. By 1895 that had reversed almost completely.
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Every few years, the Pacific reshuffles the world’s rainfall. Some regions flood. Others dry out. A WMO map tracks exactly where El Niño and La Niña shift precipitation patterns season by season — and right now El Niño is back and potentially heading toward record strength.
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