The original globe map. New finished skins will appear here later.

Takes the brightness out of the basemap so drawn lines — plate boundaries, cables, borders, flight paths — read against it instead of competing with roads and labels. Independent of the light and dark themes, because a pale basemap under a dark panel is its own problem.

The planet from space at night: city lights, the live day-night line, and a blue atmosphere glow. Pauses the lights itself if the frame rate dips.

One thing happening on Earth today, pinned on the globe when the site opens. One fetch a day, nothing in the render loop, and Not today folds it away until tomorrow.

Live aircraft positions from OpenSky Network, updated every half minute. Colour and shape follow the type each aircraft broadcasts: ▲ airline flight ▲ wide-body ◆ private or training ● helicopter (only when broadcast) ▲ glider, balloon, drone ▲ unidentified ▪ on the ground . Airline flights fly under an operator callsign; private aircraft fly under their own tail number, which is how these are told apart.

Bright lines are today's movements at the nearest airport, loaded when you switch this on. The 2014 network is a complete but dated picture, off unless you ask for it.

Meridians and parallels, with the equator, the tropics and the polar circles marked. Spacing tightens as you zoom in.

Where it is dark right now. Computed from the sun's position, not fetched — so it works offline and is never stale.

Live vessel positions in the world's maritime chokepoints, from AIS. Coverage depends on shore receivers, so some straits are better watched than others \u2014 each one says how much it can see.

Where species have actually been recorded, from GBIF — 340 years of museum specimens and field observations, pooled from thousands of institutions. Density, not range: it shows where people have looked as much as where things live.

Every US county and state boundary from 1629 to 2000, from the Newberry Library's Atlas of Historical County Boundaries. 17,727 county shapes, each with the exact date it came into being and the date it stopped. Drag the year slider and the map redraws to that day. Counties appear as you zoom in; states carry the wider view.

Every place the Pleiades gazetteer records from classical antiquity — settlements, forts, villas, sanctuaries, roads and rivers — densest around the Mediterranean and the Near East, which is where the scholarship is. Hollow markers are places whose position is only known roughly.

Choose a batch in the reader. Pins show from zoom 6. Switch off to clear all Wikipedia batches.

Nearby places follow what you are looking at — zoom in for a street, out for a district.

A free Ticketmaster key, from developer.ticketmaster.com. Covers ticketed concerts, theatre and sport. The key is stored in this browser and is visible to anyone who inspects the page, so restrict it to your own domain.

Tick to show. Use the arrows on each card to reorder them.

Where the "search" links go. A page can point a link anywhere, but it cannot choose which browser opens it.

Runs one request against each service and reports exactly what came back. Use this before reporting a fault — the result says which service is at fault and why.