Here is a lovely thing.
It is a map of the world (the United States to the northwest, Europe bright in the center, Asia to the east). To be more exact, it is a map of human communication. To be even more exact, it is a map of a very particular form of communication: collaboration between scientists in all the world’s cities.
This is the work of Olivier J. Beauchesne, who describes himself as a research analyst at Science-Metrix of Virginia and Montreal. As he explains, he extracted, aggregated, and plotted data representing scientific collaborations from 2005 to 2009.
Here he offers a very high-resolution version, suitable for zooming in on the homes of your favorite scientists.