New Tools Help Information Overload

Take a sci­en­tific ques­tion like the genetic dif­fer­ence between humans and chim­panzees. Would you pre­fer to plough through an essay on the sub­ject, or to glance at the visu­al­iza­tion cre­ated by Ben Fry in which the 75,000 let­ters of cod­ing in the human genome form a pho­to­graphic image of a chimp’s head? Vir­tu­ally all of our genetic infor­ma­tion is iden­ti­cal, and Fry high­lights the dis­crep­an­cies by depict­ing nine of the let­ters as red dots. No con­test. Alice Raw­sthorn explains why.