That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."

Species range maps (SRMs) are essential tools for research and policy-making in ecology, conservation, and environmental management.

The tiny blooms of Dendrobium eruciforme, known as the caterpillar orchid due to its creeping habit and small size. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. It's easy to forget how much we still don't know about our planet's ecosystems . Every year, researchers identify thousands of plant and fungi species that were previously unknown to science. While it can be tough to highlight the most striking examples, an international team of scientists led by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (RBG Kew) in London, have offered their personal picks for 2025.

Science Archaeology World's oldest poison-tipped arrow discovered in South Africa The 60,000-year-old relic contains traces of a toxic onion. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. For thousands of years, hunters around the world have employed poison-tipped arrows to assist in taking down prey. For example, the curare plant poisons used by South and Central American hunters paralyzes the respiratory system. Meanwhile, inhabitants of the Kalahari Desert have relied on the toxins harvested from beetle larvae .

If a major disaster like Fukushima or Chornobyl ever happens again, the world would know almost straight away, thanks to an array of government and DIY radiation-monitoring programs running globally. Why Don't Norwegians Hate Tesla Like the Rest of Europe Does? November's Tesla registrations were down in France, Sweden, Denmark, and Germany. Norway, however, is bucking the trend--thanks to a tax incentive system that will soon be rolled back.

Cartographic reasoning is the skill of interpreting geographic relationships by aligning legends, map scales, compass directions, map texts, and geometries across one or more map images. Although essential as a concrete cognitive capability and for critical tasks such as disaster response and urban planning, it remains largely unevaluated. Building on progress in chart and infographic understanding, recent large vision language model studies on map visual question-answering often treat maps as a special case of charts. In contrast, map VQA demands comprehension of layered symbology (e.g., symbols, geometries, and text labels) as well as spatial relations tied to orientation and distance that often span multiple maps and are not captured by chart-style evaluations. To address this gap, we introduce FRIEDA, a benchmark for testing complex open-ended cartographic reasoning in LVLMs. FRIEDA sources real map images from documents and reports in various domains and geographical areas. Following classifications in Geographic Information System (GIS) literature, FRIEDA targets all three categories of spatial relations: topological (border, equal, intersect, within), metric (distance), and directional (orientation). All questions require multi-step inference, and many require cross-map grounding and reasoning. We evaluate eleven state-of-the-art LVLMs under two settings: (1) the direct setting, where we provide the maps relevant to the question, and (2) the contextual setting, where the model may have to identify the maps relevant to the question before reasoning. Even the strongest models, Gemini-2.5-Pro and GPT-5-Think, achieve only 38.20% and 37.20% accuracy, respectively, far below human performance of 84.87%. These results reveal a persistent gap in multi-step cartographic reasoning, positioning FRIEDA as a rigorous benchmark to drive progress on spatial intelligence in LVLMs.