Of course, this would be child's play to Minnesota's Al Franken, who has wowed crowds and won renown with his cartographic renderings. Here's a video of him creating an outline map of the United States at the Minnesota State Fair:

Click to launch our interactive gallery Then grab a pencil and try it yourself.

—Brad Scriber

To the familiar divides—rich and poor, north and south, modern and traditional—add a new one: young and old. That’s because the average ages of the world’s populations are diverging, as some nations skew up or down. Youth booms persist in poor places like Uganda, where almost half the people (like this Kampala orphan, left) are under 15. Meantime, much of the industrialized world is aging. 

See age pyramids that compare the populations of Uganda and Japan.

Photos: Jessica Cudney (left); David McLain (right). Graphics: Mariel Furlong, NG Staff Sources: United Nations; Population Action International

In the early 1800s an Englishman could be hanged for stealing a shirt. By the end of the 1900s, growing concern for individual rights had caused the death penalty to disappear from the United Kingdom and nearly everywhere else in the Western world. Two exceptions are Belarus and the United States, although this year New Mexico became the 15th state to outlaw capital punishment. Death-penalty opponents cite the exoneration of 131 people on death row since 1973 as well as the high cost of capital cases.

Just to be clear, this blog post does not endorse the movie Bruno. In fact, this photo depicts a beloved (and now stufffed) German bear named Bruno so no one will think that we are in Bruno's camp—not that there's anything wrong with that.

Love him or loathe him, provocateur Sacha Baron Cohen's latest creation arrives in American theaters this weekend with the subtlety of a (sequined) anvil tossed to the (well-coiffed) head. I found the movie to be utterly tasteless, offensive, vulgar, and completely cringe-inducing. Needless to say, I loved it. And as a National Geographic employee, I would be remiss to send those who wish/dare to see this film into it without a short geographic and cultural glossary. After the jump, we offer terms that highlight some of the film's finer/horrifying moments. 

Click to expand map.

It’s a childhood riddle: Where would you end up if you dug a hole to the other side of the world? (Of course, that’s assuming one could survive tunneling through the molten innards of the Earth.) Kids in the United States are usually led to imagine that they’d pop up like groundhogs in a rice field in China. Wrong. One look at a map of antipodes—places on exact opposite sides of the globe—shows that an American digger would end up in the Indian Ocean. As for sandbox fantasists in China, some would luck out and emerge on land in Chile.

Mark your maps: The finals of the National Geographic Bee take place on May 20 at NG headquarters in Washington, D.C. They’re also broadcast live on the National Geographic Channel, and subsequently on PBS (check your local station for details). As the contestants do their late-minute cramming, we asked the geographers and educators who come up with the questions for their insights. Here’s what we learned from Jo Erikson, Geoffrey Hatchard, and the rest of the Bee content team.

Where do you get ideas for the geography-bee questions?

We sit down to have a brainstorming session to come up with ideas. We get ideas from National Geographic products, our colleagues and peers at the Society, current events, and outside geographic sources.

Extra: Explore more names in our interactive U.S. map.

Native American words echo in the names of lakes, rivers, mountains, states, cities, and small towns across the United States. The first settlers, who put many European words on the map, also borrowed names from local tribes. They often mispronounced what they heard—that’s how the Washoe word dá’aw, or lake, became Tahoe. In some cases they changed Indian terms so much that linguists can’t identify the original language or meaning. Laypeople have often stepped into the scholarly void with fanciful interpretations that have become part of American folklore. Chesapeake, for example, is sometimes translated as"great shellfish bay." But no one knows what the word meant to the Indians who coined it.

In 2008 apparel imports to the United States totaled almost $72 billion.

 “Apparel always chases the low-cost needle.” The garment industry tagline explains why more than 90 percent of clothing sold in the United States is made offshore, says Mike Todaro of the American Apparel Producers’ Network. U.S. apparel manufacturing started in New England and New York in the 1800s, shifted to Pennsylvania, then headed south after the turn of the century to states where labor was cheap and unions were weak. From there, it jumped the border to even cheaper labor pools in Mexico and the Caribbean.