Don’t look down

Take a look at this year’s edition of C&EN’s Trailblazers featuring chemists with roots in Latin America , and you’ll see that we open with a map of the Americas oriented with south pointing up . The decision is a wink at the theme of “The Revolución/Revolução”—both the turning of the planet and a subversion of expectations—but it also means something more profound. Maps have and reflect power. It is not by accident that the Mercator projection of the globe makes Latin America look puny relative to the hulking US and Europe, yet that map has maintained its popularity for centuries even though few still use it for its intended applications in navigation. But ever since there have been maps prescribing a worldview, there have surely been dissenters. In a 1935 manifesto , the Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García says European artists laid claim to modernism when in fact many of