World Cortisol Index

Initial Home Webpage
Globe Earth Map and "Global Cortisol Index"
Cortisol Level and Scaling of a Country
The "Cortisol"/News in Brief and AI Chatbot Explaining Article

World Cortisol Index

Why?

A lot of news is hidden today within a sea of misinformation, doom posting, and bias on social media. The World Cortisol Index seeks to answer a simple but powerful question:

“How is the world feeling right now?" -- an avenue for people to learn about what stresses are going on in the world today, or a reason to stay away from the internet to preserve your sanity, or cortisol levels.

How it Works

World Cortisol Index an AI-powered platform that transforms global news into a real-time map of planetary stress. By aggregating live articles from multiple international news sources, the system analyzes the tone of current events and assigns each country a cortisol score from 0 to 1 — where green represents stability and positive developments, and red reflects conflict, crisis, or unrest. These scores are visualized on an interactive 3D globe, allowing users to explore how different regions of the world are evolving in real time.

Clicking on any location reveals the underlying news driving its stress level, while a global ranking chart provides a snapshot of the most and least stable regions. Our project combines data aggregation, sentiment analysis, and geospatial visualization to create a new way of understanding world events - not just as isolated headlines, but as part of a larger global emotional landscape.

Challenges, and What Comes Next

There were a lot of challenges in trying to get news articles for every single country. Some nations like America and Canada are densely populated, and have a lot of news flowing out every single day - however, in less-developed regions in Africa or areas where political turmoil or media censorship is more common (such as China or Mongolia) have less news. Language barriers also lead to problems in getting access to news sources. Overall, this leads to some areas on the globe to be more populated than others.

Next to come is a work around such problems - translations for Chinese articles to English to add into the globe model, and utlizing RSS and web scraping over api calls to get around rate limiting and being limited in the amount of articles that we're able to get at a time.