Earth might be looking a little worse for wear, after the last four-hundred years of reckless wide-scale resource extraction, but to its credit it hasn’t collapsed entirely. Despite our best efforts, it continues to gamely welcome our rapidly expanding population, barring the occasional earthquake. Whether the planet…
Here’s a thought exercise that starts getting kind of gross the deeper you dive into it: what if the entire world’s population lived in one city? What would that city look like? How big would the city be? Or how small can you pack it? Is it even possible? RealLifeLore says that you can fit 7.4 billion people into a…
The world is urbanizing faster than ever, with over half of the planet’s population currently living in cities—more than any time in history. But when did this trend of “urbanization” start? It turns out its roots go back much farther than we thought.
Europe has what you may call a man problem.
There’s over 7 billion people on this planet of ours and some estimates peg the population to reach 10 billion by the end of the century. Given that there’s only a certain amount of land on Earth, is there a maximum amount of humans that our blue marble can support? Sort of! And that limit is tied to our diet and the…
We keep hearing that this is the age of rapid urbanization: By 2050, 70 percent of the world’s population will live in cities. But in the United States, the people moving into those cities are largely rich, white, and childless. What’s more, not as many of them are moving as they were a few years ago.
Outside the Florida Everglades, cougars haven’t lived east of the Rockies in over 100 years. But, a new study finds there’s a strong likelihood that states like Illinois, Missouri and Wisconsin could become home to healthy populations of the large carnivores in the next few years.
In a rare note of dissent from a prominent scientist, Paul Ehrlich is denouncing Pope Francis’s call to action on climate change, stating that the pope’s rhetoric will be as “ineffective as ignoring the problem altogether” unless the world’s billion Catholics embrace population control.
It’s Space City versus the Second City: According to new reports, massive job growth in Houston will soon propel it above Chicago in US rankings for biggest population.
The University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service has assembled a map that shows just how segregated out cities can be. The results can be used to help understand how racial problems affect communities and authorities.
Redditor TeaDranks has created a super-interesting cartogram in which the size of each country is apportioned according to population. Suddenly, the largest countries in the world don't look so mighty — Russia and Canada, we're looking at you.
A new study concludes that strict fertility measures, such as a one-child policy, or even a mass catastrophe like a global plague or a third world war, would not have a significant effect on the human population trajectory this century.
In France, they know how to relax: on public holidays, virtually all city dwellers flee the urban environment to hit the beach and countryside. And this analysis of cellphone location shows that in quantified, data-driven form.
Our global population of 7 billion has been steadily expanding and it's only going to grow faster as the century continues. But what will a world with 11 billion people look like? Paul Hanley has a written a book on the subject and he's here to answer our questions.
Now that Ebola is ravaging parts of West Africa, a nasty meme is once again rearing its ugly head — the suggestion that epidemics are "nature's way" of dealing with overpopulation. But it's an assertion that's as false as it is dangerous. Here's why.
By 2025, the biggest cities in the world will not only be bigger, but exceptionally denser. According to a new study, Hong Kong will be the densest megacity on the planet, almost twice as crowded as the runner up. And here in the U.S.—and this might be a real shocker—Los Angeles may be more dense than New York City.
Contrary to previous projections, it now appears that the world's population is unlikely to stop growing this century. There's at least an 80% chance that between 9.6 and 12.3 billion humans will inhabit the Earth by 2100 — and much of this increase will happen in Africa.
Americans who can claim themselves "born-and-raised" are far more rare in some parts of the country. While most states count at least half of their current population as natives, there's a pretty large anomaly when you get to Nevada: Only 25 percent of its current residents were born in the state where they live.…
A lot has changed in the U.S. over the course of the last 220 years, but one thing has remained the same: The steady migration of the population more and more westwards with each passing decade.
