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The world’s population has doubled in size over the last 50 years.In 2022, we reached the mark of 8 billion living on Earth. According to UN estimates, by July 2023, all the people in the world numbered 8,045,311,447.In this map, Visual Capitalist's Nick Routley and Bruno Venditti use population estimates from the United Nations Population Division to illustrate the world’s population as if the Earth had only 1,000 people. Countries with a population of below 7.6 million did not make our cutoff to be visualized, but are included in overall calculations and listed below.Click here to view interactive version of...

If you wanted to capture over 55% of the global population inside a circle with a 4,000km radius, which city would you place at its epicenter? In 2013, a post appeared on Reddit marking a circular area of the globe with “more people living inside this circle than outside of it.” The circle had a radius of 4,000 km (just under 2,500 miles) and was named the Valeriepieris circle after author Ken Myers’ username. As Visual Capitalist’s Trixie Pacis details below, acknowledging that the Valeriepieris circle is not actually a circle (it was drawn on a two-dimensional map rather than...

The African LLSVP. (Ward et al., Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, 2020) NATURE Vast Fragments of an Alien World Could Be Buried Deep Within Earth Itself PETER DOCKRILL24 MARCH 2021 They are among the largest and strangest of all structures on Earth: huge, mysterious blobs of dense rock lurking deep within the lowermost parts of our planet's mantle. There are two of these gigantic masses – called the large low-shear-velocity provinces (LLSVPs) – with one buried under Africa, the other below the Pacific Ocean. These anomalies are so massive, they in turn breed their own disturbances, such as the large phenomenon currently...

Anil Subba, a Nepali Uber driver from Jackson Heights, Queens, died just hours after doctors at Elmhurst Hospital thought he might be strong enough to be removed from a ventilator. In the nearby Corona neighborhood, Edison Forero, 44, a restaurant worker from Colombia, was still burning with fever when his housemate demanded he leave his rented room, he said. Not far away in Jackson Heights, Raziah Begum, a widow and nanny from Bangladesh, worries she will be ill soon. Two of her three roommates already have the symptoms of Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. Everyone in the apartment...

Three months after a portion of Seminary Road was re-paved and re-striped to reduce it from two vehicular lanes in each direction to one lane, a turn lane and bike lanes, the 51 Comments over the “road diet” still rages on. Let us know what you think in the poll and the comments.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) won re-election for the third time by 22 points last week. But a new report suggests it was nothing to brag about. He handily won New York City, but struggled in the rest of the state, winning only seven of the counties north of the city. In all, he lost 47 of the Empire State's 62 counties.Cuomo won Onondaga, Monroe, Albany, Erie, Ulster, and Tompkins Counties, which include major cities like Albany, Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse. All the other upstate counties overwhelmingly voted for Cuomo's Republican opponent Marc Molinaro, the Dutchess County executive. In...

Texas is a highway state. This reality stems from the need to meet the mobility demands of both sprawling metropolitan regions and vast rural areas.Paying for the state's massive system of highways has always been a challenge, however. Estimates from the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) put the state's highway expansion and maintenance needs alone at nearly $383 billion by 2040. Existing public funding, projected to be $70 billion over the next decade, will not be able to cover that cost without unprecedented funding increases after 2026.While Texans are clearly amenable to paying for better roads — two recent state...

PRINCETON, N.J. -- Gallup's analysis of political party affiliation at the state level in 2015 finds that 20 states are solidly Republican or leaning Republican, compared with 14 solidly Democratic or leaning Democratic states. The remaining 16 are competitive. This is the first time in Gallup's eight years of tracking partisanship by state that there have been more Republican than Democratic states. It also marks a dramatic shift from 2008, when Democratic strength nationally was its greatest in recent decades.

The Obama administration envisions a “low-carbon, low-petroleum” future where Americans tele-work, tele-shop, walk, bike and use carpools or mass transit if they must leave the neighborhood at all. A study released Friday says the U.S. has the potential to reduce petroleum use and pollution in the transportation sector by more than 80 percent by 2050. In other words, gasoline-powered cars may go the way of the dinosaur, and many Americans may end up living in planned, mixed-use, “walkable” neighborhoods, built along mass transit lines. … Higher densities (more people living in the same area in smaller homes), a mix of...

Many NIMBYs weren’t bothered by the idea that the City of Irvine would siphon off millions of dollars in property tax to develop the ostentatiously named Great Park on the closed El Toro Marine base, turning the expanse into a place to romp and play for those who live around it. We wonder how they feel now that the park is destined to be not so great, thanks to a ruling by state officials that $1.4 billion (with a B) in property funds can’t be spent on the boondoggle, also known as the Balloon-doggle, after its signature floating orange balloon....

This figure shows the energy density and the power density of nano vacuum tubes in comparison to other energy storage devices. Credit: H?bler and Osuagwu. (PhysOrg.com) -- Physicists theorize that quantum phenomena could provide a major boost to batteries, with the potential to increase energy density up to 10 times that of lithium ion batteries. According to a new proposal, billions of nanoscale capacitors could take advantage of quantum effects to overcome electric arcing, an electrical breakdown phenomenon which limits the amount of charge that conventional capacitors can store. In their study, Alfred Hubler and Onyeama Osuagwu, both of the...

Cola Raises Women's Osteoporosis Risk 10.06.06, 12:00 AM ET FRIDAY, Oct. 6 (HealthDay News) -- Cola may not be so sweet for women's bones, according to new research that suggests the beverage boosts osteoporosis risk. "Among women, cola beverages were associated with lower bone mineral density," said lead researcher Katherine Tucker, director of the Epidemiology and Dietary Assessment Program at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University. There was a pretty clear dose-response, Tucker added. "Women who drink cola daily had lower bone mineral density than those who drink it only once a week,"...

A new analysis of 50 years of changes in freshwater inputs to the Arctic Ocean and North Atlantic may help shed light on what's behind the recently observed freshening of the North Atlantic Ocean. In a report, published in the August 25, 2006 issue of the journal, Science, MBL (Marine Biological Laboratory) senior scientist Bruce J. Peterson and his colleagues describe a first-of-its-kind effort to create a big-picture view of hydrologic trends in the Arctic. Their analysis reveals that freshwater increases from Arctic Ocean sources appear to be highly linked to a fresher North Atlantic. "The high-latitude freshwater cycle is...

Density Is Destiny: On Politics and the Paperboy By Patrick Cox Why are things the way they are, politically speaking? Why are the Republicans' most effective ads straightforward clips of Democrats contradicting themselves? Why are conservative pundits so frequently flanking their liberal counterparts? Why is the left-of-center blogosphere moving their party away from the Democrats’ historic base while the right-of-center is co-opting libertarians and moderates? Realizing that this is a question of the same magnitude as Douglas Adams' "Life, the Universe and Everything?" I nevertheless propose that the answer is "population density" in general and "the cost of newspaper delivery"...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

Heavy Security Protects Michael Moore at Convention Michael Moore is so threatened by those warlike Republicans that he is hanging out at the GOP convention with a bevy of security guards. Editor & Publisher reported that "the biggest commotion at the Republican National Convention Monday night occurred just before 10 pm with the entrance of anti-Bush filmmaker Michael Moore, who was repeatedly halted by security attempting to reach his reserved press seat in section #340 near the side of the stage. Moore is writing a daily column this week for USA Today." Moore's timing could not have been better. Soon...

Moderate alcohol consumption could help protect women against brittle bone disease, according to a new study. Researchers at London's St Thomas Hospital examined the effect of alcohol on 46 pairs of identical twins, who drank either moderately or very little. The moderate drinkers - who drank an average of eight alcohol units a week - had significantly denser bones than those who consumed very little. The research findings were published in Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases. Researchers focused on the bone mineral density of subjects, as measured at the hip and spine. Chemical markers of the bone turnover were measured...

Scientists Find Another Huge Mini-World in Outer Solar System The most distant object ever seen orbiting the Sun is nearly as large as Pluto, expanding astronomers notions of how the solar system formed and what resides in its outskirts. The round world is currently three times farther away than Pluto from the Sun, a distance that expands even further on its 10,000-year orbit. It sits in a part of the solar system that some astronomers had thought empty. It is redder and brighter than anything astronomers have seen in the outer solar system, and scientists don't know why. The object...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2003 March 5 Where People Live on Planet Earth Credit: NRCS, USDA Explanation: Where do people live on Planet Earth? Although people inhabit every continent, the highest population densities occur in Asia. Sparsely inhabited regions occur on virtually every continent, however, including the Sahara Desert in Africa, the Great White North of North America, the outback of Australia, the Amazon of South America, and the Himalayan Mountains of...

Find your city here at the SmartGrowth.org latest news page Land-Value Loss Compensation a Hot Issue in Oregon Gubernatorial Campaign Although the Oregon Supreme Court barred a move to compensate owners for land-value losses incurred under Oregon land-use laws -- invalidating Measure 7, passed by voters in 2000, as using one amendment for multiple constitutional changes -- the compensation remains a potent issue in the state gubernatorial campaign, with Republican Kevin Mannix willing to send the measure's ''technically correct'' version back to voters, Democrat Ted Kulongoski arguing for a legislative solution and Libertarian Tom Cox proposing to study the effectiveness...