The accident at reactor four of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1986 generated the largest release of radioactive material into the environment in human history. The impact of the acute exposure to high doses of radiation ...
Evolution
Sep 29, 2022
17
6927
Modern humans migrated to Eurasia 75,000 years ago, where they encountered and interbred with Neanderthals. A new study published in the journal Current Biology shows that at this time Neanderthals were already carrying human ...
Evolution
Oct 16, 2023
3
7499
Anyone with even a passing interest in the global environment knows all is not well. But just how bad is the situation? Our new paper shows the outlook for life on Earth is more dire than is generally understood.
Earth Sciences
Jan 13, 2021
96
14587
Today, more than 10 percent of all global marriages occur among first or second cousins. While cousin-marriages are common practice in some societies, unions between close relatives are discouraged in others. In a new study, ...
Archaeology
Sep 14, 2021
0
581
A number of existing strains of SARS-CoV-2, as well as other future variants that could arise, have the potential to escape the immune system's cytotoxic T cell response in some portion of the population. That's the conclusion ...
Molecular & Computational biology
Feb 10, 2022
0
797
An international team of scientists led by Oregon State University researchers has used a novel 500-year dataset to frame a "restorative" pathway through which humanity can avoid the worst ecological and social outcomes of ...
Earth Sciences
Jan 9, 2024
25
836
Researchers from Estonia and Italy developed an innovative method by combining neural networks and statistics. Using this newly developed method, they refined the "Out of Africa" scenario. The researchers claimed that the ...
Archaeology
Oct 8, 2021
0
1076
An international team of researchers including Svante Pääbo and Qiaomei Fu of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, sequenced nuclear and mitochondrial DNA that had been extracted from ...
Archaeology
Jan 21, 2013
21
5
The length of a specific generation can tell us a lot about the biology and social organization of humans. Now, researchers at Indiana University can determine the average age that women and men had children throughout human ...
Evolution
Jan 6, 2023
8
351
Population ecologist William Rees, with the University of British Columbia's School of Community and Regional Planning, is reminding denizens of Earth that the planet can only support so many people. In his paper published ...
The term world population commonly refers to the total number of living humans on Earth at a given time. As of 29 July 2009, the Earth's population is estimated by the United States Census Bureau to be 6.774 billion. The world population has been growing continuously since the end of the Black Death around 1400. There were also short term falls at other times due to plague, for example in the mid 17th century (see graph). The fastest rates of world population growth (above 1.8%) were seen briefly during the 1950s then for a longer period during the 1960s and 1970s (see graph). According to population projections, world population will continue to grow until around 2050. The 2008 rate of growth has almost halved since its peak of 2.2% per year, which was reached in 1963. World births have levelled off at about 134-million-per-year, since their peak at 163-million in the late 1990s, and are expected to remain constant. However, deaths are only around 57 million per year, and are expected to increase to 90 million by the year 2050. Since births outnumber deaths, the world's population is expected to reach about 9 billion by the year 2040.
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