population

Close the airports! The disease is spreading...

Pandemic for iOS is a faithful recreation of the popular Web-based game where the object is to play as a villain and infect our entire planet with an evolving disease. The game is obviously quite morbid, but it's also extremely addictive as you start with one infected person in a random location and try to spread a disease to every corner of the globe. You can choose from three skill levels at the beginning of the game, with the easiest setting for quick sessions allowing for more experimentation, and the hardest setting making it a real challenge to even … Read more

Apple makes more iPhones than humans make babies

Apple has been busier making and selling iPhones of late than all of humanity has been at getting busy.

The company smashed most expectations yesterday when it announced its iPhone sales for the last three months of 2011 totaled over 37 million units, a figure that exceeds the number of babies born on planet earth--using the global average daily birth rate --during a comparable period (about 98 days).

Digital design guru Luke Wroblewski first noted on Twitter that Apple has been more productive than humanity has been reproductive in recent months.… Read more

Princeton researchers use satellite images to track disease

Tracking where humans migrate and cluster in any given country from season to season is, in some places, a tall order. Which makes tracking the risk of infectious disease outbreaks that thrive in dense populations tricky as well.

Satellite images of nighttime lights could be the answer, according to researchers at Princeton, who report on their findings today in the journal Science.

Using nighttime images taken of Niger's three largest cities between 2000 and 2004 by a U.S. Department of Defense satellite, and checking those images against public health records compiled by Niger's Ministry of Health, they … Read more

Study: Google+ population explodes to 10 million

Google+ appears to be in the midst of a population explosion.

A statistical analysis by Paul Allen, founder of Ancestry.com and chief executive of Facebook app maker FamilyLink.com, concludes that the Google+ population reached 7.3 million on Sunday, July 10, and likely will reach 10 million today.

And if Google keeps the Google+ invitation button active, as it has since Sunday, Allen expects Google+ to reach 20 million users by this weekend, he said in a Google+ post late Monday night.

"The user base is growing so quickly that it is challenging for me to keep … Read more

Forrester: 2.2 billion people online globally by 2013

This was originally posted at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

Forrester Research on Tuesday projected that the Internet population will hit 2.2 billion people by 2013. Of that tally, 43 percent of the Internet population will be in Asia.

In a report, Forrester paints a picture of Internet growth in emerging markets and stagnation in the developing world.

Among the key findings:

17 percent of the online population will reside in China. Growth rates in the U.S., Western Europe and other industrialized nations will be between 1 percent and 3 percent. Online penetration in the U.S. will … Read more

Joy! Apocalypse delayed until 2030

I always thought a stray meteorite would just smack into the world in, oh, 2020, and that would be that.

Or, perhaps, around 2015, everyone would become a celebrity and have a simultaneous nervous breakdown, brought on by excessive drug abuse, causing a Koresh-like disappearance of humanity.

But no, the year to prepare all your insurance policies for is 2030.

By that year, according to Professor John Beddington, the U.K. government's chief scientist, food and energy demand will have risen by 50 percent and fresh water by 30 percent. And the global population will have risen to around … Read more