Designer Mathieu Lehanneur has created a series of haunting urns that map out the human population of an individual country using the shape of the object.
The ceramic jars each have 100 layers which represent one year of life; birth being on the bottom, and death on top. The circumference of each layer is dictated by the number of people of that age in each country.
[via Dezeen]

While many of us wonder at the spectacle of a single mother who lives with her parents increasing her family size to 14, there is a growing discussion about the negative impact of parents having seven times less than that. Supporters of the idea that “two-is-enough” say that any environmental positive action we take will be negated by population increase.
On the BBC’s site, environmental writer John Feeney says that uncontrolled population growth threatens to undermine efforts to save the planet and calls on the environmental movement to stop running scared of this controversial topic:
It’s the great taboo of environmentalism: the [...]

Economist and blogger Justin Wehr has created this handy graph of the top 15 countries by internet population. It uses recent data from comScore, which puts the total number of unique users as of December 2008 at just over one billion. Below is the detailed breakdown.
Top 15 countries, by Internet population:
1. China: 179.7 million
2. United States: 163.3 million
3. Japan: 60.0 million
4. Germany: 37.0 million
5. United Kingdom: 36.7 million
6. France: 34.0 million
7. India: 32.1 million
8. Russia: 29.0 million
9. Brazil: 27.7 million
10. South Korea: 27.3 million
11. Canada: 21.8 million
12. Italy: 20.8 million
13. Spain: 17.9 million
14. Mexico: 12.5 million
15. Netherlands: 11.8 million
[via Wehr [...]