Mortality tables help determine the probability of death for specific populations

Visualizing cause of death over time in America

As people age, their life expectancy decreases, but the timing and speed of this decline have evolved over the years. Check out this chart which shows the shift in various causes of death of Americans over the last few decades. Data from the...

Play 17th-century death roulette

Before modern science and medicine, death was much harder to escape. Using real mortality records from London's Dreadful Visitation–a collection of all the Bills of Mortality from 1665–this interactive game gives you an idea of what may have possibly killed you during the Great Plague. Grow your appreciation for life today as you stumble upon causes of death like “livergrown” and “drowned at St. Katharine’s by the Tower”.

Calculate your risk of developing cancer

Hosted by the National Cancer Institute, this tool provides interactive charts that display the likelihood of dying from various causes—including cancer—based on factors like age, sex, race, and smoking status. By contextualizing cancer risk among other potential health threats, users can create custom charts.

Child mortality rates since ancient Rome

One of the great achievements of modern humanity has been the sea change in child mortality rates—the chance that a newborn eventually lives past puberty. For thousands of years, children had a 50% chance of not entering adulthood. About 300 years...

See how populations across the world could change in the 21st century

This tool lets you model the populations of individual countries by adjusting key demographic inputs. See how changes in birth rates, mortality, and migration affect the size and structure of future populations.

A life insurance cost calculator

The overall cost of life insurance coverage ranges widely. Factors like your term length, death benefit (the money paid out after death), health and lifestyle, and any added benefits can drastically change your monthly cost. This calculator can help you determine how much your desired coverage could run you per month.

Death taxes are placed on a deceased person's estate

Death taxes can include liquid cash, property, stocks, or other financial assets they owned. There are two main types of death taxes in the US: the estate tax and inheritance tax. Death taxes are levied at the federal and state level, but are targeted towards the rich.

Memento Movi

Have you ever wanted life to be a little more like a movie? This somewhat absurd website shows you how far along you are in life, if your life was an actual film. Enter your birthday, how long you expect to live (using your best judgment!), and pick a film. The site will show you where you are in life—if your life was, say, "Inception" or "Wicked." A little silly, we know.

Thanatology is the study of death and dying

Watch this video exploring the evolution in how researchers are studying and understanding death in the context of recent scientific research. CPR to restart hearts, ventilators, and other discoveries have challenged the way we think of death and scientifically upended the idea of death as a single moment.

Biological aging tests assess the breakdown of physiological systems

Known as aging clocks, these tests compare various metrics, like DNA methylation patterns and protein profiles, to healthy baselines. However, the non-uniformity of these baselines across individuals limits testing accuracy and prevents their clinical use.

Demographic definitions and key terms

This page provides a clear definition of demography and a glossary of demographic terminology. Demography is the science of populations. By investigating birth, migration, and aging, demographers seek to understand population dynamics. The Max...

To reach the afterlife, Egyptians lived in accordance with ma'at, or harmony

The ancient Egyptians held many beliefs about eternal life, fueling entire industries tasked with building tombs for the dead. Their leader, the pharaoh, was believed to be divine, and the lives of ordinary people were punctuated with ritual and myth. Learn more about their religion here.

An analysis of the logistic map, which shows how chaos can emerge from simple equations

When modeling systems such as the predator-prey cycle of an organism's population in an ecosystem, the logistic map function shows the population normally settles into an equilibrium value. However, at high reproduction and starvation rates, multiple such values arise, making it difficult to accurately model long-term population growth in some environments.

Annuities are financial products typically used by retirees looking for guaranteed income streams

Specifically, annuities are contracts between an individual and an insurance company that require the insurance company to make regular payments to the individual.

Grip strength predicts death better than blood pressure

In a study covering about 140,000 people across 17 countries, scientists found that for every 5 kilogram drop in adults' grip strength, it raised the risk of death by 16%. Grip strength, the research found, was a stronger predictor of cardiovascular death than systolic blood pressure.

League tables show the number of deals top investment banks do in a time period

These tables provide a visual to help keep track of the leading companies in investment banking. Companies such as JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs typically sit up top.

There may be 500,000 additional malaria deaths by 2050

Research published in the journal Nature in January 2026 estimates that by 2050, climate change may trigger more than half a million additional malaria deaths and over 100 million additional malaria cases. The work is based on climate change projections and available disease information and did not incorporate new vaccine uptake.

Calculate your estimated yearly dose of ionizing radiation

This calculator from the EPA provides a value in millirems—the US unit for effective dose—based on a variety of exposure parameters, including the state a user lives in and travel-related sources of ionizing radiation, such as passing through screening machines.

Temperature is a value that controls how predictable or creative an LLM's output is

In large language models, temperature adjusts the randomness in text generation by modifying how often words with lower probabilities are selected next in the sequence. Lower temperatures produce more obvious outputs while higher temperatures produce more creative responses.

Mortgages are loans used to buy property

A mortgage is a loan used to buy property, like a house. Borrowers typically put down a percentage of the cost of the home, and the amount left over is financed through a lender, like a bank.

A living will is a legal document spelling out your medical wishes for emergency care

This legal document makes it explicit if you want medical interventions in the event of an emergency, including CPR, feeding tubes, ventilator assistance to push air into your lungs to help you breathe, and more. Talking with your doctor about this is covered by Medicare.

A FIRE number is the amount of money someone needs in retirement

To calculate one’s FIRE number, FIRE followers typically multiply their expected annual expenses in retirement by 25.

Estimate your Social Security benefits

To calculate your Social Security benefit, the government uses information such as your birthday, current earnings, future retirement date, and more. Calculate an estimation for your future Social Security monthly benefit here.

Calculate whether or not you're in the American middle class

In 2022, roughly 52% of US adults lived in middle-income households. This income calculator can help you determine whether or not you're one of them. Specifically, the calculator lets you enter your household income, location, and more to see where you line up in Pew's government data.

Model organisms like yeast, mice, and flies help scientists decode the human body

Some species are used to quickly study the effects of human diseases and treatments because they are short-lived and have similar systems to those found in humans. Bacteria, like E. coli, have been used as human proxies given their rapid growth and ease of genetic manipulability.

Larger animals like giraffes, elephants, and blue whales have developed a unique defense against cancer, a phenomenon known as Peto's Paradox

Chaos theory—informally known as the butterfly effect—is the reason why weather forecasts are presented with probabilities rather than certainties.

Apeirophobia is an overwhelming fear of living forever, perhaps stemming from the brain's inability to conceptualize an infinite life.

View the ten deadliest tornadoes in US history.

In 2026, Finland was named the world's happiest country for the ninth consecutive year based on its wealth, social safety network, and high life expectancy, among other factors.

Use this tool to calculate the dollar value of your parental mental load, from meal planning to coordinating after-school care, then see resources that help generate solutions.

The first line of 'immortal' human cells, which can divide indefinitely and are used in scientific research, was nonconsensually taken from a Black woman.

Browse a detailed visual analysis of over 200,000 similes—comparisons that often use 'like' or 'as'—from popular fiction to see how frequently writers the same idiomatic expressions.

A century of Billboard issues documenting the evolution of popular music.

Learn how to read a prospectus, the juicy document that any company must file with the SEC before going public.

Alzheimer's can lead to brain shrinkage, with an average of around 2% of volume reduction per year

A Yale student wrote a profound essay about the consulting industry's influence on elite college students that was published in a book of her writing after she died in a post-graduation car accident.

Learn more about the history of fireworks, which dates back to an accidental invention during an alchemist's quest for information about immortality.

Studies suggest when you sleep is as important as how much you get, and syncing with your circadian rhythms may lead to less fatigue and improved long-term health outcomes

Scientists can determine Earth's past climate conditions by analyzing air trapped in microscopic bubbles within ice cores—columns of compressed snow layers that build up over hundreds of thousands of years.

Memecoins are a type of cryptocurrency—a form of digital currency with a wide variety of uses—created around popular 'memes,' or viral internet jokes.

In 1939, baseball star Lou Gehrig delivered his inspirational 'Luckiest Man' speech after retiring due to the health condition that now bears his name.

Salvador Dalí believed he was his own dead brother, who had died nine months before he was born

Volcanoes 'die' when their supply of magma runs out, if they are shifted away from their underlying magma reservoir, or if they get clogged by collapsing or their magma cooling back into rock.

The term 'algorithm' originated from the Latinized name of al-Khwārizmī, a 9th-century mathematician whose works introduced Arabic numerals and the decimal-based numeral system to Europe and whose treatise 'Al-Jabr' gave algebra its name.

When you complete a CAPTCHA on a website to prove you are human, you may be unknowingly training algorithms for self-driving cars, whose systems require training data to help identify crosswalks, bicycles, and other outdoor objects.

In its famous catalog, Sears sold $600 DIY house kits from 1908 through the 1940s, resulting in an estimated 100,000 'Sears and Roebuck homes.'

Telehealth demand for GLP-1s for weight loss is booming as consumers seek easier access.

Take a 3D tour of the Hajj, Islam's annual pilgrimage to Mecca, undertaken by more than 1.5 million Muslims each year.

Power lines are dotted with large, brightly colored balls to improve the visibility of these thin wires to helicopters and small planes and help prevent potential crashes.