Explore the results of 130,000 responses on views of the afterlife, in this rich interactive visualization.

Watch this video discussing concepts of the afterlife presented through an anthropological lens about one family's experience and traditions passed down from one generation to another.

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...

Researchers asked 10,000 participants to list 10 things that recently made them happy. One author broke down the responses into subject-verb-object categories, isolating the people and events that made responders satisfied. The result highlights how simple things like having dinner or watching a movie made someone happy. Dive in and look for some ideas or tips on feeling happy today with this fascinating visualization.

This interactive site allows you to understand the journey of your life in numbers and dates. World Data Lab asks users to enter their date of birth, country of birth, and sex at birth. The site then provides an interactive page tailored to your...

Care to hang all of human history on your wall? This data visualization charts 4,000 years of humanity. This "histomap" was originally published in 1931 and sold for $1 per copy of the 5-foot-long chart. It was said to detail the course of...

When dreams perplex us, we often want to understand them—and in the age of Google, millions go to its search engine to find answers. Now, researchers have compiled a decade's worth of dream-related queries to glean dream trends across seven languages. See what dream was most commonly searched in Arabic in 2015, or what fears and hopes are specific to one culture and time alone with this unique visual essay.

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.

Amid the historical trend toward secularization, young people still search for religion. Lamorna Ash wrote a book on this revival of interest in faith and spirituality, exploring the importance of community and identity in religious conversion. Listen to her experiences and investigations in this podcast.

This extensive report provides quantitative evidence on social well-being trends for 36 countries. Data cover demography and family characteristics, employment and wealth, mobility and housing, health status, social expenditure, subjective...

This page presents data, charts, and analysis on changes in population growth around the world. Over the last few centuries, the human population has gone through an extraordinary change. In 1800, there were 1 billion people; today, there are more...

In an era of 24-hour news, it can feel as if the world is on a perpetual downward spiral. This set of visualizations zoom out, and show how global living conditions have improved in recent centuries. The percentage of people living in extreme...

Studies of human behavior show that survey respondents may lie to present themselves more favorably. By studying anonymous search data, researchers have uncovered hidden racism, mental health struggles, and interest in taboo or stigmatized topics.

The massive model was built across a Mojave Desert lake bed using 800 lights spaced just 10 meters apart. Within the model, the entirety of human civilization appears only in the final centimeter.

Artistic renderings and reconstructions of ancient people are one way to bring the past to life, providing viewers with insights into and empathy for those who came before. This article details how modern artists and archaeologists work together to...

A study published in 2020 examined how internal, emotional relationships with God—rather than external characteristics of one's religiosity like weekly workshop attendance or attire—affected grief and adjustment among bereaved parents.

What does population density look like on a global scale? These detailed 3D renders illustrate our biggest urban areas and highlight population trends.

This econometric study attempts to estimate the economic value of increasing the global healthy lifespan by one year—and to answer the question of whether it is better to extend lifespans or slow the rate of healthy aging.

The study gathers health, lifestyle, and genetic data to understand what helps dogs live longer, healthier lives. Findings could also provide human health insights due to our shared surroundings and biology.

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”.

Every major religion has a story that started in a specific place before growing to reach millions. This quick video depicts an illustrated map over the last 5,000 years, showing how Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam grew from their humble beginnings.

In the final moments of life there are distinctive bursts of coordinated neural activity. Researchers are interested in parsing that data to better understand the dying process and also exploring how this data relates to our understanding of consciousness.

The past few millennia of humankind have produced numerous figures who left their mark on culture and society in their respective era. This interactive timeline from data visualization expert Jan Willem pulls data from Wikipedia to illustrate history's most important people relative to their prominence in modern-day thought.

The internet was officially born in 1983 and had more than 150 million global users by 1997, creating an international web of seemingly separate networks. This data visualization shows the growth of the internet from 1997 to 2021. Data in this...

This interactive map visualizes Indigenous territories across the world. Users can search by location, language, or tribe to explore the histories, cultures, and present-day communities connected to specific lands.