The percentage of the nation’s African-American population living in the South has hit its highest point in half a century, census data shows.

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Many U.S. Blacks Moving to South, Reversing Trend

The state’s population growth of 17.6 percent represented the seventh straight decade of double-digit gains, far outpacing the national growth rate in the last decade of 9.7 percent.

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Florida Attracts 2.8 Million Over Decade

More than half the population is missing in Onagawa, Japan, a picturesque seaside town whose surrounding hills funneled waters into a wave that rose nearly 100 feet high.

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In Onagawa, Japan’s tsunami destroys community

Hispanics made up just under 30 percent of Arizona’s population last year, up from 25 percent in 2000.

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Hispanics Are Surging in Arizona

Hidden inside of the night sky’s Big Dipper, a constellation we’ve all known how to locate since elementary school, is NGC 2841, a spiral galaxy about 46 million light-years away from us. Captured here by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, NGC 2841 is described as a “majestic disk of stars and dust lanes.” “A bright cusp of starlight marks the galaxy’s center,” NASA explained. “Spiraling outward are dust lanes that are silhouetted against the population of whitish middle-aged stars. Much younger blue stars trace the spiral arms.” View more Pictures of the Day . Image: NASA.

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Picture of the Day: NGC 2841′s Majestic Disk of Stars and Dust

Stephen Elop, Nokia’s chief executive, says the company will continue focusing on developing markets, where a large portion of the population is not yet using the mobile Web.

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Bits: Nokia Wants to Bring 3 Billion More Online

Minorities have become a majority over the past decade in affluent Montgomery County as the number of whites has plummeted, according to census figures released Wednesday.

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Minorities are majority population in Montgomery County

Young Americans are far less white than older generations, a shift with political and social consequences.

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Minorities Show Gains in Youths, Census Finds

Many young adults of mixed backgrounds are rejecting color lines that have defined Americans for generations.

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Race Remixed: Black? White? Asian? More Young Americans Choose All of the Above

The report forecasts that the number of Muslims worldwide will grow over the next 20 years at twice the rate of non-Muslims before leveling off.

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Report Offers Surprises on Muslims’ Growth

The Census Bureau’s report that Nevada grew 35 percent over the last decade should have been a cause for celebration, but it was instead a reminder how bad things have become in the state.

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Behind Census Figures Showing Boom in Nevada, a Story of Bust

Growing numbers of the elderly have or want jobs. What will that mean for younger workers?

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The New Old Age: Over 75 and Still Working

The announcement by the U.S. Census Bureau that the population stood at 308,745,538 on April 1 is a number for which many people have been waiting.

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Opinion: Census may surprise you

Thirty years after it introduced population measures, China continues to use a variety of coercive tactics.

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Report Cites Abuses From China’s One-Child Rule

Amid the judicial news about Obamacare, the Los Angeles Times reports a study that deserves more attention in the months ahead. “[S]ubstantial strides have been made in dealing with the consequences of disease,” [USC gerontologists Eileen Crimmins and  Hiram Beltran-Sanchez ] wrote, noting that people live longer with serious illness. But even life expectancy increases may be nearing an end, they wrote. “We have always assumed that each generation will be healthier and longer lived than the prior one,” they said. “The growing problem of lifelong obesity and increases in hypertension and high cholesterol among cohorts reaching old age are a sign that health may not be improving with each generation. . . We do not appear to be moving to a world where we die without experiencing disease, functioning loss, and disability.” And in a USC press release Crimmins elaborates: “The increasing prevalence of disease may to some extent reflect better diagnostics, but what it most clearly reflects is increasing survival of people with disease,” Crimmins said. “The cost of maintaining and providing care for people with chronic conditions is an important part of determining the economic well-being of countries with established social security and government-provided health services.” Historians of medicine have been noting related trends dating back to the 19th century. As medicine became more effective in preventing death from acute conditions, it (and other trends like changing diet and sedentary living) began to increase the proportion of the population with chronic conditions. See James C. Riley’s Sickness, Recovery, and Death , based on Victorian “friendly society” records. Of course there have been distinguished people on the other side of the question, like the demographer James Vaupel, who (when I last heard him speak at Princeton three years ago) predicted that the “plasticity of longevity,” the steady continued expansion of the human lifespan, would continue its reassuring upward march. Here’s an interview from 2004, and on the downside, a 2006 warning from The Atlantic about the perils of the “coming death shortage.” If the extension of the human lifespan, and the outlook for healthier old age, really are stalled, it’s a bigger story than all the world’s health insurance legislation. And if the trend that Crimmins and Beltran-Sanchez noted is real, we shouldn’t count on economic recovery to reverse it. There’s even evidence that the Great Depression had a net positive effect on the nation’s health, and that economic expansion might make things worse.

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Pick Your Health Crisis: Medical Stagnation or Death Shortage?