As the population ages and lives longer, dementia has become one of the country’s most expensive medical conditions, with $109 billion in direct medical costs in 2010, a new RAND study found. The medical cost of dementia exceeds that of both heart disease, at $102 billion, and cancer, at $72 billion.
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Yearly odds of a U.S. student being killed at school: 1 in 3 million
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The sicker the oceans get, the more of their habitable regions vanish. Loss of aquatic habitats is mirroring the earlier pattern on land, which began with the Industrial Revolution and continues today.
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Percentage of American 16- and 17- year-olds who use text messaging who say they do so while driving: 34 Percentage of adults who do: 47
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Percentage of Americans and Chinese, respectively, who believe their government is “on the side of average citizens”: 12, 80 Who believe their government is “on the side of corporations”: 73, 17
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A new wave of demonstrations across Australia is planned for June after the government of Western Australia moved to close remote Aboriginal settlements, saying it could no longer afford to subsidize communities plagued by social problems such as alcohol and drug abuse.
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Mississippi has overtaken West Virginia as the fattest state in the union, with an obesity rate of 35.4 percent. Montana had the lowest obesity rate—19.6 percent.
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Almost one in five women—19.3 percent—has been raped, and 44 percent have suffered sexual violence, according to a survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nearly half of the women who were raped identified the perpetrator as a boyfriend or husband.
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Total number of passenger planes that have gone missing without a trace since 2000: 10
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Pope Francis accidentally cursed in Italian while delivering his weekly blessing at the Vatican, using the word cazzo, the equivalent to the F-bomb, rather than caso, which means “example.”
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