Population much more than 8.2B, rural areas underestimated

Gear-obsessed editors choose every product we review. We may earn commission if you buy from a link. Why Trust Us? While most estimates place the current human population at around 8.2 billion, a new study suggests we might be vastly underrepresenting rural areas. By analyzing 300 rural dam projects across 35 countries, researchers from Aalto University in Finland found discrepancies among these independent population counts and other population data gathered between 1975 and 2010. Such underreporting could have consequences in terms of resource allocation within a country, but other experts remain skeptical that decades of population counting could be off by such a wide margin. Homo sapiens is the most successful mammalian species in Earth history, and it’s not even close. The species thrives on nearly every continent, in a variety of adverse conditions, and outnumbers the second-place contender—the rat— by at least a cool billion . However, a new study suggests that the impressiv ... Read full article.