mortality

A new website lets you figure out how you might die, by sorting death data by cause of death, sex, and age. For American males ages 20-29, the most common cause of death is accidents (40.2 percent of deaths), followed by homicide (17.5 percent), and suicide (11.7 percent). Urinary tract infections? 0.3 percent.

Geographers from the University of South Carolina have created a map of the United States depicting a county-level representation of natural-hazard-related deaths -- the first systematic attempt to look at mortality in this way. While highly publicized media reports on catastrophes like Hurricane Katrina and the wildfires in Northern California may lead the public to believe these disasters are the most deadly, it is actually extreme weather -- the very hot summers and very cold winters -- that cause the most deaths.