Why Do Marriages Fall Apart? A Visual Representation of US Marriage Stats [INFOGRAPHIC]]

American marriages have never been more precarious. But why do marriages fall apart, and how are families changing as a result?

The following infographic, by Tiffany Farrant and PromotionalCodes.org.uk, casts a piercing eye on the institution. Based on the annual report by The National Marriage Project, it paints a picture of marriage becoming a less and less relevant factor in the way American's live and raise children. The short version: Marriage is simply shrinking as a cultural value; where 66% of women over 15 were married in 1960, the figure has shrunk every decade since.* Now, it's just 51%:

 

When Marriage Disappears Infographic By Promotional Codes

Space over Time

BY MIKE ORCUTT @ technologyreview.com

 

Human exploration is the most visible use of spaceflight, but ­business and defense satellites fill the sky.

The retirement of the space shuttles marks the end of NASA's human spaceflight program, at least for now. But human missions funded by the U.S. government have represented only a small part of the action in space.

Of the 7,000 spacecraft that have been launched into orbit or beyond, more than half were defense satellites used for such purposes as communication, ­navigation, and imaging. (The Soviet Union sent up a huge number, partly because its satellites tended to be much shorter-lived than those from the United States.) In the 1970s, private companies began increasingly adding to the mix, ­launching satellites for telecommunications and broadcasting.

This graphic groups payloads by the nationality of the owner. A satellite, a capsule of cosmonauts, or a deep-space probe would each count as one payload. The data, which run through July 2011, were drawn from hundreds of sources, including space agency documents, academic journals, and interviews. They were compiled by Jonathan ­McDowell, an ­astrophysicist at the Harvard-­Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and author of Jonathan's Space Report, a newsletter that tracks launches.

[Source]

 

Infographic: Labor Day

With all the hot dogs and beer, it’s easy to forget the labor part of Labor Day. Here, a look at the labor force, past and present, starting with 1971, when the microprocessor was introduced and we began our crawl away from manufacturing and toward the service-driven economy of today. | By Rachel Z. Arndt

[Illustraton by Francesco Franchi] [Source]