According to a persistent legend, Viennese bakers shaped the first croissant in 1683 to celebrate the end of the Ottoman siege of Vienna. No contemporary document supports this. Its ancestor, the crescent-shaped Austrian kipferl, existed long before. It reached Paris around 1838 with August Zang's Viennese bakery. The buttery, flaky croissant we know today is a French refinement from the late 19th or early 20th century.
That's the estimate from a WHO-led study published in The Lancet in 2024, covering the half-century since the Expanded Programme on Immunization was launched in 1974. It works out to about six lives saved every minute, mostly infants. The measles vaccine alone accounts for around 60% of those lives.
According to the World Gold Council, about 216,000 tonnes of gold have been mined in all of human history. Because gold is so dense (19.3 tonnes per cubic metre), it would fit in a cube about 22 metres on each side, roughly the height of a seven-storey building. Strikingly, about two-thirds of it has been mined since 1950.