Served at the end of meals in Chinese restaurants across the United States, these cookies with a message inside are almost unknown in China. Historians trace them to early 20th-century California, where bakers of Japanese descent adapted a Kyoto cracker that held a slip of paper. During the Second World War, the internment of Japanese Americans left the field to Chinese American makers, who turned them into a symbol of Chinese food, American-style.
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.