In 578, carpenters from the Korean kingdom of Baekje were invited to Japan to build the Shitennō-ji temple in Osaka. One of them founded Kongō Gumi, a firm specialising in building Buddhist temples. Run by the same family for some 40 generations, it survived the centuries before being taken over by a construction group in 2006 after running into financial trouble. It still operates as a subsidiary.
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.