On 14 August 2003, high-voltage lines in Ohio, heated by hot weather and heavy demand, sagged into poorly trimmed trees and tripped. At the same time, a software bug froze the utility's alarm system, so operators didn't see the problem coming. The outages cascaded: about 50 million people in eight US states and the Canadian province of Ontario lost power, some of them for several days.
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.