At midnight on 29 December 2011, Samoa jumped straight to 31 December. By switching to the other side of the International Date Line, the Pacific nation lined itself up with Australia and New Zealand, its main trading partners, from which it had been almost a full day apart. The irony: in 1892, Samoa had done the opposite, living through 4 July twice to bring itself closer to the United States.
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.