Is extreme poverty really being eradicated? Here’s a statistic that illustrates how the world has changed in the last 200 years. Had you been born in 1820 there’s a 94 percent chance that you’d be extremely poor, with just six percent of the world’s population not living in extreme poverty. However, those considered extremely poor…
The idea that there are wrecks full of treasure, sitting on the ocean floor waiting to be salvaged, might seem fanciful, but it’s entirely true. And it is estimated that there is around $60 billion of unclaimed treasure still out there. UNESCO has said that there are as many as three million shipwrecks at the…
This “fact” was repeated in many places recently when the world’s population reached the seven billion mark. It was a significant moment and some sought to emphasise the population explosion by repeating this startling piece of information. For the statement to be true, however, there would obviously need to be fewer than seven billion people…
The plane is a Soviet Ilyushin Il-76 cargo plane. Currently it has an advert on the side for the Palma Beach Hotel, but its past is something far more interesting. According to the Aero Transport Data Bank the aircraft was built in 1975 in part of the Soviet Union that is now Uzbekistan. In the…
Bizarrely there is some truth in this, but it’s a lot more complicated than one person initiating the trend. The tradition of pink and blue as gender specific colours doesn’t actually go back that far – it wasn’t until the 1950s that the two colours became commonly associated with boys and girls. Until the end…
It seems that it’s pretty much the case. Research by scientists at WWF and the Zoological Society of London concluded that we destroyed half of the vertebrate animal population on Earth between 1970 and 2010. The Living Planet Index (LPI), which measures more than 10,000 representative populations of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish, has…
Earlier this year, scientists announced the discovery of Kepler-186f, a planet 492 light years away. It was notable as the first planet discovered that’s almost exactly the same size as Earth, orbiting in the “habitable zone” — the distance from a star in which we might expect liquid water, and maybe comparable life. It also,…
If you are wearing something that has a zip, have a closer look at it and there’s a fair chance that you’ll see the letters YKK embossed on the puller. It doesn’t matter if it’s a high-end designer brand or cheap high-street label, the YKK legend appears with astonishing regularity. And it’s not just on…
In January 2012 an image (pictured above) appeared on a board of 4chan, the site that’s (in)famous for being a digital playground for hackers and the birthplace the hacktivist group Anonymous. For good or for ill, though, some of the brightest digital minds are to be found loitering on this site, so this message caught…
While it’s possible that two packs of cards may have been shuffled into the same order, the odds of that having happened are actually tiny and yes, it’s hugely likely that each properly shuffled deck is indeed a unique variation of those 52 cards. While it seems improbable, given how many packs of cards there…
Matt Pomroy 