The End of Polio is Nigh

Reintroduction of Eurasian Beavers to the UK Regenerates Ecosystem

Source; BBC Earth

It has been 400 years since Britain was home to beavers. Now they have returned, and they are rapidly proving their worth:

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20161005-beavers-are-back-in-the-uk-and-they-will-reshape-the-land

Female Genital Mutilation

http://aplus.com/a/nigeria-bans-genital-mutilation?so=863e-aa69-101d2-d17b

Divorces Fell by 20% Since 2002

According to official statistics, the number of divorces in England & Wales fell from 147,735 in 2002 to 118,140 in 2012. That's a drop of 20% in ten years:

Source: ONS

In fact it's down from a high of 165,018 in the early 1990s.

Add to that the number of people who can now get married for the first tome thanks to same sex marriages and you could say that the institution of marriage is experiencing somewhat of a resurgence. There were 10,000 new civil civil partnerships in 2006 alone following it's introduction, for example.

Still Births Have Fallen Drastically Since 1927

The death of a baby is amongst the most tragic and heartbreaking thing for any individual to bear. The definition of a stillbirth is any baby born after 24 or more weeks completed gestation that did not, at any time, breathe or show signs of life.

Thankfully, such events are increasingly rare. According to official statistics the number of stillbirths in the late 1920s and early 1930s was as high as 42 per 1000 births. Nowadays, it's fewer than 6 per 1000 births:

Source: ONS

That amounted to a staggering 28,000 stillbirths per year compared to fewer than 4,000 today, even more amazing taking into account that the population of the UK was two thirds of what it was now.

Note the huge drop in stillbirths thanks to the introduction of the NHS in 1948. Those seeking to dismantle the NHS would do well to heed that as a warning of the effects of removing people's access to free healthcare.

Marked Improvement in Weather Reporting Accuracy Since 1980

The much maligned weather man gets a raw deal, it would seem. The accuracy of weather reports is improving steadily thanks to multi-million pound super computing installations that can more accurately model the weather patterns.

The following graph shows how, since 1980, the 3 day forecast has improved from around 85% to just under 100%. Likewise, the ten day forecast has improved from just 30% in 1995 to around 45%:

Source: BBC

As the BBC report puts it, overall, the accuracy of the forecast has improved hugely over the last four decades. Our current five-day forecast is as good as our three-day forecast was about 20 years ago. Our useful forecast window has increased by an extra day every 10 years.

Technology Keeps Getting Smaller, Faster, Better & Cheaper

Did you ever wonder how it is that today you can buy a handheld smartphone that's got way more computing capacity in it than all of NASA used to land man on the moon? More than IBM used to beat chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov at chess? And all for £150 or so for a basic model?

The answer is that computing technology - processors, memory and storage - is getting exponentially smaller, faster, better and cheaper over time. It's so cheap that we can be frivolous with it today in fact. Flappy Birds, SnapChat, Tinder, kitten memes and terrabytes of selfies.

The only reason this is possible is that somewhere, in some research and development lab of a computer components manufacturer, boffins are slaving away to make the components of your phones and computers smaller, faster, better and cheaper.

Take processors, for example, the brains of your phone and computer. What makes them keep getting faster, smaller, and consuming less power than those of yesteryear is principally down to the fact that each generation is manufactured to be smaller than the last. This means that today's processors can either be smaller and use less energy, or cram more transistors in than the last generation of processors - or both.

Take this, somewhat elderly, graph showing how many transistors are crammed onto today's processors compared to those in 1971:

Source: go-rbcs.com

That's possible because the size of the transistors - the zero / one switches at the heart of any processor - can now be manufactured in mind blowingly small sizes. The sorts of sizes we're talking about here are tiny, measured in nanometers, which are equal to one billionth of a metre ( 0.000000001 m).

As recently as the year 2000, transistors were 130nm in size, which is still pretty small. But that's nothing, we'll soon be mass manufacturing transistors less than 10nm in size, whilst 7nm transistors have already been demonstrated in a lab. That's an incredible reduction in component size:

Source: qph.is.quoracdn.net

Those boffins keep on breaking down technical barriers preventing progress in building things at unfathomably small sizes, and processors keep getting smaller, faster, better and cheaper as a result.

That's why your next phone will be able to load Flappy Birds that bit quicker than your last phone.