Global Life Expectancy Up 6 Years Since 1990

Medical journal The Lancet has reported that life expectancy across the globe has increased by six years since 1990.

According to their snappily named report entitled Global, regional, and national age–sex specific all-cause and cause-specific mortality for 240 causes of death, 1990–2013: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013 "Global life expectancy for both sexes increased from 65·3 years (UI 65·0–65·6) in 1990, to 71·5 years (UI 71·0–71·9) in 2013, while the number of deaths increased from 47·5 million (UI 46·8–48·2) to 54·9 million (UI 53·6–56·3) over the same interval."

For those of us who like clever people to read Lancet articles and just tell us the basics, the good folks at PopSci have summarised the report.  They conclude that the average girl born in 2012 can expect to live to the age of 72; the average boy to 68. People just about everywhere are living longer, and the average life expectancy has gone up by six years since 1990. In low income countries, the gains have been higher, with life expectancy up an average of nine years.

The highest life expectancies are in Iceland, Switzerland and Australia:

Source: PopSci

Some key stats from the report are shown here in a handy chart from the Wall Street Journal:

Source: Wall Street Journal

According to the World Health Organisation report “In high-income countries, much of the gain in life expectancy is due to success in tackling noncommunicable diseases,” says Dr Ties Boerma, Director of the Department of Health Statistics and Information Systems at WHO. “Fewer men and women are dying before they get to their 60th birthday from heart disease and stroke. Richer countries have become better at monitoring and managing high blood pressure for example.”

Average Person in the UK Using 10% Less Electricity Than Five Years Ago

The rise of the electrically powered gadget is unstoppable.

You most likely have a 40 inch flat screen TV, maybe two. It might have games consoles, PVRs, cable or satellite boxes attached to it. Your smartphone(s) needs charging every day, you may even have a smart watch tethered to it that needs charging too. You may have laptops, desktop PCs, tablets and their associated broadband routers and NAS drives all blinking away 24 hours a day. Then there's white goods like fridges, dishwashers, washers, tumble dryers etc.

So you might think that the rate at which we are using electricity is increasing along with the number of electrical gadgets, but you'd be wrong. According to figures from the Energy Saving Trust published on the BBC News website this morning, the average person in the UK is in fact using 10% less electricity than five years ago:

The reason is that modern appliances are massively more efficient than their older counterparts. An LED backlit TV will consume much less electricity than an old CRT tube TV did. Energy saving light bulbs consume a fraction of what an incandescence bulb did. New fridges are often A++ or A+++ rated appliances for energy efficiency where old fridges were B or C rated.

This is an ongoing technology success story, and we should continue to seek efficiencies wherever we can to continue this trend.

Recession Comparison - 1930's versus 2014

There have been some alarming stories in the BBC News site about increasing reliance on food banks and The Guardian about a return to 1930's levels of poverty in Britain. But just how bad is modern poverty compared to pre-Welfare state poverty?

There was an excellent article in The Register today about comparing a modern recession to the great economic crash of the 1930's. Without wishing to diminish the anguish that any one individual family is going through having fallen on hard times, collectively the UK is vastly better off than it was back then.

GDP per capita in 1935 for the UK was $6,000 (inflation adjusted) whereas today it's $24,000, so we are a vastly richer country  as on average now. There's four times more (per person) to go around than there was back then. The Register article points out that Britain in 1935 was about as rich as Albania is today. 

Source: Social Democracy 21st Century Blog

Likewise, average wages were about £11,000 (inflation adjusted) in 1935 versus £24,000 today. The average income across the country back then was lower than the minimum wage is today!

For the unemployed, Public Assistance Committee handouts for a family of five (i.e, after eligibility for dole had run out) provided £2,750 a year, or just £53 a week (inflation adjusted) in the 1930s. For a family of five!

This isn't to detract from the hardships that individuals on their uppers are going through today, but relative poverty today's recession hit society doesn't have anything on the absolute poverty of yesteryear.

(Source: The Register)

Malaria Deaths Halved Since 2000

The BBC News site and The Economist have published figures showing that deaths from Malaria have dropped 54% since the year 2000. That means between 2001 and 2013, 4.3 million deaths were averted, 3.9 million of which were children under the age of five in sub-Saharan Africa.

Source: The Economist

This incredible change is due to the fact that up to 50% of people in malaria risk regions now have access to a mosquito net. There has also been a scaling up of diagnostic testing, and more people now are able to receive medicines to treat the parasitic infection.

In 2013 Azerbaijan and Sri Lanka reported zero cases for the first time ever and 11 others continued to maintain zero cases.

The History of Land Speed Records

If you want an incredible story of progress that keeps on getting more incredible, then the land speed record is a very visible symbol of humanity's capacity for ingenuity.

Up until the steam locomotives of the early 19th century, it was thought that travelling at heady speeds like the break-neck 25 mph that the likes of Stephenson's Rocket was capable of would most probably kill the occupants. Humanity had never travelled faster than the speeds that a horse could gallop.

The history of land speed records in motor vehicles starts in 1898 at a blistering 39.24 mph in an electrically powered wheel-driven vehicle. By the early 1960's, wheel driven cars had topped out at about 400 mph and were overtaken by jet and rocket powered successors. Since then we have nearly doubled the land speed record, adding over 350 mph.

Source: Figures from Wikipedia

The current record is a giddying 763.04 mph, set in 1997. But that's not the end of things, not by a long shot.

A British team is assembling and testing Bloodhound SSC which is aiming to top 1,000 mph. That would be over 25 times the speed at which Gaston de Chasseloup-Laubat travelled in 1898, a feat achieved in just 117 years.

Source: Wikipedia

Man-Made Objects - Distance Travelled

For tens of thousands of years man-made objects like boats had only travelled a few hundred miles between nearby islands. Then Marco Polo's epic voyages of the 13th Century clocked up 15,000 miles (24,000 km). The circumferance of the earth is only 40,000 km so there's really not much further you can go if you stick to the earth's surface. Columbus's voyages, for example were only a few thousand miles in length between Spain and the Americas..

In 1957 the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite, which made it 223,000 km into orbit. In 1969 the USA managed to land a man on the moon at 395,101 km from earth, and then return to earth (so therefore approximately 800,000 km).

But these distances are absolutely dwarfed by the number of kilometres travelled later solar system probes:

Source: Figures from Space Alliance Forum

The record on the right there is for the Voyager 1 probe which has now travelled 17,413,166,489 km since its launch in 1977. It has since travelled 116 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun and exited the solar system altogether, and is still going off into interstellar space.

Source: NASA

It took this photo of the distant pale blue dot that is the Earth on its way out before losing contact with us altogether. Even travelling at speeds of over 35,000 miles per hour, it would take Voyager 1 nearly 80,000 years to travel the distance to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri.

It's actually a bit of a cheat to say this is something that is getting better than it used to be, due to the length of time it takes to travel these incredible distances. This means that some of the older probes launched in the 1970s hold the record for the longest distances travelled, but as Voyager 1 is still going at 17,043 metres per second it's still an ongoing record.

Here's the distances travelled by year of launch, with the 1969 moon landings in there for scale:

Source: Figures from Space Alliance Forum

To put this in context, the 20th Century Voyager 1 has travelled 1,160,878 times as far as Marco polo's 13th century boat ever did.

UK Agricultural Output Nearly 50% Higher than in 1973

According to statistics released by the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) in November 2014 the UK's agricultural productivity is on an upward trend:

Source: DEFRA stats

The figures are a measure of total output (cereals, industrial crops, forage plants, vegetables, potatoes, fruit, livestock meat, other livestock products like milk and eggs etc.) divided by the total amount of resources to produce them (labour, energy, animal feed etc.),

The result is that 2013 productivity is 47% higher than it was in 1973.

Largest Fall in the Percentage of Workless Households Since Comparable Records Began

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) reported in October 2014 that April to June 2013 saw the largest fall in the percentage of workless households since comparable records began.

By June 2014 the number of workless households was 15.9%, versus 20.9% in 1996:

Source: ONS

The report also revealed that stats show the largest fall in workless rate of any age group was seen in 16 to 24 year olds.

Rate of Under-Age Drinking Falls to Lowest Level Since Records Began in 1988

It's popular to run down the younger generation. So in the interests of accuracy, it's only fair to show that that tendency is often misplaced.

For example, the government's Health & Social Care information Centre published some statistics in 2014 on under-age drinking amongst the nation's school children which show that the proportion of kids indulging in under-age drinking has fallen to lowest level since records began in 1988 (the blue line is for boys, the red is for girls and the green is for total):

Source: HSCIC Figures

The proportion was 62% in 1988, which has since fallen steadily to 39% by 2013.

The Wine and Spirit Trade Association put the changes down to industry-led initiatives like Challenge 25 and Community Alcohol Partnerships, which are targeted at tackling under-age drinking, but then I suppose they would take the credit!

Let's give the benefit of the doubt to kids these days being more responsible than their forebears.

Teenage Pregnancies Lowest Since Records Began in 1969

Another alleged symptom we're told to believe indicates that society is going down hill is the supposed moral implications of the number of teenage pregnancies in the country since the sexual revolution of the late 1960s. The number of teenage pregnancies is going up, right? Wrong.

According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) report in April 2013, teenage pregnancies are the lowest since records began in 1969, the year of the Summer of Love. The estimated number of conceptions to women aged under 18 in 2011 was 31,051. This compares with 45,495 conceptions in 1969, a decrease of 32%.

A quick graph of quarterly figures for England & Wales, which have only been kept since 1998, shows the most recent drop from 11,201 teenage pregnancies per quarter in March 1998 to just 5,587 per quarter in September 2013, a drop of more than half:

Source: ONS Figures

The most recent yearly figure then is 27,834 teenage pregnancies in 2012, compared to 45,495 in 1969 which is actually a drop of nearly 39% since 1969. 

Something to consider when next the debate about how sex education regarding contraception these days is encouraging irresponsibility!

Number of Road Deaths Lowest Since Records Began

Reported Road Casualties Great Britain (RRCGB), is the official statistical publication of the UK Department for Transport (DfT) on traffic casualties, published since 1951 but with statistics going back to 1926.

Up until very recently, cars had very narrow tires, weedy headlights, the sort of very basic brakes you'd find on a bike today, no crumple zones, no seatbelts and a terrible propensity to set on fire if involved in a collision. Plus for a period of that time there were no speed limits and drink driving was common, as compared to being shunned today. Also, roads were pretty much all single track with no barriers to stop head-on collisions.

Although the number of vehicles registered for use on the roads has increased 23-fold since 1926, the number of deaths is less than a fifth of what it was at is peak in 1940, when a whopping 8,609 people were killed on UK roads, compared to 1,713 deaths in 2013:

Source: Wikipedia

Another way to look at this is the number of accidents per 100 vehicles and the number of deaths per 1000 vehicles, which shows that despite the huge increase in vehicles on our roads they are now safer than ever:

Source: parliament.uk

In fact, deaths on UK roads are half what they were in 1999 when Great Britain had the safest roads in Europe apart from Sweden. 

At present there's an awful lot of work being done to replace central reservations on motorways with concrete barriers that can't be breached, reducing deaths by head-on collisions further on the very roads on which most UK motoring miles are driven. According to the Highways Agency there are more than 400 crossover accidents where vehicles break through the central reservation barrier each year in the UK and about 40 deaths and it is estimated that 70% of these will be prevented by the new concrete barriers.

Reintroduction of Lost Species

We're used to stories about man-made extinctions of animals caused by human interference or downright destruction. What is encouraging, though, is that we're starting to learn lessons about putting back vital links into ecosystems that we destroyed.

Take for example this story about the reintroduction of top predator the wolf back into Yellowstone National Park in the USA, where it had been absent for 70 years. Not only did the reintroduced wolves not wipe out everything else, they did in fact have a magical regenerative effect on the park's ecosystem:

Before Columbus landed in North America there was thought to be 60 million bison roaming the continent, sustainably hunted by the Native American population. By 1890 these had been practically hunted to extinction by European settlers, with only a staggeringly small 750 surviving. The effect of this near extinction of the major grazing animal upon the grasslands was was thought to be one of the contributory factors of the Great Dust Bowl crisis of the 1930s.  Following a successful reintroduction programme, American Bison numbers are now above 360,000 and rising and the effect upon the ecology of the prairies is expected to be significantly beneficial:

Closer to home, colonies of sea eagles have been reintroduced back to Scotland from Norway after an absence of 200 years having been hunted to extinction on these shores:

Elsewhere in the UK, otters were pretty much wiped out in England by the 1970s due to pollution and hunting, but have since returned to every county in England and are prolific in Scotland and Wales:

There has also been the first sightings of wild beavers in an English river in 500 years in the river Otter in Devon in February 2014, plus a planned reintroduction of beavers into the forest lochs near the Sound of Jura in Argyll, while plans to release the species into the wild in Wales have also moved a step closer:

And check out these awe inspiring shots of European Bison back on UK shores, extinct in England since the 12th century but now being introduced in small pockets in England and Scotland:

And these aren't isolated success stories. In the UK there have been successful reintroduction programs for glanville fritillary and heath fritillary butterflies, northern goshawks, osprays on Rutland Water, red kites, red squirrels, reindeer, wild boar and white tailed eagles. Planned reintroduction schemes include brown bears, elk, lynx, golden eagles, grey wolves, white storks and grey whales back into the UK.

Elsewhere around the world there have been successful reintroduction programs including Alpine ibexes in France, Arabian oryx in the middle-east, vultures in the French Alps, musk ox in Alaska, and so on. There are also proposed reinrtoduction programs for for Asiatic lions in India, Caucasian red deer in Armenia, cheetahs in India, and the South China Tiger.

The reintroduction of these species helps to restore biodiversity thanks to an increase in global awareness of the importance of biological diversity in the ecosystem and the positive effect this has for all species, ourselves included.

Casualties From Land Mines Reduced to Nearly A Third of 1999 Figures

In 1997 Princes Diana became a highly visible poster-child for the campaign to outlaw land mines as a guess of the Red Cross in Angola, a role which at the time was criticised by some Conservative politicians in a way which seems somewhat startling today. The controversy generated good publicity for the cause, of course and Prince Harry has since taken on her role of highly-visible royal patron of this cause.

Deaths from mines laid during conflicts is pretty much indiscriminate. 78% of deaths are civilian and nearly half of all deaths are from children:

Source: The Monitor:

The Ottawa Treaty, concerning the prohibition of the use, stockpiling, production and transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and their destruction, was eventually passed into international law in 1999. By 2003 stockpile destruction deadlines began to be enforced to eradicate existing stores of these weapons.

As of 2012 Bulgaria, Costa Rica, El Salvador, France, Guatemala, Honduras, Macedonia, Malawi, Suriname, Swaziland,,Tunisia, Albania, Greece, Rwanda, Zambia, Nicaragua, Nepal, Burundi, Republic of the Congo, Denmark, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Jordan, and Uganda were all declared landmine free.

The Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor (known as The Monitor) provides civil society monitoring on the humanitarian and developmental consequences of land mines, cluster munitions, and explosive remnants of war (ERW). 

Their stats for the number of mine / ERW casualties per year (1999–2012) show that in 1999 there were 9,220 deaths from land mines compared to just 3,628 by 2012:

Source: The Monitor

The Monitor reports that in absolute terms, military casualties decreased by 33% between 2011 and 2012 while civilian casualties decreased by 10%. More than half the drop in military casualties from 2011 to 2012 can be accounted for by decreases in military casualties in just three states—Colombia, Myanmar, and Pakistan.

Rise of the Digital Camera

There was a time when digital cameras were regarded as a quirky gadget but not a serious camera. Then there was a time when the cameras were OK but not remotely affordable. Then sometime in the last ten years or so we find ourselves choosing digital compact cameras and DSLRs as our default camera of choice.

The next generation will look at us like a penny farthing riding relic of the Victorian era when we tell them about taking pictures without seeing the image, taking them to Boots to get developed and then finding half of them cam back blurred with 'advisory' stickers on them. So how did digital cameras take over the world?

One measure of their development, although not the only measure of quality of course, is the number of pixels in a camera image. They've come a long way since the first digital camera in a Kodak lab took a 10,000 pixel digital picture and stored it on a cassette.

Source: here

Nowadays you're looking at relatively affordable cameras which can take twenty or thirty million pixel images. The following graph shows the rise in pixel count over the years, using some landmark cameras of the day to illustrate the rate of improvement:

Source: figures from here and here (click graph to EMBIGGEN)

It should be pointed out that these days you can get a 41 megapixel camera on a phone - that's how far we've come in such a short space of time.

Worlds Tallest Buildings Throughout Time

The Great Pyramid of Giza in Cairo, Egypt was the tallest structure in the world for over 3,800 years at 146.5 metres (481 ft).

The title then passed to various churches between the 13th century and the dawn of the 20th century, with Ulm Minster in Germany reaching as high as 161 meters (530 ft), barely higher than the pyramids built thousands of years earlier.

It was only really the explosion of sky scraper buildings in the USA that got things moving again. Philadelphia City Hall in 1901 finally overtook the churches at 167 metres (548 ft) and then there was no looking back:

Source: The Jennings Report - click the picture to EMBIGGEN

The building on the far right of the diagram is the Burj Khalifa in Dubai at 828 metres (2,717 ft). The last three record holders have been in the Far East, which is over twice the size of the last US record holder, proof that Asia is taking over in the field of enormously tall buildings.

All of which begs the question, how high can we go? Of the list of proposed sky scrapers, the tallest one which has an estimated completion date is the Dubai City Tower at a whopping 2,400 meters (7,900 ft) which would be three times the size of the Burj Khalifa if it were ever to get built!

And that doesn't count various proposed space elevators that would be measured in miles high...!

Organ Donation Registration Continues to Rise

If your health deteriorated to the point where you needed an organ transplant, or if you got into an accident that necessitated one urgently, you'd like to think that there was a stock of available donor organs awaiting your needs. Thankfully, it seems that organ donation is on the rise.

The NHS Organ Donation Register (ODR) statistics for 2104 were released in a report in showing the number of registered organ donors in the period from 31st March 2005 to 31st  March 2014.

The report shows a rise from 12.2 million organ donors in 2005 to 20.2 million organ donors in 2014:

Source: NHS ODR Report 2014

The largest single source of donations came through the DVLA (53%) with people electing to join when registering for a new drivers license, which implies people will do so when presented with an opportunity. The next largest categories being via the online portal (19%) and at the GP's (19%).

The increasing trend might also be something to do with the willingness of younger age groups to donate. The largest donating age group was 21-30, followed by 16-20 and then 31-40.

If this could be matched by an upward trend in blood donation stats, then that really would be good news....

Super Computing - An Incredible Rise In Computing Power

The following chart shows the incredible rise in supercomputing power over the last 60 years, shown in floating point operations (FLOPS) per second (e.g. how many calculations involving a decimal point can be done per second):

Source: Wikipedia

That graph curve alone would be impressive enough, but it's worth pointing out that the graph is done on a logarithmic scale, which means each upwards increment is ten to the power X larger than the last one. If it was plotted on a linear scale then the progress is so mind blowing it'd be completely unreadable on a graph.

Basically, back in the 1940s the world's most powerful computer could do fewer than one floating point calculation per second.

Today we're at the stage where a super computer can do 1017 floating point calculations per second, that's one hundred quadrillion calculations, or 100,000,000,000,000,000, per second.

Even if we take the last few years since 2008 and plot it on a linear graph you can see the rate of progress isn't slowing down. This one is shown in petaflops which is 1015 calculations per second, or 1,000,000,000,000,000 calculations per second:

Source: Figures from Wikipedia

Super computers in development, or proposed do be developed, include a weather modelling computer that could produce an estimated 1021 FLOPS or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 calculations per second by the year 2030.

Sooner or later we'll reach the limits of what existing silicon chips can do, but don't expect this continual rise in power to end there. A new generation of quantum computers is being developed that will be orders of magnitude more powerful than the 'traditional computers' described above!

If you're finding all this a little hard to get your head around, your PS4 games console can do 102.4 giga FLOPS and an XBox One can do 112 giga FLOPS. In 1993 that would be achievable only with the world's fastest super computer, which at the time was Fujitsu's Numerical Wind Tunnel at the National Aerospace Laboratory, Tokyo, Japan (124.50 giga FLOPS) and looked like this:

Source: Fujitsu

Charitable Giving - Public Generosity Keeps on Rising

If you subscribe to the notion that society is somehow going down hill then you might believe that people are becoming more selfish and less generous. However, if you take a look at charitable donations to the big TV charity fundraisers over time you'll see that donations keep rising year on year as the general public becomes more generous than ever.

For example, the first Children in Need event in 1980 raised just £1 million, whereas the eventual 2014 total is likely to be around £50 million (figures below show just the on-the-night total with the eventual 2014 figure yet to be calculated at the time of writing, hence the red column):

Source: Figures from Wikipedia

If we use an on-line inflation calculator to work out what 1980's £1 million total would be worth today it would be worth approximately £4.4 million in today's money, so we're approximately eleven times as generous as we were in 1980!

Meanwhile, Comic Relief has been going since 1988 when it raised £15 million, compared to the 2013 total of over £100 million:

Source: Figures from Wikipedia

Again, allowing for inflation calculated on the on-line tool, 1988's total would be worth about £37 million today, so we're nearly three times as generous than we were in 1988 by that measure!

According to statistics from the National Council for Voluntary Organisations charitable giving overall has risen from £9.4 billion in 2004 / 2005 to £11 billion in 2010 / 2011:

Source: NCVO

During this period the mean amount given per donor per month rose from £24 to £31 which, given that the period being measured was during a global economic melt-down, apparently didn't slow down the public's ever growing generosity.

HIV evolving 'into milder form'

The BBC News site is reporting a study by virologists at Oxford University which suggests that the HIV virus is evolving to become less deadly and less infectious.

Source: BBC News

To paraphrase an article, which itself paraphrases a much larger study, every so often HIV infects someone with a particularly effective immune system and has to adapt if it is to survive, which it does so at a cost to its ability to replicate.

Whilst this is far from a sign that HIV is about to become ineffective yet, it's good news, particularly given the additional factor that retro-viral drugs are forcing HIV to become milder and take longer to develop into AIDS.