Pope Re-States Catholic Church's Belief in Evolution and the Big Bang

That historic bastion of scientific suppression known as the papacy has come out publicly to reaffirm the Catholic church's belief in Evolution and the Big Bang.

Given that it is over 150 years since Charles Darwin published On The Origin of Species you would have thought that the battle to convince the public that evolution could be explained by natural means would have been pretty much done and dusted a long time ago.

Yet, staggeringly, there remains a worrying large proportion of people in the UK and elsewhere that believe everything was created by a god as-is, or that their god has been manually tweaking things from the heavens throughout history.

In the UK around 80% of people believe in evolution, meaning that the number of people who do not believe in evolution has dropped to below 1 in 5, with a few not sure. That beats the USA where only 40% of people believe in evolution:

Source: Wikipedia

According to a poll run by Gallup, which asked the American public whether species were created, evolved with a god's help or evolved without a god, 42% of American people are straight-up creationists, who don't believe in evolution at all, be it god guided or otherwise! Thankfully, the percentage of US 'natural selection' evolutionists has risen from just 9% in 1982 to 19% today:

Source; GALLUP

If even the Pope can come to terms with the scientific facts, perhaps its time for the majority of the world's population to read up on Darwin's 150 year old book and follow suit?

Here's a BBC Bitesize GCSE revision guide to be getting on with: LINK and a Dummies Guide: LINK

Percentage of UK Children Living in Poverty Has Fallen Since Year 2000

The percentage of children living in poverty has fallen since the turn of the millennium, according to ONS figures quoted on the BBC News website.

Source: BBC News

The figures show a drop from over 25% of children living in poverty in 1999 / 2000 to just 17% by 2013 / 2014.

The BBC report notes that "A child is defined as being in poverty when living in a household with an income below 60% of the UK's average. Average household income in 2013-14 was £453 a week - making the poverty line £272 a week."

The BBC News article expresses concern that that fall has been partially reversed in this year's figures. However, the latest figures also showed that 9.6 million people were on relative low incomes in 2013 / 2014 which represents a fall of 100,000 on the previous year. This is down from 11.2 million in 1998 / 1999 when comparable records began.

Computer Games in a Different League

It's difficult to think of a field which is so demonstrates such incredible progress in a short space of time than computer games. Computer games didn't exist at all until some very basic things cobbled together on scientific oscilloscope screens in the 1950s. From that point until today's sprawling, high-definition 3D sandbox landscapes has been quite a journey.

It wasn't until 1972 that the first commercially successful game came about, which was Atari's Pong. Initially, it was only released as a cabinet based arcade game, but subsequently as home gaming systems began to take off in 1975 Atari released it as a dedicated console capable of playing just this one game.

To say Pong was basic would be an understatement. It was black and white, had basic bleep sounds and by virtue of the fact it was plugged into a home TV it was of course standard definition and narrow screen:

Fast forward 40 years to the current crop of games consoles. The recent E3 games expo in Los Angeles saw the announcement of the next crop of games for consoles like Sony's PS4. The PS4 has a CPU with eight 1.6 GHz cores on it and a dedicated graphics processor capable of delivering 1.84 TFLOPS, which basically means it's a bit tidy.

In the hands of today's games designers that means that a PS4 game today looks like this:

Skin textures look increasingly real, water flows realistically and reflects the light perfectly, foliage blows in the breeze and bends as the main character runs through it, the landscape consists of far-off horizons of towering mountains and idyllic towns and ruins.

But that's not all. The video games industry stands on a precipice at the moment, whereby the forthcoming releases of the long-promised technology of virtual reality headsets looks certain to herald a new era of super immersive gaming that will wipe the floor with what's gone before.

Take, for example, the Occulus Rift headset, now owned by web giant Facebook. It has developed to work with games consoles such that the wearer dons the headset and can see the landscape around him in 3D. This is still a pre-release technology at the moment, but it has blown the minds of those doing previews of the technology:

Expect Pong 1975 edition in 3D any time soon. Watch out for that square puck.

We're Taller Than Ever, Which Shows We're in Better Health

One nice and simple indicator of how much healthier we all are than we used to be is our height. Today we have a higher income, more sanitary living conditions and better education about health and nutrition than ever before. Add to that lower infant mortality and fewer mouths to feed due to smaller family sizes, and it means that the average person grew up with better nutrition than our ancestors, and it shows in our average height.

For example, by 1971 the average British 21 year old male was 10 cm taller than they were a century earlier in 1871:

Source: BBC News

And this trend is not just affecting UK males, it's repeated across the globe. The following graph shows upward trends in average height of around 10 cm per person between 1810 and 1980 in every region of the world:

Source: Our World Data

It seems that from skeletal remains found during archaeological digs that average height in Europe bumbled along at around 170 cm for the past two thousand years, before rocketing up to closer to 180 cm as a result of the industrial revolution.

Source: Our World Data

You can say what you like about modern lifestyles, but the stats show we are healthier than ever before.

Life Expectancy Nearly Doubled Since 1841

Life today for many of us is more sheltered, more surrounded by material goods and more connected to the outside world than ever before. It's also nearly twice as long as it was in Victorian times.

According to stats from the Office for National Statistics life expectancy in 1841 was around 40 years. By 2010 it had risen to around eighty:

Source: ONS Mortality in England and Wales: Average Life Span, 2010

Source: ONS Mortality in England and Wales: Average Life Span, 2010

And depending on how you measure how long we live, we might expect to live as long as 85 (males) or 89 (females) as a modal average, as the ONS report explains:

"In 2010 life expectancy for a newborn baby boy was 79 years and for a newborn baby girl 83 years. These are the average number of years a baby could expect to live if he or she experienced the mortality rates at each age in 2010 throughout his or her life. An alternative measure of average life span is the age at which half of all deaths occurred before and the other half after (median age at death); in 2010 this was 82 for a man and 85 for a woman, up to three extra years of life than given by life expectancy at birth. The third measure of average life span, the modal age at death, gives a further three or four years of life: 85 and 89 years for a man and woman." - ONS

The difference between the modal average and the other two measures is that the others are skewed by the incredibly high infant mortality rates in the Victorian era which reduce the statistical lifespan of the average UK citizen.

Back in the Victorian era the peak age at people died was around 60-70, whereas by 2010 it was around 85:

Source: ONS Mortality in England and Wales: Average Life Span, 2010

Source: ONS Mortality in England and Wales: Average Life Span, 2010

So you've been given 15 - 25 years of extra lifespan just by virtue of the fact that you are living today. What will you do with it?

China is World's Biggest Investor in Renewable Energy

China is currently the world's biggest importer of oil, which combined with its infamous air-pollution problem, is driving the country to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels. 

China's emissions (Source: BBC News)

According to Forbes magazine, the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century report put China once as leading rest of the world in renewable energy investment in 2013, spending a total of $56.3 billion on wind, solar and other renewable projects. 

By 2015, according to the Financial Times, China extended its lead over the US in investment in renewable energy, which rose 32 per cent to a record $89.5bn, with about three quarters of that going into wind and solar power.

As the BBC reports, this could mean that China's greenhouse gas emissions could start to decline within 10 years, according to a report from the London School of Economics. 

The LSE authors note that "China's pledge includes a commitment to use 'best efforts' to peak before 2030; we are beginning to see the fruits of China's best efforts. China's transformation has profound implications for the global economy, and greatly increases the prospects for keeping global greenhouse gas emissions within relatively safe limits."