August 22, 2025
Scientists can make an enormous difference in the world.
Take the researcher Sarah Gilbert, who has dedicated her career to developing vaccines. Over the last two decades, she has contributed to vaccines against the flu, MERS, Nipah virus, and Rift Valley fever. When she heard about the outbreak in China in January 2020, she began working on a vaccine, just in case. By the end of that year, the vaccine against COVID-19 was approved, saving an estimated 6.3 million lives in the following year alone. Without this effort, we would have faced a much darker reality, marked by lockdowns, overwhelmed health systems, and widespread suffering.
This chart lists many such scientists whose work saved many people’s lives. The estimates are taken from the web publication Science Heroes, where you can find profiles of these scientists.
It’s difficult to estimate the exact difference particular innovations have made, and I take all such estimates with a grain of salt. None of these scientists did their work in isolation; their innovations were achieved thanks to collaborative efforts and the earlier work of other researchers.
Our team spends much of its time counting deaths, but it’s equally important to know the number of lives saved — even though it is harder to estimate and involves much larger uncertainty. It’s inspiring to be reminded that creative, enterprising, and tenacious people can enormously contribute to our lives.
Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, who invented synthetic fertilizers, are at the top of this list. My colleague Hannah Ritchie wrote an article about the difference their work has made: How many people does synthetic fertilizer feed? →
Yesterday
It might seem odd that countries would agree to import plastic waste from other countries, but many do so for the cheap materials or to feed specific manufacturing processes.
Environmentally, the trade in plastics has often been a concern, as it allows rich countries to effectively “dump” waste on poorer countries with weaker waste management systems.
The good news is that trade in plastic waste has fallen by more than two-thirds over the last decade. You can see this reduction in the chart.
China has been the biggest driver of this. It was once a large importer, but after a steep decline in trade in 2016 and a ban in 2018, many countries lost their largest export market.
In 2024, around 5 million tonnes of plastic waste were traded worldwide. For context, that is around 1% of the total plastic waste generated. What’s perhaps surprising is that most trade is now between high-income countries, which reduces the risk that this waste leaks into the environment.
February 07
Industrial robots are rapidly becoming a common part of manufacturing in some countries. The chart here shows how many new ones are installed each year in the industrialized countries for which we have available data from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR).
In this dataset, industrial robots are defined as automatically controlled, reprogrammable, and multipurpose machines used in industrial settings. The data covers only physical industrial robots, not software or consumer technologies.
The chart shows that in 2011, China, the United States, Japan, Germany, and South Korea were all installing similar numbers of these robots. However, in the decade that followed, the paths of these countries diverged. By 2023, annual installations in China had risen to 276,000 robots, a twelvefold increase.
Over the same period, installations in the United States, Japan, Germany, and South Korea also increased, but much more slowly: none of them even doubled. The United States, which saw the second-largest rise, went from 21,000 new installations in 2011 to 38,000 in 2023.
These figures refer to new robots installed each year; that is, annual additions to the existing stock of robots. The IFR also publishes data on the total number of robots in operation, and by this measure, China also had the largest installed base, at around 1.76 million robots in 2023.
Relative to its large manufacturing sector, China’s stock of robots today does not stand out – but the data here shows that this is changing quickly.
February 05
Most of our work on war and peace focuses on the people killed directly in the fighting. But war has many other costs: it worsens people’s health, leaves them without work, and pushes them out of their homes.
The chart shows this for the civil war in Syria. Since the war began in 2011, more than 400,000 people have been killed in the fighting. At the same time, annual deaths increased as more people died from other causes. Young children were especially affected: estimates suggest that the number of annual child deaths more than doubled.
The war has also forced millions of people to leave their homes: in total, more than seven million are displaced within Syria, and almost as many are refugees elsewhere.
It also became much harder for people to make a living. Average living standards, measured by GDP per capita, have more than halved since the war began. As a result, poverty and hunger have risen sharply.
These numbers come with uncertainty because conflict makes it hard and dangerous to collect data.
This shows that to understand the costs of war, we need to have a broad perspective and see its impacts on health, displacement, and living standards.
February 03
Three-quarters of people worldwide say they are religious. But rates of religious identity can vary a lot across countries, and so do the particular religions people follow.
In the map, you can see the most common religious affiliation for each country. This can include the “unaffiliated” who do not identify with any specific religion. This data is sourced from the Pew Research Center and is based on how people describe their own identity, regardless of their particular practices or beliefs.
As you can see, Christianity is the most common across much of Europe, the Americas, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Islam is the most common across North Africa and the Middle East, while Hinduism and Buddhism dominate across much of South Asia.
In East Asian countries such as China, Japan, and South Korea, the religiously unaffiliated are the biggest group. That doesn’t mean these populations hold no religious beliefs; they may still engage in activities that can be considered religious or spiritual, but they don’t describe themselves as belonging to any one in particular.
January 31
William Foege, who sadly died this week, is one of the reasons why this map ends in the 1970s.
The physician and epidemiologist is best known for his pivotal role in the global strategy to eradicate smallpox, a horrific disease estimated to have killed 300 million people.
Despite the world having an effective vaccine for more than a century, smallpox was still widespread across many parts of Africa and Asia in the mid-20th century.
Foege played a crucial role in developing the “ring vaccination strategy”, which focused on vaccinating people around each identified case, rather than attempting a population-wide vaccination strategy, which was difficult in countries with limited resources.
This strategy, combined with increased global funding efforts and support for local health programs, paved the way: country after country declared itself free of smallpox. You can see this drop-off through the decades in the map.
The disease was declared globally eradicated in 1980.
William Foege and his colleagues’ contributions are credited with saving millions, if not tens of millions of lives.
January 29
Several data sources show that theft in England and Wales has declined in recent decades.
One of those is police records — but they only capture reported crimes, and many people don’t report thefts. So it’s also important to draw on a second data source. The data we show here comes from reports based on face-to-face interviews with a representative sample of the population. In these interviews, the public is asked about their personal experiences of crimes in the previous 12 months.
On this chart, we’ve broken down the numbers by four different types of theft.
You can see a dramatic drop in vehicle-related thefts. These peaked in 1995, with an estimated 4.3 million incidents in England and Wales. While some of these incidents involved the actual stealing of a vehicle, many were either attempted break-ins or the theft of specific components, such as radios.
Burglaries — which involve someone breaking into a building to steal — also peaked in the mid-1990s.
Both types of incidents have decreased by more than 80% since then.
Pickpocketing or “snatching” has been more persistent. These crimes have decreased slightly from the 1990s and early 2000s, but have also experienced an increase in recent years.
January 27
In 2000, less than 10% of the population in Indonesia had access to clean cooking fuels. This is now over 90%, as the chart shows.
Clean cooking fuels are those that, when burned, emit less than the World Health Organization's recommended amounts of air pollutants. They reduce the burden of air pollution — and its health impacts — for the households that use them.
In 2007, the Indonesian government launched a national program to move from kerosene cooking fuels to liquefied petroleum gas.
This shift has greatly reduced particulate pollution and improved health outcomes. Death rates from indoor air pollution have fallen steeply.
