Covid vaccines have saved nearly 300,000 lives in the United States, according to the Yale School of Public Health.

General Mills once employed 45 people to keep their fabricated “Betty Crocker” personality answering up to 5,000 queries a day.

An average American adult spends about $320 on lottery tickets annually, of which around 60% is paid back in (taxable!) winnings, i.e. they lose about $128 per year.

GMOs are present in over three-quarters of conventionally processed foods in the U.S.

Globally, 2019 was the second warmest year since 1881; the previous five years were the hottest five on record (for the second year running).

Hoover Dam’s Lake Mead is on track to fall to 1,048 feet elevation by the end of 2022, the lowest since it was filled in the 1930s.

Any traveler who has suffered from chronic diarrhea (leading to potentially fatal dehydration) knows the value of rehydration solution (simply salt and sugar in water). Discovered by Indian pediatrician Dilip Mahalanabis, it’s saved about 60 million lives.

Harpers sez: Chance that an American would rather be mugged than audited: 1 in 2.

Your body replaces itself with a largely new set of cells every seven years to 10 years. (That awful thing you did 20 years ago? It wasn’t you.)

Historically, “deadly quarrels”—world wars, homicides and everything in between—account for less than 2% of all deaths.

The first electric streetlight in Humboldt was turned on at the junction of Second and G Streets (outside what was then Vance House) at 6 pm on October 24, 1885. It was powered by an “electric machine” at Vance’s wharf, east of present-day Bayfront restaurant.

Bitcoin mining uses somewhere between 32 and 110 terawatt hours/year (it’s notoriously hard to come up with a firm number). The global banking industry (which cryptocurrency could one day replace, according to true-believers) uses 250 terawatt hours/year, about 1% of the global energy consumption.