December 09, 2024
How has the risk of dying from cancer changed in the United States?
To understand this, we can look at national cancer death rates in the United States.
The gray line shows the crude rate, which is the rate of deaths from cancer per 100,000 people. It has risen between 1950 and 1990 and has fallen slightly since then.
However, cancer death rates rise sharply with age, and the age of the US population has increased since 1950, so we would expect cancer death rates to rise for that reason alone.
What if we adjust for the increased age of the US population?
The red line, the age-standardized rate, shows this. It shows the cancer death rate if the age structure of the US population was held constant throughout.
This shows a slight rise until 1990 and then a significant decline; rates have fallen by one-third.
This means Americans are now one-third less likely to die from cancer at the same ages as Americans in 1990.
This comes from several factors: better screening and earlier diagnosis, medical advances in cancer treatments, and public health efforts to reduce risk factors like smoking and exposure to carcinogens.
Yesterday
Japan closed down most of its nuclear plants after the Fukushima Daiichi disaster in 2011, and nuclear production dropped dramatically.
You can see this in the chart above, which shows Japan's electricity mix since 1985. It’s based on data from the Energy Institute.
Fossil fuel plants — notably coal and gas — were ramped up to keep the lights on. The first nuclear reactors only came back online in 2015, under stricter rules from a new safety regulator created after the disaster.
As of early 2026, 15 reactors are running — out of 54 before Fukushima — and nuclear's share of electricity is still only around a third of its pre-2011 level.
May 12
Crop yields across Africa have lagged far behind the rest of the world — the regional average is around 2.5 times lower than the global average.
But some countries in the region show that yields can grow much faster. Ghana is one example. In the chart, you can see its cereal yields compared to the average for Africa as a whole.
Several government programs contributed to this growth.
In 2008, the Ghanaian government launched a fertilizer subsidy program; it had some impact on yields but was relatively modest.
The largest shift came from the introduction of the Planting for Food and Jobs program in 2017, which dedicated large public funds to distributing improved seeds, fertilizers, and other inputs to farmers.
The data shown is based on nationally reported statistics, and some researchers question the exact size of the reported gains.
But the result that yields have gone up looks robust: independent modeled assessments estimate that maize and rice production are over 40% higher than they would have been without the program.
May 9
In the late 20th century, a handful of countries — led by Brazil and the United States — turned to liquid biofuels to reduce their dependence on foreign oil markets, producing transport fuels from cheap crops instead.
In the early 2000s, interest in biofuels ramped up sharply, and not just in the Americas. They came to be seen as a leading method to decarbonize road transport. This was because today’s alternative to the combustion engine, the electric car, was still far too expensive.
Over the last two decades, global liquid biofuel production has grown sevenfold, as the chart shows.
Electric vehicles are now far cheaper and, in some places, cost-competitive with petrol cars, so biofuels are no longer seen as the central answer to low-carbon transport.
Yet, the world produces more of them than ever, and this is expected to grow over the coming decade, largely due to fuel standards and national policies that have promoted them.
May 7
Around 1.3 million people die from road injuries across the world every year. That includes the deaths of drivers, passengers, and pedestrians.
That’s around 2.4% of deaths from all causes.
As the chart shows, this death toll has been similar for decades, in the range of 1.25 to 1.35 million deaths each year.
However, with a larger global population and many more cars on the road, this means the death rate from road injuries — the number of deaths per 100,000 people — has fallen.
May 5
Solar and wind energy have grown quickly in recent years, but global electricity demand has grown faster. So while their share of electricity generation kept rising, it wasn't enough to push fossil fuels into absolute decline.
But in 2025, that changed. According to Ember's Global Electricity Review, low-carbon electricity sources grew faster than demand, pushing some fossil fuels out of the mix.
Global electricity generation increased by around 850 terawatt-hours (TWh) from 2024 to 2025. As you can see in the chart, solar and wind accounted for nearly all of this growth. While the world still burned slightly more gas, this was more than offset by a decline in coal and oil.
To reduce carbon emissions, fossil fuel use needs to keep falling in absolute terms — not just in the power sector but also in other energy and industrial sectors.
May 2
In 2018, my colleague Max Roser wrote an article titled “The Internet’s history has just begun”. His point was that while the Internet had already changed the world, large changes lay ahead because billions of people weren’t using it yet.
In this chart, I revisit that observation using more recent data from India, the world’s most populous country.
When Max wrote his article, roughly one in five people in India were online. The chart shows that since then, adoption has grown much faster than in the decades before. Today, more than 70% of India’s population is online — close to the global average.
When you look at related trends in the adoption of communication technologies, you see that much of the sudden acceleration in growth after 2018 was driven by mobile phones.
Mobile phone subscriptions in India took off in the early 2000s and had already reached 75 per 100 people by 2015. Internet access accelerated through its mobile networks, which were made affordable by new technologies and market competition — including a major market disruption, which started in 2016 when a new low-cost entrant drove down prices.
April 30
Teenage pregnancy rates have fallen across all regions in the last few decades.
The chart shows the number of live births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 19 since 2000, based on data compiled by the United Nations.
Globally, rates have fallen by over one-third. This decline has been even more dramatic in some regions. For example, rates have fallen by over three-quarters in Central and South Asia.
Birth rates have also fallen among adolescents aged 10 to 14 years old, where health concerns for pregnancy in such young girls are even greater.
