WorldRankd

In Singapore, owning a car costs $75,000 before you buy the car. That's just the government permit. Then you buy the car.

@CuriosityonX 4.3 minutes at closest approach. 21 minutes at the farthest. Same camera, same signal, same speed of light. The only variable is where two rocks happen to be in their orbit.

It takes up to 20 minutes for the signal from this camera to reach Earth. If you were standing there waving at the camera, you would be dead or long gone by the time we even saw the first frame. 140 million miles of dead silence. This is Mars.

@historydefined The wildest part is it was filled with saltwater pumped directly from the Pacific. The ocean kept corroding everything, maintenance costs spiraled, and it closed in 1971. Went from the largest pool in America to a parking lot in one lifetime.

Fleishhacker Pool in San Francisco was once the largest swimming pool in the United States. Built in 1924, it was so massive that lifeguards used rowboats to patrol it. The pool measured 1,000 by 150 feet, held 6.5 million gallons of water, and could fit up to 10,000 swimmers. In 1999, the site was converted into parking for the zoo.

@stats_feed 815 million hectares. To put that in perspective, Russia's forest alone is larger than the entire land area of Australia. And most of it is Siberian taiga that stretches across 9 time zones.

🇷🇺 One-fifth of the world's entire forested area is located in Russia.

53 years. In the time since the last person stood on the Moon, we've built the ISS, landed rovers on Mars, and mapped the observable universe. But nobody went back. The fact that it takes two separate rockets launching and docking in lunar orbit just to attempt it shows how hard Apollo actually was.

The last humans to walk on the Moon left in December 1972. More than half a century later, China is the closest any nation has come to sending astronauts back. On China's 11th Space Day, the program is well into development: the Long March-10 rocket and Mengzhou crewed spacecraft both completed key flight tests in February 2026, and the uncrewed Chang'e-7 mission is set to launch later this year to survey the lunar south pole ahead of the crewed landing. The mission plan involves two rockets launching separately — one carrying the lunar lander Lanyue, one carrying the crew — rendezvousing in lunar orbit before descent. If successful, it would be the first crewed lunar landing in over 50 years. #MoonLanding #ChinaSpaceDay #SpaceExploration #Aerospace #Space

@latestincosmos The part that gets me is it worked across six different human cancer types. Cancer stem cells are the reason tumors come back after treatment. We've never had a reliable way to study them in a lab until now.

🚨: Japanese Scientists have created a hydrogel that reverts cancer cells back to cancer stem cells in 24 hours.

@pubity Previous record was 2,540 meters. They didn't just break it, they added nearly a kilometer. And it's Antarctic, not Arctic. That lake has been sealed off from the atmosphere for potentially 34 million years.

China drilled a 3,413 meter hole into arctic ice to access a lake that's been buried beneath ice for millions of years. They're using the ancient water to study climate change and test how life could survive on frozen alien planets and moons.

@Defence_Index China, South Korea, and Japan together build roughly 90% of every ship on Earth. The rest of the world splits the remaining 10%. That concentration of industrial capacity in one region is historically unprecedented.

🇨🇳 China is now the world’s undisputed leader in shipbuilding China produces over 50% of global ship output, more than any other country by a wide margin. It controls 7 of the 10 largest shipyards worldwide, enabling faster and lower cost production than most competitors. From container ships and LNG carriers to modern destroyers and aircraft carriers, China is building both commercial and military fleets at scale. Its navy is already the largest in the world by number of ships, supported by unmatched industrial capacity. This is not just economic strength. It is industrial power translating directly into maritime influence 🌊⚓

The US ranks 15th in Numbeo's 2026 Quality of Life Index. The top 3: Netherlands, Denmark, Luxembourg. 14 countries scored higher. Most of them have populations smaller than New York City

@sciencegirl 28 days. That's it. Makes you wonder how much of the rise in childhood allergies over the last 30 years is just a side effect of paving over every surface kids touch.

Research in Finland found that simply changing what children play on can quickly influence their immune system. Scientists redesigned parts of nursery playgrounds by swapping gravel and asphalt for natural forest materials, soil, moss, leaf litter, and native plants, so kids would be exposed to the microbes found in nature. After just 28 days, clear biological differences emerged. Children who played in these “rewilded” spaces developed a richer mix of microbes on their skin and in their gut. They also showed higher levels of regulatory T-cells, which help the body manage inflammation and reduce the risk of immune overreactions like allergies. These changes were not observed in children who stayed on conventional playground surfaces. The findings support the biodiversity hypothesis, the idea that limited contact with natural environments, especially in urban life, may be linked to rising allergies and autoimmune conditions. What stands out is how simple the intervention was. This wasn’t extreme outdoor exposure-just everyday play in a more natural setting. Even small, regular contact with soil and vegetation appears to shape the body’s internal ecosystem and how the immune system develops. Learn more: "Dirty Playgrounds: How Rewilding Finnish Schools Transformed Children's Health." LettsSafari

@stats_feed First 50 GW took 11 years. The last 50 GW took 14 months.

🇮🇳 India hits 150 GW solar mark with record 14.45 GW additions in Q1 2026 alone.

@BenNollWeather NOAA puts this at 62% chance of El Nino now, with a 1-in-4 shot at Super status (Nino-3.4 above +2.0C). If the Kelvin wave surfaces by July instead of September, we could be looking at a repeat of 1997-98 conditions. That one raised global temps by 0.4C in a single year.

Super El Niño: A record-breaking westerly wind burst was caused by rare triplet cyclones in the Pacific during early April. Highly unusual winds along the equator created a strong Kelvin wave, which is now just starting to transport huge amounts of warm water across the Pacific.

@AssaadRazzouk People are still debating whether the energy transition is happening. It already happened. The numbers just haven't caught up to the narrative yet.

In 2025 alone, solar, wind, EVs and heat pumps erased 800m tons of coal demand, more than the entire coal use of India. It also wiped out 260 billion cubic meters of gas, nearly half the global LNG market Clean tech is gutting fossil fuel demand, and we're just getting started

@stats_feed The price dropped from $2,200 to under $1,000 per patient. Thailand now has one of the highest HIV treatment coverage rates in Southeast Asia. Sometimes the most effective public health policy is just refusing to blink.

In 2007, Thailand legally issued a compulsory license to make cheap generic versions of Abbott's HIV drug Kaletra. Abbott retaliated by withdrawing 7 medicines from Thailand. Thailand held firm, and HIV treatment coverage expanded to hundreds of thousands more patients.

@HumanProgress The labor-hours framing is what makes this hit. I wonder what the biggest outlier is going the other direction. Housing? Healthcare? What costs MORE hours of work today than in 1925?

In 1925, people cooled food using insulated cabinets chilled by a block of ice. They typically cost around 140 hours of entry-level work. Today, a mini fridge at Walmart sells for $184, or 9.8 hours of entry-level work, and is far cheaper to run. humanprogress.org/ice-blocks-to-…

@FluentInFinance For context, the current DC fast charging standard is 20-45 minutes for 10 to 80%. Going from that to 7.5 minutes isn't an incremental improvement. It's closer to the jump from dial-up to broadband.

JUST IN: A Chinese company just recharged an EV from 0 to 80% in 7.5 minutes. Most people have no idea what this means. Greater Bay Technology just rolled its first all-solid-state EV battery cells off a production line. These cells hit 260-500 Wh/kg in energy density. That's about double what most EVs run on today. And the company's targeting mass production in 2026. Today's EV batteries use liquid electrolyte. It works. But it has limits: - Degrades over time - Fire risk (liquid = flammable) - Slower charging - Energy density caps out This solid-state battery replaces the liquid with a solid material. Safer. Denser. Better in almost every way. Imagine charging your car from 0 to 80% in 7.5 minutes. By 2030 the standard global car will cost $10,000 and it will not use gas.

@ErikSolheim They already have 7,000+ pre-orders and are targeting 10,000 units a year by 2029. The gap between "flying cars are science fiction" and "flying cars have a production timeline" closed faster than most people realized.

🇨🇳 Chinese electric vehicle maker Xpeng says it expects to begin large-scale production of flying cars next year in 2027.

@amazingmap Hungary still has entire Soviet-era housing blocks with 10,000+ residents in a single complex. There are villages in the countryside with fewer people than one hallway.

Settlements in Hungary with a smaller population than the country’s largest residential building

@PeterDiamandis The labor math is wild but the solar number is the one that breaks people's brains. In 2010 it was 36 cents/kWh. A 92% cost drop in 15 years. No other energy source in history has done that.

A humanoid robot will cost us $30K and works 24/7 for $0.40/hour. A solar panel generates electricity for 3 cents/kWh. What exactly is the argument that we CAN'T create abundance?

A volcanic island with 380,000 people has the 5th fastest internet on earth. 471 Mbps. Iceland ran fiber to every fishing village.