A record number of objects went into space in 2025

There are two ways to produce seafood: catch fish in the wild or farm your own. Seafood farming is often called “aquaculture”. Aquaculture is dominated by the farming of fish, but also includes other organisms, such as crustaceans and aquatic plants.Aquaculture has grown rapidly over the last few decades. In fact, as the chart shows, it has overtaken wild catch since 2013.This has relieved some pressure on wild fish stocks: if this increased demand for fish had been satisfied by wild catch, then many more would be severely overexploited.Read more in our article on the rise of aquaculture.

The United Kingdom was the birthplace of coal. It has now, effectively, died there.As shown in the chart, in the late 1980s, around two-thirds of the UK’s electricity came from coal. By the time I was born in the 1990s, this had dropped to just over half.The use of coal has plummeted in my lifetime. It now makes up around 0.1% of the UK’s electricity.Coal was first replaced by gas, but is now being pushed out by wind, solar, and biomass.Explore more charts on the death of British coal.

Forty years ago, young people had higher literacy rates in Sub-Saharan Africa than in South Asia. You can see on the chart that the region had a 10-percentage-point lead in 1985.But things have changed a lot since then. Sub-Saharan Africa now lags by more than 14 percentage points.While literacy has improved in both regions, it has done so much faster in South Asia. There, almost all young people have basic reading and writing skills. In Sub-Saharan Africa, most of them do, but there is still a significant lag behind other world regions.In South Asia, the increase in literacy rates among young women has been particularly dramatic. In the mid-1980s, only around 40% had basic reading skills. That has more than doubled to over 90%, and the gap between young men and women has essentially closed.Explore how other educational and literacy measures compare across countries, age groups, and gender in our work on global education.

Throughout the entire 20th century, about 100 million people died earlier than they would have because of smoking. That’s a lot, but it pales in comparison to the expected numbers for this century.Between 2000 and 2023 alone, smoking-related deaths are estimated at 163 million. You can see this comparison in the chart.Some epidemiologists project that unless there is a substantial change in smoking uptake and rates across the world, there could be as many as one billion smoking-related deaths in the 21st century.In the 20th century, most of these occurred in today’s high-income countries. In the 21st century, most will come from low- and middle-income countries.Many of the people who are expected to die are smoking today, but even more are expected to be future smokers. Finding ways to help people stop smoking and prevent them from starting matters for keeping this huge figure in the millions, not billions.People often ask whether vaping is safer than smoking. I tackled this question in a recent article — the short answer is “yes”.

Just a decade ago, almost three times as much electricity in the European Union was coming from fossil fuels as from solar and wind.But last year, for the first time, solar and wind produced more than coal, gas, and oil combined. They accounted for just over 30% of total electricity production.You can see this rise of solar and wind — and fossil fuels’ decline — in the chart.This record happened despite a poor year for wind output due to low wind speeds and a slight increase in gas to compensate for lower hydropower output from dry conditions.Explore more data for specific European countries based on the latest update from Ember.

Forty years ago in Japan, two babies were born for every person who died. Twenty years ago, these numbers were equal. And today, the ratio has reversed: one baby is born for every two people who die.In the chart, you can see this change in the number of births and deaths over time.Since deaths now greatly outnumber births, and because immigration is low, Japan’s population has started to shrink.See which other countries now have more people dying than being born.