US astronaut Christina Koch landed in Kazakhstan recently after spending 328 days in space, the longest continuous spaceflight by a female  astronaut. The following infographic shows 10 of the longest spaceflights made by astronauts including Christina:

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Source: RFE/RL

The US FDA approved 42 novel drugs in 2019. This was down from 59 approved in 2018. Swiss pharma giant (NVS) was the only company with four drugs approved. The complete list of drugs approved by the FDA in 2019 are shown in the table below:

Source: FDA

For more details you can visit the FDA site.

Disclosure: No Positions

Health care in the US is a cruel joke. Among the developed countries, the health care “system” is the worst in the world in terms of pretty much everything from spending to outcomes. One can easily write a voluminous book on the reasons for this disaster that all of us have to deal with. Too many cooks each with its own agenda leads to high cost and not so much improvement in the all important outcome for the patient.

It is possible to get a $0.99 burger anytime in one of the fast joints in the nation. However if one falls sick after eating this and checks into a hospital, he/she can end up paying hundreds even with insurance. One factor that causes health care costs to skyrocket each year is that the supply of doctors are highly restricted. The demand for health care is high but the supply is limited by the American Medical Association. As the number of doctors available is restricted the price of existing doctors goes up naturally for their services. The population of the country increases year after year due to both legal and illegal immigrants. However the number of doctors does not rise accordingly. No wonder the population is forced to deal with physician shortage on a permanent basis.

The following chart shows Doctors per capita in the OECD countries based on 2018 data from a recent research report. The US has the lowest number at just 2.6 doctors per 1,000 people. Norway has the highest at about double that of the US rate.

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Source: U.S. Health Care from a Global Perspective, 2019: Higher Spending, Worse Outcomes? by Roosa Tikkanen and Melinda K. Abrams, The Commonwealth Fund

From the report:

Despite having the highest level of health care spending, Americans had fewer physician visits than their peers in most countries. At four visits per capita per year, Americans visit the doctor at half the rate as do Germans and the Dutch. The U.S. rate was comparable to that in New Zealand, Switzerland, and Norway, but higher than in Sweden.

Less-frequent physician visits may be related to the low supply of physicians in the U.S. compared with the other countries. The U.S. has slightly more than half as many physicians as Norway, which has the highest supply.

The economic consequence of this cartel-like behavior of restricting doctors supply is huge. For instance, millions of productive hours are wasted by workers trying to get an appointment with doctors and then sitting in the doctor’s office for hours waiting for these god-like humans to see the patient. The moral consequences cannot be estimated as millions of Americans skip necessary doctor visits and some even perish due to lack of access to doctors or healthcare. But then again does anyone really care about morality anymore ?

Tourism is an important industry in many countries of the world. The industry accounts for billions of dollars in economic activity and millions of jobs around the world. In some of the small countries such as those in the Caribbean, tourism is the main industry that the country’s economy depends on. Below are some of the fascinating facts related to the economic impacts of Global Tourism:

• Tourism accounted for 10.4% of global GDP in 2018 (i.e. US $ 8.8 Trillion)
• One in ten all jobs are related to the industry
• 1/5 of all new jobs created in the last five years are in Tourism
• In 2018, after manufacturing tourism was the second growing sector

Source: TRAVEL & TOURISM ECONOMIC IMPACT 2019 WORLD, World Travel & Tourism Council

Countries that ignore tourism as an industry lose substantial revenue.

With that said, the below infographic shows the fastest-growing tourism destinations based on 2019 data:

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Source: RFE/RL

Data is being created at an astonishing rate today.From Youtube to Twitter to everything in between, billions of people around the world are creating content every day. The dramatic growth in social media in recent years has led to the creation of even more data, For example, millions of videos are uploaded onto Youtube, Facebook, etc. every day. According to one IBM report in 2016, the size of the digital universe may reach a Brontobyte in the coming decade.

How big is a Brontobyte? The following chart shows the answer:

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Source: What’s causing the exponential growth of data? by Timoth Greaton, Nikko Asset Management

From the above article:

One of the most interesting statistics about the increasing volume of data appeared in a 2016 IBM report “10 Key Marketing Trends For 2017”, which outlined that 90% of all worldwide data at that time was created in the preceding two years, when 2.5 quintillion bytes of data was created per day. With data volume around the world still growing at an immense pace, it could be a matter of time before the global datasphere reaches a brontobyte (approximately 1,024 yottabytes) in the coming decade (Chart 3).

An interesting question to think about is this: Has the exponential growth of data made people smarter or dumber? Or to put differently, has social media made people more intelligent, educated, cultured and responsible citizens (or) has it made them dumb, foolish and mindless zombies cocooned into their own little world?