One poll in 2016 found that French people are the most pessimistic on Earth, with 81 % grumbling that the world is getting worse and only 3 % saying that it is getting better.
End-of-life businesses also offer alternatives to costly temple gravestones, such as scattering loved ones' ashes in Tokyo Bay (just don't tell the honeymooners to whom the boat is also offered).
More than 80 % of the candidate drugs that make it into clinical trials because they worked in mice do not go on to work well in humans.
Hospital doctors have far more opportunities to earn substantial kickbacks – try seeing a good specialist in China without offering a fat "red envelope".
Every year 350 tonnes of cigarette butts, the equivalent in weight to two blue whales, are cleared off the streets of Paris alone.
The income-tax code is so knotty that America has as many tax preparers per 1,000 people as Indonesia has doctors.
Diseases compete to kill people as they age; if one does not get you the next will.
Gay men's rate of anal cancer is the same as the rate of cervical cancer for women.
Julius Caesar (at the time in his 50s) swam nearly 300 metres or six lengths of an Olympic pool with his sword and purple cloak clenched between his teeth, apparently holding his official papers dry above his head.
If you had to be reborn anywhere in the world as a person with average talents and income, you would want to be a Viking.
Life's candle burns most brightly when it is about to go out.
90 % of the brain develops between the ages of zero to five, yet we spend 90 % of our dollars on kids above the age of five.
It's a bit like being a doctor in a plague year; you'll be busy for a while, but it doesn't bode well for the long term.
John Graunt tallied causes such as "the King's Evil", a tubercular disease believed to be cured by the monarch's touch.
Many albinos are murdered by people who think that their bones contain gold or have magical powers. Some witchdoctors claim that amulets made from albino bones can cure disease or bring great wealth to those who wear them. Women are at higher risk of rape because of a myth that sex with an albino can cure HIV. A gruesome trade in their body parts has spurred killings in Tanzania, Burundi, Mozambique, Zambia and South Africa.