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The 50 Most Important Life-Saving Breakthroughs in History

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The 50 Most Important Life-Saving Breakthroughs in History

The 50 Most Important Life-Saving Breakthroughs in History

For most of civilized history, life expectancy fluctuated in the 30 to 40 year range.

Child mortality was all too common, and even for those that made it to adulthood, a long and healthy life was anything but guaranteed. Sanitation was poor, disease was rampant, and many medical practices were based primarily on superstition or guesswork.

By the 20th century, an explosion in new technologies, treatments, and other science-backed practices helped to increase global life expectancy at an unprecedented rate.

From 1900 to 2015, global life expectancy more than doubled, shooting well past the 70 year mark.

Important Breakthroughs

What were the major innovations that made the last century so very fruitful in saving lives?

Today’s infographic from AperionCare highlights the top 50 breakthroughs, ranging from pasteurization to the bifurcated needle, that have helped propel global life expectancy upwards.

Interestingly, while many of these innovations have some linkage to the medical realm, there are also breakthroughs in sectors like energy, sanitation, and agriculture that have helped us lead longer and healthier lives.

To see innovations on an individual basis, AperionCare breaks them down further as follows:

Timeline of innovations affecting life expectancy

The breakthroughs that are credited with saving the most lives?

Toilets, synthetic fertilizers, blood transfusions, the green revolution (also known as the “Third Agricultural Revolution”), and vaccines are each credited with saving 1 billion lives. Meanwhile, pasteurization, water chlorination, antibiotics, antimalarial drugs, and the bifurcated needle have saved hundreds of millions of lives each.

There are also some unusual entries to the list.

It turns out that satellites have actually saved 250,000 lives, thanks to the ability to better forecast natural disasters. Nuclear power also gets a shout out – and it may surprise some people that nuclear energy is the least deadly form of energy per kilowatt generated.

Progress in Life Expectancy

For a graphical look at how this all has impacted life expectancy, the following chart from Our World in Data makes a very clear case:

Life Expectancy graph

The impact from these new technologies was first experienced in Europe at the end of the 1800s – and other continents quickly saw the benefits thereafter.

Impressively, Africa has now passed the 60 year mark in life expectancy, with numbers still rising.

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The World’s Biggest Cloud Computing Service Providers

Cloud computing service providers generated $270 billion in revenues last year, concentrated among a few giants.

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This tree map shows the biggest cloud computing service providers globally by market share.

The World’s Biggest Cloud Computing Service Providers

This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.

Today, the three largest cloud computing service providers command 66% of the global market.

Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have generated billions in revenues through their cloud infrastructure that provide the computing power companies need to store data. What’s more, most AI models are run on the cloud, creating a surge in computing demand for cloud providers.

The above graphic shows the largest cloud providers globally, based on data from Synergy Research Group.

Breaking Down the Cloud Market

Here are the world’s top cloud computing service providers based on enterprise revenues as of the fourth quarter of 2023:

ProviderCountryMarket Share Q4 2023
Amazon Web Services🇺🇸 U.S.31%
Microsoft Azure🇺🇸 U.S.24%
Google Cloud🇺🇸 U.S.11%
Alibaba Cloud🇨🇳 China4%
Salesforce🇺🇸 U.S.3%
IBM Cloud🇺🇸 U.S.2%
Oracle🇺🇸 U.S.2%
Tencent Cloud🇨🇳 China2%
Other🌐 Other21%

With 31% of the global market share, Amazon’s cloud division posted $24.2 billion in revenues over the quarter.

AWS is a major cash engine for the company, but growth slowed over 2023 as enterprises and startups cut back on tech spending. Annual sales growth compared to the same quarter last year grew by 13%—far below competitors Microsoft and Google, whose cloud divisions grew by 30% and 26%, respectively.

As we can see, U.S. firms make up the lion’s share of the market, while China’s Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud together comprise 5% of the global share.

The AI Boom and the Cloud

Given that a significant chunk of AI models are run on the cloud, the industry may be positioned to see greater demand as momentum accelerates.

In fact, newer AI systems are as much as 10 to 100 times larger than older models. In line with this, major cloud providers are seeing high demand for cloud services to allow companies across financial to manufacturing sectors to run large language models on their platforms.

Today, 98% of companies globally rely on the cloud for at least one part of their business applications, which may present a market opportunity for the industry as advancements in AI continue to grow.

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