54 percent
Fwd.us, the techie nonprofit organization lobbying for increasing immigration of highly educated people into the U.S., raised about $37 million in its first year of operation. More than half of that —$20 million — was from Fwd.us co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, who also is the principal founder of Facebook. [The Center for Public Integrity]
664th
The ranking on Wednesday of the new music streaming app Tidal in the iPhone app store, down from 23rd last month. Jay Z’s service, which had challenges from the start, has dropped on the chart as its rivals surge toward the top. [BGR]
$25,000
The amount Floyd Mayweather paid a dentist for about 20 custom mouthguards. Mayweather will fight Manny Pacquaio next week in Las Vegas. [
Grantland]
100,000
One well-known biohacker’s estimate for the number of biohackers worldwide. Biohackers seek to take control of and improve their
biochemistry, their bodies and their minds, according to this well-known biohacker’s website. His estimate should be taken with a grain of salt — or pat of butter, as he takes his coffee — since he’s trying to make a bunch of money selling supplements to biohackers. But he also came up with “bulletproof coffee,” so he’s all right in my book. One night in college I tried to use
a dumb party game that shocks you in order to stay awake studying, and while that was an awful idea that completely failed, that night was also when I decided to count myself in the noble club of biohackers. [
Bloomberg]
3 million
The number of fake condoms seized by Shanghai police. There might have been toxic metals in them, maybe lead. Not a great situation all around. [
Daily Mail]
More than 8 million
The Internal Revenue Service gets a lot of phone calls around tax time, but doesn’t have the resources to answer them all. As a result, this past tax season the agency’s phone system hung up on more than 8 million calls. [
AP]
100 million
Facebook’s WhatsApp, an app that facilitates international messaging, is growing fast. The app has more than 800 million monthly active users, an increase of 100 million from four months ago. [
Business Insider]
15 billion years
Throw out your Apple Watches; they can’t compete with strontium. Scientists from the
National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado, Boulder, have built an atomic clock that uses the alkaline earth metal strontium to keep time. It’s so precise, it won’t gain or lose a second for 15 billion years. Shame they came out with it a year after we realized that time is just a construct — a flat circle, really. [Los Angeles Times]
$22.98 trillion
That’s an economist’s estimate for the worth of the
1.89 billion acres of land in the continental United States. [
The Wall Street Journal]
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