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Significant Digits For Friday, Oct. 21, 2016

You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the telling numbers tucked inside the news.


7 months

The Environmental Protection Agency should have issued an emergency order protecting the citizens of Flint, Michigan, seven months earlier then it actually did, the agency’s Inspector General said. The EPA finally issued an order on the city’s lead-tainted water in January 2016. [NPR]


22 percent

Percentage of pro-Clinton Twitter traffic during the first presidential debate that was derived from bots and automated accounts. That might seem like a lot until you learn that bots accounted for 33 percent of pro-Trump’s traffic. [CNN]


60 percent

Percentage of Americans who support legalizing marijuana, a record high according to a Gallup poll. When the question was first broached by Gallup in 1969, 12 percent of Americans were down with the ganj’. Several states are voting on cannabis-related issues this coming Election Day. [PBS]


1996

The Tennessee Valley Authority officially switched on the second reactor at its Watts Bar Nuclear Plant. The reactor, which has been under construction since the seventies, is the first to open in the U.S. since 1996. [CNN]


$3.6 million

Total amount raised on the fundraising site GoFundMe in campaigns aimed at paying for in vitro fertilization treatments. More than 1,700 campaigns have drawn nearly 37,000 individual donations. [Bloomberg]


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Walt Hickey was FiveThirtyEight’s chief culture writer.

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