Skip to main content
ABC News
Significant Digits For Monday, April 13, 2015

You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the telling numbers tucked inside the news. To receive this as an email newsletter, please subscribe. Seriously, clicking on things in order to read them? Yawn. Subscribe.

3 hours

A robot sent into one of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant lasted for three hours, inspecting about two-thirds of what it was supposed to before dying. [Sputnik News]

4 “Game of Thrones” episodes

Season 5 of HBO’s “Game of Thrones” premiered Sunday night, but not before the first four episodes of the season leaked online and were downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. [TorrentFreak]

28 Ebola patients

The U.S. has spent many millions of dollars building Ebola treatment centers in Liberia that haven’t been used; 11 U.S.-built centers have seen 28 patients. [New York Times]

46 banks

The head of the Ukrainian Deposit Insurance Fund said 46 Ukrainian banks have gone bankrupt. The nation’s economy shrank 7.5 percent last year. [Press TV]

54 charged officers

Despite thousands of shootings by police officers since 2005, only 54 officers were ever charged with a crime. [Washington Post]

100 miles per hour

That’s the speed limit the FAA set for Amazon’s delivery drones, which are currently in the testing phase. [Gizmodo]

$1,000 per unit

IKEA is planning to mass produce temporary housing units for use in refugee camps and disaster areas. The shelters each cost $1,000 to make and come with all the tools needed for assembly. [Web Urbanist]

$15,000

That’s the amount of benefits welfare recipients in Australia could lose if they don’t vaccinate their children. The Australian government announced the new “no jab, no pay” policy Sunday. [Sky News]

More than $2 billion

One of the downsides of an actively managed pension fund? Fees. New York City’s pension funds have paid more than $2 billion in management fees over the last 10 years for “virtually nothing in return.” [New York Times]

$2.5 billion

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has formally entered the 2016 presidential race. Her supporters and Super PACs are looking to raise $2.5 billion. [New York Times]

If you haven’t already, you really need to sign up for the Significant Digits newsletter — be the first to learn about the numbers behind the news.

And, as always, if you see a significant digit in the wild, tweet it to me @WaltHickey. Also, subscribe.

Walt Hickey was FiveThirtyEight’s chief culture writer.

Comments