You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news.
2 hours
Nike has launched a new project, “Breaking2,” and assembled a team of “designers, scientists, coaches, and statisticians” with one goal: get someone to run a marathon’s 26.2 miles in less than two hours. The current record is 2:02:57. The company’s recruited a number of distance runners and plans to hold the record-breaking marathon in the Spring of 2017. [Wired]
16 Republican senators
Have expressed support for investigating alleged Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election. These senators may also make it difficult for Donald Trump’s pick for Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson — the ExxonMobil CEO who has ties to Vladimir Putin — to win Senate confirmation. [FiveThirtyEight]
20 weeks
American Express is drastically expanding its parental leave policy, now offering 20 weeks at full pay for both mothers and fathers. [Fox 6]
54 percent
Percentage of Americans who have heard “nothing at all” about the “alt-right,” the white nationalist movement that gained prominence during Trump’s campaign for the presidency. And 30 percent of people who have heard “a lot” or “a little” about it aren’t sure what it stands for. [The Pew Research Center]
1.25 million
The hottest selling CD of the year is from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who sold 1.25 million CDs in five weeks according to Billboard, blowing away all his younger (and alive) competition. There’s a catch, though: Universal Music Group dropped a box set of Mozart’s complete discography to mark the 225th anniversary of his death, and each of the 200 discs in the set counts as a sale. So only about 6,000 buyers are responsible for Mozart topping the pops. [Quartz]
$1 billion
The Supreme Court on Monday rejected challenges to an NFL plan to pay $1 billion to settle lawsuits related to concussions filed by former players. The plan covers an estimated 20,000 NFL retirees for the next 65 years. [PBS]
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