You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news.
23 points in 27 minutes
Opening night of the official NBA season is still a week away, but Pelicans rookie Zion Williamson is already putting up historic numbers with his preseason performance so far. He’s averaging more than 23 points, six rebounds, and two assists per game in 27 minutes a night over four games. FiveThirtyEight’s Chris Herring points out that “over the past 20 years, no rookie has finished their preseason campaign averaging more than 20 points per game.” The only other players in the league averaging more points per game this preseason are Giannis Antetokounmpo, James Harden and Stephen Curry, and all three are previous MVP winners. [FiveThirtyEight]
75 petabytes
On Tuesday, Amazon announced it had moved its database storage from a competitor, Oracle, to its own AWS services, a migration effort that involved more than 100 consumer services, and “75 petabytes of internal data stored in nearly 7,500 Oracle databases,” the company wrote in its blog post. The move included customer-facing tools like Alexa, Amazon Prime and Twitch, as well as internal ones like AdTech. [TechCrunch]
4-day-old baby girl
A couple in the middle of burying their own child at a cemetery in Northern India were surprised to hear crying noises nearby. They were the sounds of a four-day-old baby girl in an earthen pot. After digging up two to three feet of dirt, the three-pound infant was rescued in the state of Uttar Pradesh and brought to the hospital by a security guard. The child is receiving medical treatment in an intensive care unit for infections and respiratory issues while an investigation has been launched to locate her parents. [CNN]
359 to 114, with 72 abstentions
Single women and lesbians in France are a step closer to accessing fertility treatments after the country’s lower house of parliament approved a new bioethics bill on Tuesday. The new law would fulfill a pledge President Emmanuel Macron made during his 2017 election campaign. National Assembly lawmakers voted 359 to 114, with 72 abstentions. The bill will now go to the Senate in January. [AFP/Straits Times]
13.7 percent decline
International students aren’t as interested in coming to the U.S. for business school as they once were. Experts say changes in U.S. immigration policy, trade and political tensions with China and the growing popularity of technology jobs that don’t require M.B.A. degrees are why international applications fell by 13.7 percent this year. Harvard Business School saw its largest overall drop in applications to its M.B.A. programs since 2005 at 6.7 percent, and the declines were even greater at Northwestern, Yale and Dartmouth, at more than 15 percent. [Wall Street Journal]
17 black female United Airlines pilots
The most recent data from the Federal Aviation Industry shows an extraordinary gender gap persists in who is flying airplanes, with women making up only 7 percent of American pilots. Only a tiny slice of them are black women. Captain Theresa Claiborne, the first African-American pilot in the U.S. Air Force, says at United, where she works, only 900 of the almost 13,000 pilots are women, and only 17 are black women. “Right now we only have two black women captains.” [Bloomberg]