Hello! Congrats to everyone in South Korea who got "1 year younger" on Wednesday, after the government ended the traditional practice of considering newborns to be 1 year old when they are born. Today's charts explore:
No way to sugarcoat it
This morning brought bad news for our moderately Diet-Coke addicted editor, as the World Health Organization is set to label Aspartame — an artificial sweetener found in many diet sodas, chewing gum and many other products — as “possibly carcinogenic to humans”.
The report could prove controversial. Aspartame has been approved for consumption in the US since 1974, originally for use as a tabletop sweetener, before finding its way into many diet drinks as America began to watch its consumption of sugar.
Indeed — perhaps surprisingly — Americans have been cutting down on their sugar intake for the last 20 years. Data from the USDA reveals that per-capita consumption of sugar peaked in 1999, following the boom in high-fructose corn syrups, and has fallen ~17% since.
Make it til you fake it
The soaring use of Aspartame and other artificial sweeteners is easy to understand — the Food & Drug Administration estimates that Aspartame is roughly 200 times sweeter than table sugar. Other products are even sweeter. Sucralose, the non-nutritive sweetener found in Splenda, is estimated to be 600 times sweeter than table sugar.
The FDA’s definition of what’s a safe and acceptable daily limit for artificial sweeteners is high. According to their guidelines, an adult weighing 150 pounds would have to consume around 18 cans of zero-sugar soda a day to experience severe negative health effects.
BlackBerry surprised investors on Wednesday, announcing a recent quarter of profitability. But it wasn’t because of a sudden surge of phone sales inspired by the recent movie about the company. Instead it was because of a complex sale of non-core patents, netting the company some ~$218m, helping the company add to its cash reserves.
Nostalgia calling
The first device to hold the BlackBerry name came out in 1999 — a ground-breaking two-way pager capable of delivering email across multiple wireless networks. That focus on email and its workplace functionality drove the company to new heights throughout the early 2000s, with sales peaking in 2011, just as the iPhone and other touchscreen devices were going mainstream.
But sticking to the corporate market was also BlackBerry's undoing. A fractured leadership and a too-late foray into tablets and touchscreen phones (like the BlackBerry Storm) was ill-fated, and the rise of the open Android ecosystem saw the company lose ground quickly, as developers built apps for rivals. In the coming years the clickity-clack of the iconic tiny keyboards slowly faded — despite some power users, including former President Obama, clinging dearly to their BlackBerry’s.
The security switch
As businesses and governments favored BlackBerry phones for their security features, the company realized that selling this underlying software, instead of the hardware, could be a viable parachute strategy for the ailing company. The shift clearly didn’t restore revenue to its peak, its most recent sales amounted to just 3% of that high, but it did ensure the survival of the company.
Today, Blackberry's IoT (Internet of Things) business provides software into over 235 million vehicles for various functions, ranging from driver assistance to infotainment systems, while the company’s cybersecurity solutions are used by numerous mobile banking websites.
Knot yet
The latest data from Pew Research out this week reveals that an astonishing 25% of 40 year olds in the US have never been married, marking a record high share. In 2010, the corresponding figure was 20%, and if we go back to 1980, just 6% of 40 year olds had yet to tie the knot.
The data fits with the longer term trend in marriage — people have been getting married at a lower rate and generally later in their lives. Indeed, the typical age for men to say "I do" was just over 30, while women typically married a few months after their 28th birthday, according to the US Census Bureau. Both these ages have increased by around 5 years since the turn of the century. In 2000 the median age for men and women to get married was 26.8 and 25.1, respectively, and if you go back to the 1950s, women were typically getting married just after they turned 20.
Emerging adult
Exploring why marriage is increasingly put off is a complicated social question, but access to higher education has certainly played its part. With more people studying, the percentage of 21 year olds with full-time jobs has dwindled from 64% in 1980 to 39% in 2021, according to Pew Research.
Another explanation is that a new life stage "emerging adulthood" — when individuals are studying, leaving home for the first time, exploring their identity, travelling or just embarking on their careers — has gotten longer.
Shifting cultural norms around living with partners, increased economic independence for women, changing work patterns, a rise in the number of people who consider themselves "religiously unaffiliated" and an increase in the number of people living alone have also all contributed to the trend.
• Red wine sales within France have halved since the 1990s, according to the latest figures from the AAWE.
• YouTube is keen not to be denied its advertising revenue, as the video platform experiments with cutting off access for people using an ad blocker.
• An Italian teacher who was fired for being absent from work for 20 years has vowed to defend herself, condemning the ruling from Italy's highest court.
• Can you come up with an unbreakable password to beat this (very frustrating) password game?
• AI has imagined what it thinks people from each of the 50 States look like.
Off the charts: Which company were we charting about below? Hint: the company has been caught up in a viral trend on TikTok? [Answers below].
