Precious metals are rare, exceptionally valuable metals that our planet naturally provides. Precious metals include gold, silver, platinum, and palladium. While gold has a reputation for being the quintessential symbol of wealth, status, and exclusivity, platinum and palladium are actually fifteen times more rare than gold. All of these precious metals offer crucial applications beyond jewelry and décor; they are used in nearly every industry, including medicine, dentistry, aerospace, automotive, and manufacturing. In fact, 11% of all gold produced is used in industry. We rely extensively on heavy metals and the countries that produce them.
Precious metals are rare, exceptionally valuable metals that our planet naturally provides. Precious metals include gold, silver, platinum, and palladium. While gold has a reputation for being the quintessential symbol of wealth, status, and exclusivity, platinum and palladium are actually fifteen times more rare than gold. All of these precious metals offer crucial applications beyond jewelry and décor; they are used in nearly every industry, including medicine, dentistry, aerospace, automotive, and manufacturing. In fact, 11% of all gold produced is used in industry. We rely extensively on heavy metals and the countries that produce them.
Years ago, women from Hong Kong and China used to dominate the list of the richest self-made female billionaires, but due to the ongoing turmoil in Chinese market for many years now, self-made women from Europe and the United States are back on top of the list of females who built their own fortunes. The richest of them was Rafaela Aponte-Diamant of Switzerland, as of June 2. She along with her husband are the founder of a shipping company MSC. They created this company in 1970 and both own a 50 percent stake in it. Their expanding business has given Aponte-Diamant a net worth of more than $28 billion. According to Forbes, she is also the seventh richest woman in the world and its 49th richest person overall.
Steel is an important component of the modern industry and
economy, as it is vital for the construction of automobiles, buildings and many
other infrastructures and appliances that we use in our daily lives.
The Infographic uses data from the World Steel Association to visualize the top steel-producing countries in the world, and highlights China’s rise to the top, as it now makes up more than half of the world’s steel production.
China leads when it comes to clothing exporters from around the world. It has a record of having exported some $176 billion worth of garments in 2021, according to data from the World Trade Organization. China on its own made up a third of global exports that year. Next in the list comes the European Union, with $151 billion in exports. The bloc accounted for 28.1 percent of global figures. When looking at numbers on a country by country basis though, Bangladesh is the world’s second major exporter, having sold $34 billion worth of clothing abroad that year, which equated to just over 6 percent of exports.
Japan and the Netherlands have reportedly agreed for
stricter restrictions on the export of chip manufacturing technology to Chinese
companies.
Companies that are most likely to suffer from the consequences of
the deal include ASML, Nikon, and Tokyo Electron. Bloomberg has reported that
it could take months for Japan and the Netherlands to legalize the agreement.
The restriction follows Joe Biden’s order for the US to restrict chip sales to China, and has been announced in an attempt to reduce China’s access to advanced semiconductors that contributes to its military and artificial intelligence capabilities.
Rare earth elements (REE) are metals that have many uses in
current key technologies, such as cell phone screens, wind turbines and even
are used for electric motors. As the infographic shows, any one in need any of
the 17 chemical elements will have a tough job sourcing them from anywhere but
China. The People's Republic of China has the world's largest reserves of these
not so rare metals.
We use cotton in our everyday lives. From clothes to coffee
strainers, cotton is used everywhere. One more cotton product that was widely
used after the spread of Covid-19 is a mask.
Cotton is the most used natural fiber and it has now become
the most important non-food agricultural product. At present, nearly half of
all fabrics need cotton fibers.
Using data from the United States Department of Agriculture,
this infographic lists top cotton producers from all around the world
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has recently issued a ban on some of China’s leading surveillance and telecom services, including Huawei, ZTE Corp, Dahua, Hytera, and Hikvision among others, that can no longer sell their telecom and video surveillance equipment the US.
While many are deeming the FCC’s decision as controversial, the agency has claimed that the attempts are in the country’s best interests in terms of national security.
Becoming an astronaut was a dream of many young children but it appears that this profession has lost some of its glamour, at least in the United Kingdom and the United States. Children in these regions are more interested in becoming a social media influencer rather than jetting off into space. Chinese children have opposite views, more than half (56 percent) of 8 to 12-year-olds said that they would most like to become an astronaut when they grow up and only 18 percent said they would become an influencer.
The infographic has the responses of nearly 3,000 children
who were asked which profession they are most drawn to. The options given were:
influencer/YouTuber, astronaut, teacher, professional athlete and a musician, as
part of a 2019 study by The Harris Poll and Lego Group. They could choose up to
three options.
To understand size of the economy and overall wealth, the
most common method used is by calculating GDP. Although it is useful to look at
economic output on an annual basis, there are other important metrics to
consider when estimating the wealth of a nation.
Household wealth statistics reveal which country’s citizens
are accruing the utmost level of money and assets worldwide.
This visual utilizes data from Credit Suisse’s annual Global
Wealth Report to break down the latest estimates for household wealth by
country.
This is a quite surprising fact that the global urban population has taken over the rural population. According to the records of the year 2007, the two groups were split nearly 50/50, with around 3.3 billion people apiece. In today’s date, the percentage of people who live in the urban areas has grown to be over 55% and is expected to reach 68% by the year 2050. It is because of this trend that many of the world’s largest cities have become home to millions of people.
Due to this increasing density in the urban areas, different
businesses, households and also governments have installed numerous security
cameras which could serve many purposes but the mainly being crime protection.
To get a hold of the scale of this surveillance, data from a recent report by
Comparitech is taken which helps to visualize the most surveilled cities in the
world.
Human beings in different ways have always harmed and
polluted the land but, it turns out that it is not just the land that is being
damaged, the space is also being polluted now. Uncountable pieces of debris
that comes from broken down satellites, rocket boosters and weapon tests that
have been launched over the past years have now gotten stuck in orbit. Due to
this, there is clutter in the orbit which is a problem for the active
satellites needed now for monitoring the Earth. The other harm is that there is
a release of harmful chemicals into the atmosphere as they burn up on re-entry,
using up the ozone layer, as well as potentially creating problems for future
launches and space exploration.



