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Plot Twist Daily

@plot-twist-daily.bsky.social
109 followers 263 following 516 posts

Daily plot twists from real data: tech & AI, money, science, history. Myth-busting facts, sourced and chart-backed. The numbers usually tell a better story than the headline.

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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 19h
Work began on 9 August 1173. By 1178, three of eight storeys up, the south side was already sinking into soft ground, and building stopped for almost a century while the soil settled. Later floors were curved to compensate. The bell chamber went on in 1372: 194 years into its... #history #histodons
Timeline showing Pisa tower construction beginning in 1173, the lean appearing in 1178 at three storeys, and the bell chamber completed in 1372, 194 years later.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
The Yale Bright Star Catalogue lists every star brighter than magnitude 6.5, the naked-eye limit: 9,096 across the entire sky. Only half the sky is above the horizon at once, so a perfect dark night offers about 4,500 - a city night, a few hundred. Nobody has ever seen millions. #science #SciComm
Two bars: the popular guess of millions of visible stars versus 9,096 naked-eye stars in the entire sky per the Yale Bright Star Catalogue.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
O.C. Marsh named Brontosaurus excelsus in 1879. In 1903 Elmer Riggs folded it into Apatosaurus, and for a century every well-read child knew it was a mistake. A 2015 specimen-by-specimen study of the diplodocids in PeerJ found differences large enough to restore the genus. It... #science #SciComm
Timeline showing Brontosaurus named in 1879, merged into Apatosaurus in 1903, and reinstated as a valid genus in 2015, 112 years later.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
In July 1958 the Office of Naval Research unveiled Frank Rosenblatt's perceptron: a 5-ton IBM 704 that taught itself, after 50 trials, to tell left-marked punch cards from right-marked ones. The New York Times ran "New Navy Device Learns by Doing." ChatGPT arrived 64 years later. #tech #AI
Timeline showing Frank Rosenblatt's perceptron demonstrated in July 1958 and ChatGPT launching in November 2022, 64 years later.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Rome burned in July 64 CE. Bowed string instruments did not reach Europe for almost another thousand years. Tacitus places Nero 35 miles away at Antium when the fire broke out. The fiddle only entered the story in English plays of the 1620s - Shakespeare had given him a lute. #history #histodons
Timeline showing the Great Fire of Rome in 64 CE and bowed string instruments arriving in Europe around 1000 CE, almost a millennium later.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
A 2017 PeerJ study led by William Sellers modelled the loads on a T. rex skeleton and found a true run would have shattered its leg bones. Top speed: about 20 km/h, a brisk walk on very long legs. Usain Bolt peaked at 44.7 km/h. Jurassic Park's Jeep chase was never in danger. #science #SciComm
Two bars: Tyrannosaurus rex top speed of about 20 km/h versus Usain Bolt's peak of 44.7 km/h.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
The International Space Station orbits about 400 km up. NASA puts Earth's gravity there at roughly 90% of its strength on the surface. Astronauts float not because gravity is gone, but because the station is in permanent free fall - falling around the Earth rather than into it. #science #SciComm
Two bars: Earth's gravity at 100% at sea level versus about 90% at the International Space Station's altitude of 400 km.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
On 13 November 1878 Edison wrote that "bugs - as such little faults and difficulties are called" show up in every invention, quoting slang already in use. The Harvard Mark II moth of 1947 was taped into a logbook as the "first actual case of bug being found." It was a joke. #tech #AI
Timeline showing Edison using the word bugs for technical faults in 1878 and the Harvard Mark II moth in 1947, 69 years later.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Bell was granted the telephone patent on 7 March 1876. Ten months later, former samurai in Satsuma rose against the Meiji government under Saigo Takamori. The rebellion lasted six months and ended with his death on 24 September 1877. The samurai era closed in the age of the... #history #histodons
Timeline showing Bell's telephone patent in March 1876, the Satsuma Rebellion beginning in early 1877, and Saigo Takamori's death in September 1877.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
The Natural History Museum lists Velociraptor at 1.8 m long and about 7 kg - a Thanksgiving turkey with a tail. Jurassic Park built it at twice its actual size and modelled it on Deinonychus. Quill knobs found on a fossil in 2007 confirmed it was feathered. #science #SciComm
Two bars: the Jurassic Park Velociraptor at roughly 3.6 metres versus the real animal at 1.8 metres long.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
The full Moon covers about half a degree of sky. The Andromeda Galaxy, 2.5 million light-years away, covers roughly three - six times the Moon's apparent diameter, per NASA. You only see its bright core by eye; the rest is too faint. The biggest object overhead is a galaxy. #science #SciComm
Two bars: the full Moon spans about 0.5 degrees of sky while the Andromeda Galaxy spans roughly 3 degrees.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
The earliest print version of "let them eat brioche" is in Book VI of Rousseau's Confessions, written around 1767, credited to an unnamed "great princess." Marie Antoinette was then 11 and living in Austria. Nothing ties the line to her until more than 50 years after the... #history #histodons
Timeline showing Marie Antoinette born in 1755, Rousseau writing the 'let them eat cake' line around 1767, and her becoming queen in 1774.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
The great coal beds were laid down by swamp forests of the Pennsylvanian, 323 to 299 million years ago. The first definite dinosaurs appear around 233 million years ago - 66 million years after those swamps were buried. Oil is mostly marine plankton. Nothing you burn was a T. rex. #science #SciComm
Timeline showing coal-forming swamps from 323 to 299 million years ago and the first dinosaurs at 233 million years ago, 66 million years later.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Observers in the late 1800s measured Jupiter's Great Red Spot at about 41,000 km across. Voyager found 23,300 km in 1979; Hubble measured 16,500 km in 2014, and the shrink rate had jumped to roughly 930 km a year. The storm that once held three Earths is closing. #science #SciComm
Line chart showing Jupiter's Great Red Spot shrinking from about 41,000 km across in the late 1800s to 16,500 km in 2014.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Shigetaka Kurita drew 176 emoji on a 12-by-12 pixel grid for NTT DoCoMo's mobile internet in 1999 - weather, hearts, a handful of faces. MoMA acquired the set in 2016. Apple did not offer an emoji keyboard outside Japan until iOS 5 in October 2011, twelve years later. #tech #AI
Timeline showing NTT DoCoMo's original emoji set in 1999 and the iPhone's worldwide emoji keyboard in October 2011, 12 years later.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Qin Shi Huang linked the first frontier walls around 221 BCE, but almost none of that rammed earth survives. The stone-and-brick wall in every photograph is the Ming wall, built 1368-1644 - some 8,850 km of it. Most of the Great Wall went up after Columbus sailed. #history #histodons
Timeline showing the first Qin walls in 221 BCE and the Ming Great Wall, the version that survives today, built between 1368 and 1644.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
A 2018 PNAS study by Meyers and Malinverno read 1.4-billion-year-old rock layers like a clock and found a day then lasted just over 18 hours. The Moon was about 44,000 km closer and Earth spun faster. As the Moon drifts outward, it keeps stretching the day. #science #SciComm
Two bars: an Earth day is 24 hours today versus about 18 hours 1.4 billion years ago.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
The IBM Simon went on sale in August 1994: a touchscreen phone with email, a fax modem, apps and a stylus. It sold about 50,000 units and was pulled within six months. The iPhone arrived 13 years later - to a world with the batteries and networks Simon never had. #tech #AI
Timeline showing the IBM Simon smartphone going on sale in 1994 and the iPhone launching in 2007, 13 years later.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
The 1666 fire burned four days, destroyed about 13,200 houses and 87 churches, and left some 100,000 Londoners homeless - yet official records list just six deaths. Historians suspect the true toll was higher and simply went unrecorded. The city burned; the ledger barely... #history #histodons
Two bars: about 13,200 homes destroyed in the Great Fire of London versus six officially recorded deaths.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Herodotus lists roughly 7,000 Greeks at Thermopylae: 300 Spartans plus Thespians, Thebans, Arcadians, Corinthians, Phocians and more. Most were sent away before the final stand, where about 1,400 fought - and 700 Thespians died beside the Spartans, uncredited. #history #histodons
Two bars: the legendary 300 Spartans versus the roughly 7,000 Greeks who actually defended Thermopylae.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Every toy-box scene of dinosaurs in tall grass is wrong. Grasses existed by the late Cretaceous but were rare underbrush; open grasslands only spread in the Miocene, about 20 million years ago - some 46 million years after the last non-avian dinosaur died. #science #SciComm
Timeline showing the last dinosaurs dying 66 million years ago and grasslands spreading about 20 million years ago, 46 million years later.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
The eight-minute figure only covers the last leg. NASA estimates the energy in sunlight spends 10,000 to 170,000 years ricocheting out of the Sun's dense interior before it escapes the surface. The warmth on your skin may predate every human civilization. #science #SciComm
Two bars: sunlight crosses space to Earth in about 8 minutes, but its energy takes on the order of 100,000 years to escape the Sun's interior.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Polaris is famous, not bright. At magnitude 2.0 it ranks about 48th in the night sky; Sirius, at magnitude -1.46, outshines it roughly 25 times over. The North Star earned its job by position - it sits almost directly above Earth's axis - not by wattage. #science #SciComm
Two bars: Sirius appears about 25 times brighter than Polaris, which ranks about 48th in the night sky.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
The Bureau of Transportation Statistics puts the average US domestic air fare in 2024 at 36.2% below 1995 once inflation is removed - about $601 in constant dollars then against $384 now. Ticket prices did rise in raw dollars. The dollar fell faster. #finance #investing
Two bars: the average US domestic air fare was $601 in 1995 in constant dollars versus about $384 in 2024.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
On 29 October 1969 a UCLA student sent the first message over ARPANET; the system crashed after two letters, so it read LO. Berners-Lee's proposal at CERN is dated March 1989. He invented the web - a way of linking documents that runs on top of the internet. #tech #AI
Timeline showing the first ARPANET message in October 1969 and the World Wide Web proposal in March 1989, 20 years apart.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
In 1975 Kodak engineer Steven Sasson built the first digital camera: 0.01 megapixels, eight pounds, 23 seconds to write one black-and-white image to cassette tape. Kodak patented it in 1978. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January 2012. #tech #AI
Timeline showing Kodak building the first digital camera in 1975 and filing for bankruptcy in 2012, 37 years later.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
On 21 August 1911 Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian handyman who had worked at the Louvre, walked out with the Mona Lisa under his coat. Crowds queued to stare at the empty wall. Recovered in Florence two years later, it came back the most famous painting on Earth. #history #histodons
Timeline showing the Mona Lisa painted around 1503 and stolen from the Louvre in 1911, 408 years later.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
The statue is a copper skin, and in 1886 it was dedicated the color of a new penny. Salt air and rain turned that copper first dull brown, then blue-green, as carbonates and sulfates formed. Color images show the transformation complete by about 1920. #history #histodons
Timeline showing the Statue of Liberty dedicated in copper in 1886 and fully green by 1920, 34 years later.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
The first Pony Express rider left St Joseph, Missouri on 3 April 1860, carrying mail 2,000 miles in about ten days. The transcontinental telegraph line was finished on 24 October 1861. The service shut down two days later. Total run: eighteen months. #history #histodons
Timeline showing the Pony Express beginning in April 1860 and ending in October 1861, eighteen months later.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
In 240 BCE Eratosthenes compared midday shadows at Syene and Alexandria and calculated Earth's circumference to within a few percent. Educated Europeans never forgot it. The story of Columbus facing flat-Earth doubters was invented by Washington Irving in 1828. #history #histodons
Timeline showing Eratosthenes measuring Earth's circumference in 240 BCE and Columbus sailing in 1492, 1,732 years later.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Earth formed about 4.54 billion years ago under an atmosphere of carbon dioxide, methane and water vapor. Free oxygen only began building up at the Great Oxidation Event, roughly 2.4 billion years ago. Half of Earth's history was unbreathable. #science #SciComm
Two bars: Earth is 4.54 billion years old but has had oxygen in its atmosphere for only about 2.4 billion years.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
The draft Neanderthal genome, published in Science in 2010 by Svante Paabo's team at the Max Planck Institute, found that up to 2% of the DNA of present-day people outside Africa came from Neanderthals. They did not vanish without trace. They were absorbed. #science #SciComm
Two bars: about 98% of a non-African genome versus up to 2% inherited from Neanderthals.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Birds did not descend from dinosaurs. Birds are dinosaurs - a surviving branch of the theropods, the same group that produced Tyrannosaurus. The non-avian lines died at the end of the Cretaceous. About 11,000 dinosaur species are alive right now. #science #SciComm
Two bars: zero non-avian dinosaur species alive today versus about 11,000 living bird species.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
NASA puts it flatly: the total mass of all the asteroids combined is less than that of Earth's Moon. The standard estimate for the main belt is about 3% of the Moon - and a third of that is Ceres alone. Spacecraft cross it without dodging anything. #science #SciComm
Two bars: the Moon's mass at 100% versus the entire asteroid belt at about 3% of it.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
The Moon sits about 384,400 km away on average. Line up Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune at their widest and they span roughly 380,000 km. The whole rest of the solar system's planets would fit in that gap, with room to spare. #science #SciComm
Two bars: the average Earth-Moon distance of 384,400 km versus the combined 380,000 km width of the seven other planets.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
The Chicxulub asteroid, 66 million years ago, took roughly 76% of species on Earth. The end-Permian event 252 million years ago killed about 96% of marine species and 70% of land vertebrates. Life needed millions of years to rebuild. The dinosaurs got the famous one, not the... #science #SciComm
Two bars: the end-Cretaceous asteroid extinction killed about 76% of species versus 96% of marine species in the end-Permian extinction.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Saturn is 4.5 billion years old. Cassini weighed its rings during 22 dives between planet and rings in 2017, and light rings mean young rings. NASA puts them at 10 to 100 million years old. From Earth's perspective, they may have formed during the age of dinosaurs. #science #SciComm
Two bars: Saturn is about 4,500 million years old while its rings are estimated at 10 to 100 million years.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
NASA puts the Milky Way at 100 to 400 billion stars. A 2015 Nature study led by Thomas Crowther counted 3.04 trillion trees on Earth, built from more than 400,000 ground measurements. Even against the highest star estimate, trees win by more than seven to one. #science #SciComm
Two bars: up to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way versus 3,040 billion trees on Earth.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Britain abolished slavery across most of its empire in 1833 and the United States in 1865. Mauritania, the last country in the world to do so, did not abolish slavery until 1981 - and did not make it a criminal offence until 2007. #history #histodons
Timeline showing abolition in the British Empire in 1833, the United States in 1865, and Mauritania in 1981.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
On December 17, 1903, Orville Wright flew 120 feet in 12 seconds. A Boeing 747-8 has a wingspan of about 225 feet. The entire first flight would not have cleared one modern airliner's wings. Sixty-six years later we landed on the Moon. #history #histodons
Two bars: the Wright brothers' 120-foot first flight versus the 225-foot wingspan of a Boeing 747-8.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Titanic carried 20 lifeboats certified for 1,178 people, against roughly 2,224 aboard. Board of Trade rules, written for far smaller ships, required capacity for about 1,060 - so she exceeded the legal minimum by 17%. The rule was the failure. #history #histodons
Two bars: Titanic had lifeboat seats for 1,178 people and about 2,224 people aboard.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
FAO estimates put managed honey bee colonies at 69.4 million in 1990 and 101.7 million in 2024 - up 47%. Individual hives do die at high rates, and wild pollinators are in real trouble. But the managed honeybee is livestock, and the herd is growing. #science #SciComm
Two bars: 69.4 million managed honey bee colonies worldwide in 1990 versus 101.7 million in 2024.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
NOAA puts it plainly: at least half of the oxygen produced on Earth comes from the ocean, mostly from microscopic phytoplankton. Rainforests consume most of the oxygen they make through respiration and decay. The lungs of the planet are underwater. #science #SciComm
Two bars: the 20% rainforest oxygen claim versus at least 50% of Earth's oxygen produced by the ocean.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
The federal minimum wage rose to $7.25 on July 24, 2009 and has not moved since - 17 years. The previous record freeze ran from January 1981 to April 1990, about nine years. This is the longest gap since the wage was created in 1938. #finance #investing
Two bars: a nine-year freeze from 1981 to 1990 versus the 17-year freeze since 2009.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
BLS tracked every US private-sector establishment born in March 2013: 79.6% were still open a year later, 50.6% after five years, and 34.7% made it a decade. The failure rate is real. It is nowhere near the number everyone repeats. #finance #investing
Two bars: the myth that 90% of businesses fail in year one versus the actual figure of about 20%.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
The UN's Global E-waste Monitor logged 62 million tonnes of electronic waste in 2022 and found only 22.3% was documented as properly collected and recycled. The rest is unaccounted for - along with roughly $62 billion of recoverable metals. #tech #AI
Two bars: 22.3% of 2022 e-waste was documented as properly recycled versus 77.7% unaccounted for.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
ITU counts about 6 billion people online in 2025 - roughly three-quarters of humanity - and 2.2 billion still offline. 96% of those offline live in low- and middle-income countries. The global internet is still missing more than two billion people. #tech #AI
Two bars: about 6 billion people used the internet in 2025 while 2.2 billion remained offline.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
Satellites feel like the natural home of the internet. They are not. FCC data put satellites at just 0.37% of all US international capacity. Nearly everything you send abroad travels as light through fiber-optic cable lying on the ocean floor. #tech #AI
Two bars: undersea fiber carries about 99.6% of US international capacity versus 0.37% for satellites.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
476 CE ended Roman rule in the West. The eastern half, governed from Constantinople, went on calling itself Roman until the Ottomans took the city in 1453 - 977 more years. The empire outlived its own famous ending by nearly a millennium. #history #histodons
Timeline showing the Western Roman Empire falling in 476 CE and Constantinople falling in 1453, 977 years later.
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Plot Twist Daily @plot-twist-daily.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
In 1692 Salem, nineteen people were executed by hanging and one, Giles Corey, was pressed to death under stones. Nobody was burned. Burning was a Continental European practice; English law hanged the people it convicted of witchcraft. #history #histodons
Two bars: nineteen people were hanged in the 1692 Salem witch trials and zero were burned at the stake.
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