The average person today can expect to live far longer than someone born in 1960, regardless of where they live.
This chart, via Visual Capitalist's Bruno Venditti, tracks life expectancy at birth across four World Bank income groups. While high-income countries still have the longest lifespans, the biggest gains have come elsewhere. Upper-middle income countries have added more than three decades to life expectancy, while low-income countries have made substantial progress as well.
The data for this visualization comes from World Bank via FRED. It tracks life expectancy at birth by income group from 1960 to the latest available data (2024).
High-Income Countries Still LeadHigh-income countries still have the highest life expectancy, reaching 80.3 years in 2024.
That is up from 68.3 years in 1960, a gain of 12 years. These countries started from a much higher baseline, meaning their gains have been slower but still substantial.
Examples include the U.S., Germany, and Japan.
Upper-Middle Income Countries Saw the Fastest Gains
Upper-middle income countries posted the largest increase, rising from 41.9 years in 1960 to 76.3 years.
That is a gain of 34.4 years, the fastest improvement of any group in the dataset. This category includes countries such as China, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa.
Much of this improvement coincided with rising incomes, better sanitation, expanded vaccination programs, lower child mortality, and broader access to healthcare. Together, these changes helped push life expectancy in many middle-income countries toward levels once seen only in the world’s wealthiest economies.
The Global Life Expectancy Gap Has NarrowedIn 1960, people in high-income countries lived about 27 years longer than those in low-income countries.
Today, the gap stands at roughly 16 years. While a significant difference remains, low-income countries have added more than 23 years to average life expectancy since 1960. In other words, much of the world’s longevity progress has come from countries that started furthest behind.
However, the remaining gap shows that income, healthcare access, and living conditions continue to shape longevity worldwide.
If you enjoyed today’s post, check out Ranked: Countries With the Most Ultra-Rich Residents in 2026 on Voronoi.
Tyler Durden Mon, 06/15/2026 - 19:40
Authored by Howard Armitage via New Atlas,
When my neighbor wanted a vision of what his fence could look like, I didn't hesitate to ask ChatGPT to create a mock-up. I took a photo of the fence and asked it to overlay a potted Jasmin espaliered to it, after a couple of tweaks, and all of about one minute later, it gave me this:
AI-generated mock-up created from the author’s original fence photographDuring a recent conversation with a diving buddy, he pulled out his phone mid conversation and said "Hey Grok, show me that dive computer we were talking about this morning." And yes, it's $580 worth of gorgeous.
Its translation abilities are spectacular, and occasionally hilarious. It really is the Babel fish. Not that long ago I moved to a bank simply because it supported Apple Pay years before the big players. At that time, paying with just the tap of a wrist always garnered astonishment and commentary. Around the same time, voice assistants started crossing the line from novelty to genuinely useful. Set a timer, make an appointment, play some music. Super!
"Alexa, turn the kitchen light on." Light comes on. "No, turn it off." "There is no device called 'it' to turn off." Oof!
No memory, no context.
Enter Nabu (yes I know, I haven't got round to changing the wakeword name yet). Naby knows it turned the kitchen light on, and knows I was referring to the kitchen light when I said "turn it off." It remembers, it has context, because it's not just a dumb voice assistant anymore, it is plumbed into my local AI.
The big commercial AI platforms can be connected to these systems, but running it locally means the data stays within the boundaries of my house. It won't process that mountain of documents or win that tricky legal case yet, but it can keep track of the state of my home and understand what I mean when I speak naturally.
That's a big deal - because now I don't have to write and memorize tiresome automations for rigid pre-programmed commands, I can converse with Nabu in human and it understands "all the lights" or "just the downstairs aircons."
Only five years ago, running an AI model at home was a ridiculous proposition - you'd need datacenter hardware and a tech-bro budget. Now, it's dramatically cheaper and easier - with consumer GPUs, mini PCs, Ollama and Hugging Face, technically curious people are quietly building surprisingly capable AI systems at home. The GPU that I can hold in my hands doesn't compete with a datacenter the size of several football fields - but for my homelab tinkerings, it's surprisingly capable, and is only becoming more so.
I should probably backtrack a little here - I'm enthusing about Home Assistant, which I've been running for about 12 years - originally on a Raspberry Pi, now in a VM on ProxmoxVE. Sensors and controllers are scattered all over the house, with a dashboard in a browser acting as mission control. Lights automated with timers and presence detectors. Sun elevation adjusts blinds, curtains react to sunrise and sunset, and moisture sensors trigger irrigation on demand. Solar and battery systems respond to dynamic electricity pricing, buying and selling power depending on what the grid is doing.
Home Assistant proclaimed 2023 to be the Year of the Voice and duly launched a prototype Voice Assistant. At launch, its capabilities were limited. Today, it is genuinely good at a variety of tasks, and it's all open source so you can build your own device from very inexpensive hardware, and the software is on GitHub.
Local models - Llama, Gemma, Mistral, Qwen - very much lag behind the giant commercial systems, but for experimentation, home automation, and general day-to-day interaction, they're becoming more and more usable. I personally care about data sovereignty (a huge topic in its own right), so running a local AI grants me a more privacy-conscious workflow, and it still works when the internet doesn't.
Quite how many months of commercial AI subscriptions I could have got for the price of my GPU is a question I'm deliberately avoiding, predominantly for marital reasons. I rather think of myself as a data nerd. All those sensors collecting all that data in a "If this, then that" environment makes for endless tinkering possibilities. And with an AI-powered Nabu gradually replacing Alexa, my office edges ever closer to Tony Stark's lair. We're no longer at "deploying Kubernetes clusters" level of difficulty, but it's still very much a tinkerer’s space rather than a mainstream consumer appliance. Even so, it feels like a taste of where we're heading.
The strange thing is how quickly this all stops feeling strange. Talking naturally to an AI that understands context, remembers previous conversations and controls my house may have garnered astonishment and commentary. Now, it's just another thing sitting quietly in my server rack.
Home Assistant acting as “mission control” for lighting, climate and automation around the author’s home Howard Armitage Tyler Durden Mon, 06/15/2026 - 19:15More than three years after adopting test-optional admissions, Columbia University is reversing course and will once again require standardized test scores from prospective students.
Columbia announced on June 13 that, beginning in fall 2027, first-year and transfer applicants will have to submit either SAT or ACT scores to be considered for admission. The university will remain test-optional for the upcoming 2026–27 admissions cycle.
University officials said the decision follows a “multiyear faculty review” that found “test scores, among other factors, were a useful indicator of potential student success.”
“Standardized testing is one of many elements that can demonstrate a foundation of academic excellence; others include your performance in your secondary school coursework and the rigor of your curriculum,” the university stated on a webpage outlining its new policy.
As Bill Pan reports for The Epoch Times, Columbia was among the first elite universities to suspend testing requirements during the COVID-19 pandemic, when widespread school closures and testing disruptions limited students’ access to the SAT and ACT. In 2023, the university extended its test-optional policy indefinitely, becoming the first Ivy League institution to make the change permanent.
It was also the last of the eight Ivy League schools to maintain a test-optional admissions policy.
Princeton University reinstated standardized testing requirements in October 2025, leaving Columbia as the sole Ivy League holdout.
The debate over standardized testing has intensified in recent years as some of the nation’s most selective institutions have restored testing requirements. Like Columbia and Princeton, many of those schools have cited internal data showing that test scores are a strong predictor of academic performance and graduation outcomes.
When Princeton announced its decision, university officials said data collected during five years of test-optional admissions showed that “academic performance at Princeton was stronger for students who chose to submit test scores than for students who did not.”
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which reinstated its testing requirement in 2022, also said that considering SAT and ACT scores—particularly math scores—“significantly improves” its ability to predict whether applicants will succeed in the institute’s highly demanding mathematics and math-based science courses.
Critics of standardized testing, however, argue that emphasizing those scores may disadvantage students from low-income and historically underrepresented backgrounds who lack access to expensive tutoring, test-preparation courses, and other educational resources.
Columbia’s move also comes amid renewed interest in standardized testing from the Trump administration.
Administration officials have argued that test-optional admissions policies allow colleges to rely more heavily on subjective criteria, such as personal statements, potentially serving as illegal proxies for race in admissions decisions, a practice the U.S. Supreme Court has declared unconstitutional.
“The persistent lack of available data—paired with the rampant use of ‘diversity statements’ and other overt and hidden racial proxies—continues to raise concerns about whether race is actually used in admissions decisions in practice,” President Donald Trump wrote in an August 2025 memorandum to the secretary of education.
In a proposed compact offered to nine institutions in exchange for preferential access to certain federal funding opportunities, the Trump administration also demanded that they require standardized test scores as part of the admissions process.
The proposal further urged schools to publicly release anonymized admissions data, including applicants’ GPAs, standardized test scores, and other academic measures, broken down by race, national origin, and sex.
Despite the revival of testing requirements at some elite institutions, test-optional admissions remain widespread nationwide.
According to FairTest, an advocacy group opposing the use of standardized testing in college admissions, more than 90 percent of ranked four-year colleges and universities in the United States will not require applicants to submit SAT or ACT scores for fall 2026 admissions. The organization’s survey covered approximately 2,000 four-year institutions.
Tyler Durden Mon, 06/15/2026 - 18:50