While the retail market value of breakfast cereal has risen from $11.5 billion in 2020 to $12.6 billion in 2026, that's mainly driven by higher prices, as the actual volume of cereal consumed in the United States is down over the period. The total market volume of cereal dropped from 2.2 billion kilograms in 2020 to 1....

In the middle of the 20th century, the contiguous 48 U.S. states were home to 1,453 glaciers that covered 562 square kilometers across six Western states. As of today, that total area has shrunk by 35 percent, and over that time, 398 glaciers that had been cataloged in the original assessments disappeared. That doesn't...

For years, tech companies worked to get their products into school districts, and while a cohort of educators and parents bristled at the educational impact of making all cognition digital, the tech crowd mostly won the argument, with things like the PSAT now entirely online. Well, there's been a bit of a recent retrea...

New data from market research firm EDITED indicates that we are in the twilight of the dominion of the sneaker, as other shoe styles begin to supplant sports footwear in day-to-day usage. Sneakers have been on a tear lately - they rose from 37 percent of the global market in 2012 to 50 percent in 2024 - but other more ...

A pumpkin in Rhode Island is awaiting the final sign-off from the people at Guinness, but it appears to have set the world record for heaviest pumpkin. The current record-holder is a 2,857-pound (1,296-kg) pumpkin grown in Lymington, England that was set only a week ago on October 3; the new contender for the record we...

California's wineries are struggling with a glut of wine and awful margins, as the region produces too much product and the world drinks too little of it. Some vintners are switching things up and ripping out vines to plant alternative crops, among them agave, the succulent that constitutes the key ingredient in tequil...

In Walmart's perfect world, workers wouldn't have to touch a product until it arrived at the store, perfectly organized on the pallet and ready to be placed directly on the shelf. But in the real world, the robots they've hired can't lift the big bags of dog food. A new report from the Wall Street Journal shows the ret...

The handheld smart camera market in the United States was essentially invented by American company GoPro, but competition from two Chinese rivals in particular obliterated its market share to just three percent globally. Those rivals - DJI, with 73 percent of the market, and Insta360, at 20 percent - are themselves at ...

A new survey from YouGov found that the median household in America owns two televisions. Overall, 14 percent of respondents said that there was no television in their home, 22 percent said there was one and 25 percent said there were two. On the upper end, four percent of respondents indicated there were six or more t...

According to the Marine Minerals Administration, 62.9 percent of daily offshore oil production - 1.28 million barrels per day - has been shut down due to Hurricane Isaias, which frankly could not have happened at a more ideal time. Also, 57.4 percent of daily output (1.13 billion cubic feet per day) of natural gas prod...

A new survey found that people have turned from the Old Ways and are simply not in the spirit of Halloween. Sure, some people will observe the more casual fall activities, with 47 percent saying they plan to watch a scary movie, and 43 percent will display Halloween decorations, but the holiday has been just so commerc...

In the Moneyball era of baseball, an axiom of the optimized analytics of baseball was that bunting was for suckers, and that in general, teams should not bunt because trading an out (valuable) for a base advancement (less valuable) in the aggregate sufficiently reduces scoring. This has made bunting - and those skilled...

New studies raise questions about the accuracy and efficacy of various different types of evidence used by forensic experts in criminal investigations. Scientific analysis of ballistics evidence produces considerably higher error rates than one might otherwise accept; in practical testing, examiners misidentified bulle...

A new study published in the journal Evolution looks at the loudest birds in the world, all of which live in Brazil. In 2019, one of the authors measured the white bellbird at 125 decibels, with a voice that sounds like a smoke detector bleating at the sonic intensity of a jackhammer. Enchanting. The new study collecte...

The annual QSR Drive-Thru report is out, and the average drive-thru in the study took 323.9 seconds to serve a car. The best performers were Tim Hortons (260 seconds), KFC (265 seconds) and Dunkin' (289 seconds). The slowest were Raising Cane's (380 seconds), Dutch Bros (382 seconds) and Chick-fil-A (426 seconds), thou...

It can sometimes seem like there are dozens of streaming services vying for your subscription dollar, but that's not entirely right. There are, in fact, hundreds. Parks Associates tracks 370 streamers in the United States and 234 in Canada, and based on their data, once you separate out the various spinoff or subsidiar...

In 2025, credit cards made up 34 percent of payments, followed by debit cards at 31 percent, and cash at 14 percent. That is a significant realignment from 2015, when cash was king and made up a third of all payments, followed by debit cards (29 percent) and credit cards (18 percent). Part of this shift is the rise of ...

The traditional cable bundle has dropped to include just 31 percent of national households, with subscriptions to cable appearing in 40.1 million households. In the past five years, 31 million customers have dropped their cable, satellite or television providers, a 44 percent decline. As recently as the second quarter ...

Major League Baseball notched a record high for fastball speed, with batting averages remaining near all-time lows. Four-seam fastball speed averaged 94.8 miles per hour this past season, up from 91.9 miles per hour when tracking began in 2008. This year, there were a record 5,687 pitches that came in at 100 miles per ...

The price of a barrel of jet fuel cost $99 on February 27, the day before the United States' war with Iran began, a price that doubled to $209 by April and has since settled at around $195 per barrel in mid-September. That in turn has led to a surge in airfare prices that have remained stubbornly high even as the price...