According to the newly published statistics from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, 11 million people in the United States were displaced due to natural disasters last year. This is the largest number of people of any country; worldwide, 46 million people were displaced internally due to a natural disaster. C...

About 4 million U.S. households own reptiles and amphibians as pets, and between food ($279 million) and supplies ($521 million), the overall market to serve those households has grown to about $800 million. That number is a 60 percent increase from 2019 and is projected to grow further still. Pythons, geckos, even hum...

The route was finished in 2021 & goes from Portugal to Singapore. But no one has ever taken the journey... Here's Why: The world's longest train journey is epic - but nobody's ever taken it.

Exports of green tea from Japan hit 8,798 tonnes last year, 10 times the amount that was internationally shipped 20 years ago. Powdered tea, predominantly matcha, accounted for 58 percent of the total, stoked by high global demand for the green beverage. Tea farmers in the country are reluctant to change business opera...

The Philippines is the second-largest gambling hub in Asia and has undergone a substantial shift in the method of gambling since the spread of phone-based gambling. For the first time, revenue from people gambling on their phones exceeded the revenue from people gambling in casinos, which may be a glimpse of things to ...

A new survey asking Europeans about their capacity to endure an attack found that as we approach V-E day, ultimately, few European countries feel they can defend their country: 16 percent of Germans, 20 percent of Italians, 32 percent of Spaniards, 37 percent of Brits and 44 percent of the French. In contrast, 71 perce...

A new scam takes people looking to obtain cheap health insurance and makes up fake employment for them at companies exempt from the stricter requirements of other firms. The marks are enrolled in a health plan offered by a company with a fake job that pays nothing, a hack that many opponents to the Affordable Care Act ...

Problems with the cocoa supply are feared to be getting worse amid quality control problems in Ivory Coast, which is the main global supplier of cocoa beans. The mid-crop harvest is now underway, a harvest period that tends to produce tinier beans processed locally into cocoa butter, but indications appear that this ha...

Mondelēz has been tweaking its $1 billion Chips Ahoy! brand and plans to continue using the 62-year-old cookie brand to push it past its current situation of being the replacement-level cookie in the aisle. Sure, it's the second-largest cookie brand in the United States, but the company wants to get at the heart of a ...

A new survey found that American attitudes toward tattoos have shifted substantially in the past 10 years. When the same survey was run in 2015, 26 percent of respondents had a very or somewhat favorable view of tattoos, while 40 percent had an unfavorable one, making a net favorability rating of -14 points. This time ...

Word got out about chicken thighs being a more flavorful and cheaper part of the bird, and now thighs and breasts are often comparable in grocery stores. After decades of optimizing this animal to produce large muscles of white meat, it's thigh time. While sales of chicken breast by volume are up 3.9 percent in the pas...

In Japan, steel is now cheaper than water. The average price of a 1-liter bottle of mineral water reaches 156 yen (US$1.09) while the average distribution price for 1.6 millimeter cold-rolled steel sheets comes in at 1441,500 yen per ton, which breaks down to 141.5 yen per kilogram. That is 15 yen cheaper than a kilogr...

While oil companies continue to extract petroleum from the ground, taking a step back, the health of the carbon extraction industry is not particularly strong. Since 2021, the 5 largest independent oil majors (Exxon, Chevron, Shell, BP and Total) have been in the habit of sending more money back to shareholders than th...

Tractor Supply debuted Tractor Supply Rx, a pharmacy service for pets and animals, allowing customers to shop for and get advice on medications, then have them delivered. This integration comes as no surprise, considering the company purchased longtime partner and online animal pharmacy Allivet in 2024 for an undisclos...

On your typical day in the United States, there are about 8,500 unmanned aircraft flying in the air, which is just a taste of things to come if the ambitions of the tech industry are any indication, as companies like Amazon dabble in drone delivery. Most of those are recreational drones, but if they do become commercia...

In 2023, carbon emissions from the cement industry came in at 1.57 billion tons of carbon dioxide, which was around 8 percent of global emissions. Cement is a crucial material the world over, but the process of making it is really carbon-intensive, and zeroing in on ways to produce viable cement with less disastrous em...

A new analysis of the 52 million chords used across 680,000 songs found that - to the expectation of anyone who's strummed a guitar string or tickled the ivories - G major and C major were the most commonly found. I've never done either of those things - drummer, baby - so this information came as a surprising and deli...

61% of Americans say that being "frugal" is less tacky today than 10 years ago, more than double viewing it as being careful with money rather than "cheap". Nearly three-quarters (72%) of Americans now believe being open about budgeting is socially acceptable, with those embracing transparency repor...

A new survey asked Americans about their high school experiences, honing in on a few commonalities, including having a crush on someone (87 percent), having a group of friends (83 percent), attending a school football game (68 percent) and lying to your parents (67 percent). That last question just shows that at least ...

A new analysis of Netflix's most viewed content in the back half of the year found that of the 500 most popular programs on the service not produced in the United States, South Korea led the pack, producing 17 percent of them. Overall, in the back half of 2024, content from the U.S. accounted for 59 percent of viewing ...