Roberto A. Ferdman

A new study on Silk Road, the recently shut-down illicit online marketplace that first brought bitcoin to notoriety in 2011, paints an interesting picture of three major countries’ illegal drug purchasing habits. The study, Use of Silk Road, the online drug marketplace, in the UK, Australia and the USA, surveyed nearly 10,000 global drug users in an effort to gather information about how Silk Road was used.

The character of Sherlock Holmes and other elements from the popular novels written by Scottish author Arthur Conan Doyle in the early 1900s are now part of US public domain, reports the New York Times.

Amazon just wrapped up a successful holiday shopping season. It sold 36.8 million items on Cyber Monday alone, or 426 items per second.

The past few years haven’t been kind to France’s most famous sparkling wine. For the second consecutive year, the world drank less Champagne than it did in the previous year. Current estimates have sales volumes falling by 3% to 4% this year, after dropping over 4% in 2012.

Bad news for almond lovers: A growing pile of setbacks is pinching global production and sending prices through the roof.

Pornography has always been a pioneering industry online, pushing internet technology, business models, and usage forward more than is often acknowledged.

When Uruguay starts selling state-grown marijuana next year, the stuff is going to be cheap—the government, the only entity which will be allowed to sell marijuana, plans to charge only $1 a gram. That compares to an average street price of roughly $20 in the US.

San Francisco-based social media startup Buffer just did something unprecedented: It published the salaries of every one of its employees online, available for the public to see. “We hope this might help other companies think about how to decide salaries, and will open us up to feedback from the community,” CEO Joel Gascoigne wrote in a blog post published on Thursday.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) released a report today (pdf) assessing how its 30 member nations have been working to help curb to nearly $1 trillion of illicit cash that’s being smuggled out of developing countries each year. The 116-page report surveys a number of avenues for dirty money flow, including money laundering, tax evasion, and bribery, among others.

China’s taste for candy hasn’t been lost on American chocolate giant Hershey.

Daisuke Inoue should be sitting on a fortune right now. Back in 1971 Inoue brought the world’s first karaoke machine to market. Had he patented his invention, the royalties from the device that now populates bars and homes all over the world might be worth millions. But he never did.

The world has been running a global chocolate deficit for a few months now, gobbling up more cocoa than Africa, which produces the vast majority of the world’s supply, can produce. And that’s likely just the beginning of the problem.

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder—ADHD—is big business these days. It has become the most-diagnosed long-term disorder after asthma, reports the New York Times. Over 3.5 million American children currently take an ADHD drug, a nearly 500% increase since 1990.

A recent survey conducted by global research firm IPSOS across 20 countries, found that a whopping 71% of Chinese say they gauge their success by the things they own. That’s significantly higher than it was for every other country included in the survey.

An analysis of retail pricing habits run by price intelligence firm Profitero revealed a pretty staggering statistic: Amazon changes its prices more than 2.5 million times a day. By comparison, Walmart and Best Buy changed their prices roughly 50,000 times each in the entire month of November.

Researchers at Cornell University have managed to 3D print a loudspeaker, according to the University’s newspaper. Using two customizable 3D printers originally developed at Cornell, a team of graduate mechanical engineering students managed to almost seamlessly print the loudspeaker’s plastic, conductive and magnetic parts, producing an electronic device in two pieces that needed only to be put together to make a functional loudspeaker.

Warren Buffett apparently likes the AMC television series Breaking Bad so much, he decided to send out a Christmas card inspired by the show. The card reads “Have yourself a Meth-y Little Christmas,” a play on the main character Walter White’s illicit job as a meth cook. It features a photo of Buffett in a full Walter White outfit, as seen above in the version sent to Wall Street Journal reporter Serena Ng, who used to cover Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway for the paper.

It happened last year for the first time: bot traffic eclipsed human traffic, according to the bot-trackers at Incapsula.

Costco sees opportunity in Spain’s deadbeat economy.

Starbucks is jumping on the soda streaming bandwagon. And amazingly it’s letting customers in certain stores globally carbonate not just juices and sodas but a selection of its coffee and tea beverages too.

It takes the average McDonald’s worker seven months to earn what its CEO makes in just a single hour.

The first documentary on Sriracha, the extraordinarily popular hot sauce, has arrived. You can download it for $5 dollars here. The 33-minute film by documentarian Griffin Hammond surveys the life of Sriracha’s maker and founder of Huy Fong Foods, David Tran, and the goings-on of his two bustling hot sauce factories.

Popular hazelnut and cocoa spread Nutella has become such a global product that the OECD decided to use it as a case study in its latest report on global value chains.

Uruguay’s senate is set to pass an historic bill (link in Spanish) today that will make the country the world’s first to legalize marijuana.