By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Renovation

Oftentimes homeowners will embark on a little bit of last-minute renovation in order to spruce up a property ahead of a sale, with the idea to invest a little money into a home to sufficiently enhance the curb appeal so the seller will make back the investment and then some upon the sale of the home. In some instances, the ROI can be pretty outstanding: A new garage door cost on average $4,513 in 2024, but added $8,751 to the resale value of the home, a 194 percent cost recoupment and one of the best things one can do to juice the sale price. Other clever and cost-effective renovations include replacing an entry door (adds $4,430 to resale value at a cost of $2,355), dabbling in landscape maintenance or lawn care, or refinishing hardwood floors. Some renovations are bad bets; remodeling a kitchen might cost $158,530 but only add $60,176 to resale value, recouping just 38 percent of the cost. If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a home renovation television show to pitch — one that does to This Old House or Fixer Upper what Moneyball did to baseball. It’s gonna mostly involve doors.

Veronica Dagher and Ben Eisen, The Wall Street Journal

Lawson

The Japanese convenience store Lawson is hiring up employees on the other side of the world to serve as digital shop clerks. The first such clerk will be a Japanese expatriate living in Sweden who will run several Lawson locations in Tokyo and Osaka during the overnight hours. Lawson’s already used remote workers to staff registers — about 70 employees work as avatar operators as of November, serving 29 shops — but this is the first time Lawson is looking abroad for staff for the graveyard shift. The program is effective at freeing up in-person workers to do non-register tasks, and expects a 1.5-hour reduction in register duty time on average.

Daiki Hiraoka, Nikkei Asia

Arctic

Russia set a record in 2024 for the most amount of cargo shipped over the Arctic shipping lane, which historically was impenetrable for large container carriers during all but the hottest months of the summer. Overall tonnage transported over the Northern Sea Route increased to 38 million tonnes, which is up from 35 million tonnes the prior year and 10 times the level moved a decade ago, when 3.7 million tonnes traversed the route in 2014. The Russian government has high ambitions for the sea route and wants to move 190 million tonnes along it by 2030, but those targets have been largely stymied by American sanctions.

Malte Humpert, gCaptain

Driverless

Interest in driverless car technology increased over the course of 2024, with the percentage of Americans who think it’s at least probably likely that driverless cars become widespread on U.S. roads now up to 49 percent, up from 43 percent when the question was posed in 2023. Overall, city dwellers tended to be a little more enthusiastic about the possibilities of driverless vehicles (44 percent said they were very or somewhat enthusiastic) than those in the suburbs (30 percent enthusiastic) or rural areas (20 percent). I can see some of the appeal here, as a resident of a city that has lots of convenient, semiautonomous vehicles that don’t require you to drive them; we just call them “subways” though.

Taylor Orth, YouGov

Florida

The future of the citrus industry in Florida is in serious doubt, as the citrus greening bacterial infection has spread to millions of acres of groves and has reduced the state’s total citrus production by 74 percent. The orange crop is expected to be the lowest in a century, and the citrus industry has been somewhat emboldened by new breakthroughs in addressing the disease, which is spread by the Asian citrus psyllid insect. Last year, USDA scientists shared one potential gene-editing remedy, and the agency’s invested $400 million into addressing citrus greening. Another study that looked at setting up curry plants near citrus groves as a “trap crop” to lure in the psyllids has had some success, with the strategy producing a 91 percent decrease in the insect vector presence in testing.

Leah Borts-Kuperman, Food Dive

Rationing

A new study looked at the long-term health impacts for the British children who grew up under post-war sugar rationing, which had the unintended side effect of essentially keeping the average diet within modern guidelines for daily sugar consumption. The study found lifelong health benefits of the involuntary restriction of sugar: kids who were young under sugar rationing had a 35 percent lower risk of diabetes and a 20 percent lower risk of hypertension in their fifth and sixth decades of life compared to those children who missed the sugar rationing by a few years.

Saima S. Iqbal, Scientific American

Land

Lots of land in Europe and Asia that had been used for farming has gone fallow, as improved efficiency in productive regions makes it infeasible or uneconomical for many areas where subsistence farming was the norm to keep things going. What happens to this land after the fact is an interesting question, and in Europe, it’s a 120 million hectare since 1990 question. Globally, something like 400 million hectares of land that was used for farming has in the time since gone fallow. One concern for allowing nature to simply take its course is that at least in the immediate aftermath of abandonment, the diversity of the plant life that moves in is not only lower than the surrounding countryside but usually lower than it was when it was being gardened, and large tracts of land might be taken over by brambles and thorny shrubs that crowd out the potential return of forested land. In Poland, scientists estimated that 75 percent of abandoned farmland is dominated by invasive species, such as goldenrod, which crowds out trees.

Dan Charles, Science

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