• After years of rising used-car prices, the prices of used cars are expected to drop this year due to more families choosing to buy or lease new cars. The switch is largely driven by better economic times, according to the Wall Street Journal.
• The price of natural gas has rallied since the start of the new year, making it the top performing commodity. The unusually cold weather has increased consumption of natural gas and lowering the level in reserves, according to the Wall Street Journal.
• While Americans are both looking for renewable energy and weary of large nuclear reactors, the nuclear power industry is now introducing small and medium sized reactors. The new reactors are smaller in size and designed with disasters like the Japan earthquake in mind, according to CNBC.
• Netflix is once again toying with the possibility of increasing the monthly fee for new members and varying prices for streaming on multiple screens simultaneously. The video streaming company had received intense backlash from costumers and shareholders the last time it attempted a price increase, according to Bloomberg News.
• Hamburg, Germany’s second largest city, is designing a plan to almost eliminate automobile traffic in the center of the city by increasing the amount of public transportation as well as biking and walking lanes. Similar plans are becoming popular in industrial cities working to go green, according to CNBC.
• Only 3 percent of the companies to have an initial public offering (IPO) between 1996 and 2013 had women CEOs. The statistics reflect the continued disproportion of female CEOs to male CEOs in the U.S., according to the Wall Street Journal.
• Ratings for the popular A&E show, “Duck Dynasty,” have been sharply lower than the same time last year. The show about a family of duck call producers was surrounded with controversy when the patriarch, Phil Robertson, made public anti-gay comments, according to the New York Times.
• The chief operating officer of Facebook Inc., Sheryl Sandberg, became one of the youngest female billionaires in the world last week when the price of Facebook hit all-time highs. The 44-year-old owns about 12.3 million shares of the popular social networking site, according to Bloomberg News.
