Move over, Alexa. Wal-Mart is going high-tech in its fight against Amazon.com.

The success of modern-day retailing depends as much on information as it does on the products being sold.

Grid operators and traders thought they were totally prepped for the historic U.S. solar eclipse. There was just this one thing they didn't completely factor in: "irregular human-behavior patterns."

"Storied plastics" - or plastics that are collected by waste stream, sorted by material type and traced back to the original point of origin - are a good choice of material for use in packaging as companies attempt to improve their sustainability practices, research suggests.

Herbie Mays is 3M proud, and it shows - in the 3M shirt he wears; in the 3M ring he earned after three decades at the company's plant in suburban Cincinnati; in the way he shows off a card from a 3M supervisor, praising Mays as "a GREAT employee." But it's all nostalgia.

Wal-Mart and a group of food giants are teaming up with IBM to explore how to apply blockchain technology, also known as distributed ledger tech, to their food supply chains.