After Steve and Lori Dockendorf's two oldest children left their dairy farm to go to college, the husband-and-wife owners of a 100-cow farm in Watkins, Minn., had to figure out how to replace the labor they'd lost. The traditional solution would have been to hire a couple of extra hands. Instead, the Dockendorfs went with robots: robots to help feed the cows, robots to help clean the barn, even robots that can milk the cows.

You'd expect to see headlines like this - 'Launch of New Apple iPhone Causes Riots - when consumers beat down doors and trample each other, yet these riots were in China, among workers at Foxconn, a major supplier to Apple and other U.S. companies.

Building a profitable service is difficult because grocery stores have painfully low margins. Remember dot-com flameouts HomeGrocer and Webvan? Peapod, a pioneer in the space, still delivers in such cities as Chicago, New York and Philadelphia, but recently it's resorted to opening actual pickup locations to make the model work. FreshDirect has come as close as anyone to building a brand around home grocery delivery, but it remains small, operating primarily in the New York area. Yet, Amazon seems poised to move into the business in at least two California cities.

How can we tell how small businesses are feeling? Find out how many vans they're buying. Van sales were up 32 percent in July over last year, a greater increase than nearly every other vehicle type, except for sports cars, according to data from Bloomberg Industries.

Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad and Union Pacific Corp. are combating a drop in coal cargoes by catering to the industry responsible: the hydraulic fracturing of shale formations.

When rain doesn't fall in Iowa, it's not just Des Moines that starts fretting. Food buyers from Addis Ababa to Beijing all are touched by the fate of the corn crop in the U.S., the world's breadbasket in an era when crop shortages mean riots.

This spring, President Obama said he had "good news" to report: Lost American jobs are returning to the U.S. "For a lot of businesses, it's now starting to make sense to bring jobs back home." In trumpeting this "reshoring" of jobs from abroad, the administration points to employers, including General Electric and Caterpillar, that have shifted some manufacturing to the U.S. The president also cited an April online survey by Boston Consulting Group showing that 37 percent of manufacturers with sales of more than $1bn and almost half of those with more than $10bn "plan to or are actively considering bringing back production from China to the U.S." Yet there's little data to back up claims of a reshoring rush.