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American consumers put the brakes on major purchases through 2008 and 2009, and car sales—for both new and used vehicles—suffered significantly. Now, more than a year after government incentives (remember Cash for Clunkers?) got consumers back onto the auto sales floor, the industry is recovering—and could face a big boost due to a simple fact: people are sick of driving their beaters.

While annual revenue for public relations firms flat-lined from 2008 through this year, IBISWorld foresees a nearly 6 percent annual growth for the industry over the next five years. And while employment in the field has actually dropped in recent years, it's staged for a 3 percent increase every year through 2016. Gary McCormick, chair of the board of directors of the Public Relations Society of America, says the industry's recent stagnancy was due to other companies that use PR firms or independent contractors cutting back on advertising, marketing, and PR expenses.

School's the new cool nowadays. At a time where many businesses weren't able to survive the recession and others are struggling to stay afloat during the recovery, technical and trade schools are thriving

Hot start-ups in the coming year will likely be thinking outside of Silicon Valley. It's not that technology and software are on their ways out; rather, a softly stabilizing economy has heightened consumer confidence and opened up growth in areas such as brick-and-mortar retail, boutique consulting firms, and education companies, industry data from three private research firms show

Call it the comeback car.

Setting out to identify the most promising industries for starting a business in the coming year, a team of Inc.com reporters and freelancers scoped out data from three private research companies and researched independently (which included all sorts of standard reporting procedures, including but not limited to: phoning reality-show agents, interviewing used-car-salesmen wannabees, and getting a haircut at at the country’s best barbershop). The data we compiled, compared, and contrasted came from Sageworks Inc. , which does past and current financial analysis of privately held companies, AnythingResearch.com , which provides industry market research analysis, reports, and publications, and IBISWorld , which provides detailed past industry growth percentages, revenue forecasts for the next five years, employment growth, profit margin averages, and industry competition ratings

As businesses go global , the market for second-language acquisition continues to grow due to both increasing globalization and an increasingly diverse U.S. population

On a busy stretch of the Garden District in New Orleans—miles from the frat-boy brouhaha of Bourbon Street—Aidan Gill is rebuilding the idea of the American male, one haircut at a time. Walk into his shop and you're met with a monument to the history of barbering (here, it's almost necessary to call them "barber arts"): Glass cases on the wall display tonics and lotions of ancient pedigree along with old blades, powder brushes, and some downright-medieval-looking grooming devices.

Imagine Twitter had a dating service, where the only options were to propose dates, respond to dates, or directly message the person. A user could see the person's picture and basic information, and if interested, click a button to indicate that.

A shave and a haircut is worth a lot more than two bits these days.

Richard Miller has had one of the toughest jobs in higher education. The Olin Foundation tapped him a dozen years ago to create an engineering college on a hilltop in the Boston suburb of Needham.

Imagine if, after the next Deepwater-esque oil spill, we simply deployed a fleet of inflatable sailboats, equipped with oil-sucking booms, that would autonomously sail to the spill and soak up the oil. Or, if we need accurate data about radiation in the water outside another power plant approaching meltdown, we just sent in our fleet of boats, because we don't feel bad about submitting our robot slaves to radiation.

After we wrote about how many solar panel makers fared badly on The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition 's 2011 Solar Scorecard , the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) nearly fell over itself to respond, telling us that the solar industry is cleaning up its act--and fast.

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Yes, says Stanford. We're not so sure. A Stanford study shows that after cutting down a virtual reality tree, people are more likely to conserve paper