You don't have to feel guilty if you don't have the time to pack elaborate lunch boxes for your children.

The “Valentine’s Day Massacre” nearly cut the Las Vegas Valley’s explosive growth off at the knees 26 years ago, when fewer than 1 million people called the region home. Jurisdictions had been battling one another for growth-sustaining allocations to Colorado River water for years, and the Las Vegas Valley Water District took drastic action Feb. 14, 1991, upon realizing it couldn’t meet any more water commitments: It stopped promising service to new developments. Henderson soon followed suit.

As the world goes digital, cybersecurity is becoming more and more important. Take, for example, the recent breach of Equifax credit monitoring, which exposed personal information of more than half of all Americans.

Technology companies want the wastewater. The cities produce a steady supply of it.

It all started with a shipment of sweaty sex toys.

It was a hot and humid day in August 2003 and Jennifer Pritchett and her then business partner were days away from opening Minneapolis’s first feminist sex shop, Smitten Kitten. They had sunk all their money into their first shipment of products, but as they excitedly opened the boxes of toys, packing peanuts flying everywhere, they knew immediately that something was wrong. The toys were leaching an oily substance. It was coming off the products, out of the clamshell packaging, through Styrofoam packing peanuts, leaving big greasy spots on the cardboard box. What, they wondered, was wrong?

When 26-year-old Amber, a Las Vegas transplant, realized her dog ate her favorite vibrator, she headed to Las Vegas’s Adult Superstore. Amber grew up in a small Midwestern farming town of 6,000 people, a place where sex “was shunned” and sex toys were never discussed. If she wanted to find a sex-toy store back home, it would mean driving 40 miles to St. Louis. Now, at the Adult Superstore, a large sex-toy emporium — think clothing retailer H&M but for sex toys — she knows that she’ll not only have many options to choose from, but once there, she’ll be treated with respect by a knowledgeable staff. But it wasn't always this way.

You never forget your first vibrator. According to a 2009 study by Indiana University, almost 50 per cent of American women have played with the pulsating devices. That number has undoubtedly climbed thanks to pop-culture phenomena such as Fifty Shades of Grey and marked changes in the “adult industry”. Gone are the days when all sex shops were dives hawking crotchless polyester knickers and sticky men’s magazines, with a dodgy peep show in the back. The sex-toy business has boomed into a purportedly $15 billion (£11.5 billion) a year trade that is increasingly high-end, sophisticated in design and aggressively courting female consumers.

Thieves who crept into Alanis Morissette’s Brentwood home in February made off with a stash worth $2 million, including the singer’s treasured vintage jewelry. A week later, someone broke the window of former Lakers guard Nick Young’s house in Tarzana and stole a safe stocked with $500,000 in valuables.