Startups get a lot of attention from the industry. Simple as that. They are the sexier, jazzier, more vulnerable babies that the media gets excited about, and investors want to nurture. However what happens to startups when they grow up? When they perhaps graduate from an incubation or acceleration programme and need to walk on their own? They still have a lot of growing up to do, yet there is an expectation that they should be fully-functional companies at that point. That expectation is ingrained into the industry, so much so, that even the entrepreneurs themselves start to believe it.

Every successful startup founder has to be first and foremost a great salesperson. It means to be able to sell a brand-new concept before it even exists. To get key stakeholders and users to buy in requires some creative promising — and some faking it till making it. However, there is a thin but clear line between that and blatantly lying.

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Accelerators in the Arab world are all the rage lately. For every one that has shut down since we last listed the Top 10 Accelerators in the Middle East and North Africa two years ago, another has sprung up in its place, Palestine’s Fast Forward, Gaza Sky Geeks, Dubai’s in5, Abu Dhabi’s logistics-focused Turn8 among them.

The list will likely continue to grow this year; demand from startups is building, and, when it comes to teaching startups what they need to know, stakeholders support accelerators as a quicker fix than education reform.

A new study suggests something encouraging for busy people: Every minute of movement counts toward the 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity we’re all supposed to be getting each week. University of Utah researchers found that each minute spent engaging in some kind of moderate to vigorous physical activity was associated with lower BMI and lower weight.

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This time, nature tipped its hat, and Diana Nyad finally conquered the 110-mile passage from Cuba to Florida that had bedeviled her for 35 years.

Sharks steered clear, currents were friendly, and storms took most of the Labor Day weekend off.

image: Andy Newman/Florida Keys News Bureau, via Associated Press

By mapping the way patents cite each other, network scientists have been able to study how different technologies rely on each other and how new technologies emerge

Navigating the web in the early 90s was never an easy business. The complaint echoed from one user to the next was that it was next to impossible to find anything.

That began to change in the mid-90s thanks to the evolution of search companies such as Yahoo. But even the early incarnations of search were difficult to use. Yahoo is a good example. Its earliest search tool was a directory that categorised webpages according to a predetermined hierarchy.

Electric-vehicle battery packs could shrink 20 to 30 percent, and make electric vehicles more affordable, if new sensors were developed to monitor the cells in a pack, according to the U.S. government’s Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E). The agency says such sensors could have an even greater effect on hybrid gas-electric vehicle batteries, causing them to shrink by half.

Better sensors could tell what’s happening inside each of the hundreds of cells that make up an electric vehicle’s battery pack, allowing automakers to safely store more energy in them. A $30 million ARPA-E program that’s been underway for about a year is seeking to develop the necessary technology.

Biotech venture capitalists have been busy selling companies and taking them public lately, but investors such as Clarus Ventures are experimenting with strategies that enable them to rely less on the public markets and corporate acquirers.

Leonhard Foeger/Reuters Clarus has had its share of biotech success lately, including the sale of Pearl Therapeutics Inc. to AstraZenecaAZN.LN -0.94% PLC in June. But given that investors generally have struggled to profit from biotech deals in recent years, the firm doesn’t want to depend entirely on the usual exit routes. One alternative strategy that’s starting to pay off involves helping pharmaceutical companies solve their R&D cash crunch.

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Humanscale CEO Bob King discusses the company's ergonomic office furniture and the state of U.S. manufacturing with Carol Massar on Bloomberg Television's "Taking Stock." (Source: Bloomberg)

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Try this: Count your exhalations--1, 2, 3--all the way to 10. See if you can get to 10 without thinking about lunch or laundry or deadlines or dates.

Unless you've trained your attention, it'll probably start to wander--which, new research into the brain suggests, begins at a physical level.

"Your neurons can fire for a while with the energy they have in them, but not for long: After a dozen seconds, each needs more energy," research psychologist Peter Killeen tells Fast Company.

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The past couple posts have described some pretty severe experiments on octopuses, including: showing how octopus arms can grow back after inflicted damage and how even severed octopus arms can react to stimuli. (For the record, animals in the studies were anesthetized and euthanized, respectively.) Without getting too far into the woods (or reefs) of animal treatment ethics, the question remains: How much pain and distress can these relatively short-lived invertebrates experience?

The idea that insights from the healthcare systems of low-income countries might be transferable from low to high-income countries is becoming increasingly common in global health and innovation publications. One journal wants to take this idea further to develop an international forum for high-quality research, where academics, practitioners, leaders, and policy-makers can come together to learn, share and critique emerging results on the subject.

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In my 22 + years as an entrepreneur and working with successful entrepreneurs and successful business professionals, universally I’ve discovered that they have learned to think and act like successful people. This is what has allowed them to rise to the top of their profession. Each would tell you that along the way they have learned how to think differently.

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Being a savvy young professional in your 20s has its advantages.

Pro: We’re young. We can adapt easily.

Pro: We’ve got better technology than our parents did when they broke into the working world.

Pro: Finding a place to work where you have more freedom and flexibility to work from home is easier than ever.

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While out walking in London recently, I passed a group of uniformed schoolchildren moving in an orderly, single-file line, with teachers in front and rear.

Nothing unusual, except for one thing that made me laugh out loud: their identical school ties. Or more accurately, what was left of them. More than half the kids had cut their ties so that only three or four inches remained below the knot.

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During a recent radio interview on the BBC, the host asked me what advice I would give to young people who want to start their own businesses. In the 46 years since I launched Student magazine, the world has certainly changed. The uncertain economic outlook and the relentless pace of technological advances make replicating Virgin’s success much more challenging for today’s young entrepreneur.

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An important determinant of the reliance on feelings in judgment is their perceived diagnosticity. This diagnosticity has long been thought to be a function of two primary factors: how representative are the feelings of the target to be judged, and how relevant are feelings for the judgment to be made. Our research uncovers a third important factor: the person’s trust in his or her feelings, which is defined as the degree to which this person believes that his or her feelings generally point toward the “right” answer in judgments and decisions.

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The dramatic drop in the cost of creating a company over the last decade ($2 million in the late ’90s to maybe $5,000 today) has had an obvious effect on the venture capital world. Serious venture investment is not required in the earliest stages of a company’s life, so angel investors have been getting the best seed deals. That spawned “super angels” and their subsequent micro-VC funds, which in turn evolved into crowdfunding platforms like AngelList.

Andy Kessler, whose take on things I generally like, recently wrote a piece for The Wall Street Journal called, “Robots, 3-D Printers and Other Looming Innovations.”

In it he posed the question of whether the internet and other disruptive trends have destroyed more jobs than they’ve created. Could innovation actually be fueling the stubborn unemployment that has persisted in much of the country?

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What does a road mean to you? Does it evoke a Kerouacesque vision of freedom and adventure or a dystopian nightmare of noxious fumes, endless congestion and the sickening fear that you could be one of the million people killed in traffic accidents every year, or the millions more injured?

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