The rise of diabetes is causing avoidable deaths and imposing substantial costs on ailing healthcare systems. Alarmed, lawmakers are attempting to improve prevention and get the emerging pandemic under control.

Diabetes is a growing healthcare challenge and one of the four priority noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), also known as chronic diseases, targeted for urgent action by world leaders.

NEW YORK -- Three years into being a business owner, Becky Davis knew she needed to break the hold technology had on her.

Davis, a marketing and management consultant to other small business owners, was so immersed in emails, texts and social media that she was getting only four or five hours of sleep a night and her husband said he felt invisible. It also hurt her productivity -- she'd get distracted reading people's posts and realize she'd lost two hours of work time.

Research and teaching assistants at Columbia University have voted to unionize as the Graduate Workers of Columbia, an affiliate of the United Auto Workers union, according to a news release issued on Friday by the union.

The National Labor Relations Board ruled in August that graduate students who serve as research and teaching assistants at Columbia were primarily employees, not students, and so could unionize under federal labor law. The ruling reversed a 12-year-old decision involving Brown University, and threw open the doors for graduate students to organize into collective-bargaining units at private colleges and universities.

Learning the Investment Landscape

You can have the sexiest and most exciting company in the world, but if you don’t understand the language and strategies of these investor sharks, they’ll eat you for lunch! The investment world is a brutal battlefield! You must understand what investors are doing, saying and how to strategically plan your attack. Below is the overview of the investment industry, language and strategies that you need to know:

PRYOR, Okla. — Students at Pryor High School study robotics. Elementary schools have basic computer programming classes using free laptops, online collaboration software and Wi-Fi spread across this small town in Oklahoma’s Green Country.

“We have to prepare them for their future, not our past,” said Don Raleigh, superintendent of the town’s schools. “You have to have new skill sets.”

Scientists say they discovered the "troubling" reason why a massive iceberg splintered off one of West Antarctica's largest glaciers last year, and why this may not bode well for the future of the world's coastal megacities.

Warm ocean waters appear to have melted Pine Island Glacier from underneath, causing a deep subsurface crack that split the ice from the inside out, Ohio State University researchers found.

Indiegogo entered into the investment crowdfunding sector with a big splash this month. Partnering with MicroVentures, a FINRA approved Reg CF portal and Broker-Dealer, Indiegogo launched with four diverse investment opportunities: BeatStars, Republic Restoratives, Play Impossible, and ArtCraft Entertainment. Three of these offers have hit their funding target, and the 4th is nearly there indicating solid momentum out of the gate.

International joint ventures (IJVs) have become a staple of the global economy. They enable firms to apply both their own and their partner’s core capabilities to projects in markets that each might otherwise not be able to access effectively. For small- and medium-sized companies, in particular, IJVs provide a way to operate in new or foreign countries while sharing responsibility and resources, whereas larger firms can benefit by gaining access to a smaller partner’s niche expertise, access to scare resources, or foothold in a specific market.

WASHINGTON, DC – The National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) today issued the following statement after the House of Representatives passed the 21st Century Cures Act, sponsored by Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI), Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Energy and Commerce Committee Member Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO).

“On behalf of our nation’s life science investors who since 2006 have collectively invested over $101 billion into 4,494 companies working on cutting edge medical innovation, we applaud passage in the House today of the 21st Century Cures Act,” said Bobby Franklin, President and CEO.  “Increasing funding for NIH, advancing precision medicine, and improving the environment for the development of life-saving drugs and treatments is critical to ensuring the U.S. remains the global hub of medical innovation.”

Buyout firms have taken an increasingly large role in healthcare, investing in the full range of companies: insurers, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, medical-technology firms, and many kinds of service provider. Historically, success has come from making “smart bets” on companies well positioned to capitalize on an industry trend or shift. TPG’s buyout of Par Pharmaceutical and Clayton, Dubilier & Rice’s acquisition of Envision Healthcare are examples of investments that benefited from secular industry tailwinds. Those same factors have propelled the healthcare sector to a leading performance in public markets over the past five years (Exhibit 1).

I recently started a thread of discussion regarding why I avoid companies that are unprofitable. The topic is fairly long so I am breaking it up into several posts. You can see the first posting here.

There are times that you will want to invest in unprofitable companies. However, this has to be done carefully and with a small portion of your investment portfolio, perhaps 10%. For this 10% of your portfolio, you can invest in more speculative offerings.  Some speculative offerings such as high-tech startups or biomedical startups typically have a fairly long run of being unprofitable as they work through their startup issues.

We’re all tempted to use words that we’re not too familiar with. We throw them around in meetings, e-mails and important documents (such as resumes and client proposals), and they land, like fingernails across a chalkboard, on everyone who has to hear or read them.

No matter how talented you are or what you’ve accomplished, using words incorrectly can change the way people see you and forever cast you in a negative light. You may not think it’s a big deal, but if your language is driving people up the wall you need to do something about it.

Keith Pavitt was a professor at the Science Policy Research Unit at Sussex University, one of the most influential think-tanks within European innovation policy. Like many of his peers, Pavitt had grown frustrated by shortcomings of the Framework Programmes. In June 2000 he was invited to a workshop in Lisbon of a FP-funded project on ‘Scenarios for the evaluation of the European science and technology policy’.

Image: http://sciencebusiness.net/

Silicon Valley start-ups get lots of attention. But the reality is that the vast majority of successfully scaled ventures are not mythical unicorns with billion-dollar paper values, but real-world workhorses that plug along, steadily producing results and scaling up, year after year.

One strategy for successfully scaling your company can be to become a supplier to-and an integral part of the supply chain for-large, global corporations. But while the growth from tapping into corporate supply chains and procurement processes can be significant, becoming a supplier for large corporations is extremely difficult and time consuming.

In the old days, an investor hoping to get in on the ground floor of the next Google or Facebook had a couple of options: have a friend or relative on the inside, or sign on with a big brokerage firm handling the startup company’s private placement—a sale of stock that hasn’t yet gone public.

Not anymore. Ordinary investors now can buy shares in startups that are just getting off the ground, sometimes for just a few dollars. If, that is, they are willing to take on a whole lot of risk.

The Finnish government has decided that a good ‘second life’, a digital one (www.secondlife.com), must be included in the pantheon of citizens’ rights. Helsinki is already a digital city. At lunchtime on any day of the week in the Finnish capital, crowds of young – and not so young – people navigate the Internet readily and easily in the streets and public places. These people, let us call them ‘Internauts’, make use of superfast network connections. Access is free in bars, restaurants and hotels: computers are available free of charge for anyone who does not own a portable computer.

By all appearances, we’re in a golden age of innovation. Every month sees new advances in artificial intelligence, gene therapy, robotics and software apps. Research and development as a share of gross domestic product is near an all-time high. There are more scientists and engineers in the U.S. than ever before.

This infographic was created by Naka Kondo, an editor for The Economist, Intelligence Unit’s thought leadership division based in Tokyo. The full report Old problems, new solutions: Measuring the capacity for social innovation across the world can be read here.

ROCKY HILL _ The state's venture capital fund, prodded by investors suggesting a new direction, is scouting for high-tech funds where it can invest public money to broaden its network of technology-based startups.

Connecticut Innovations, which invests in startup bioscience, medical equipment and other high-tech companies, is responding to entrepreneurs, investors and others urging a different tack to spur business expansion and job growth.