New equity crowdfunding regulations that began taking effect last year have transformed the landscape for both entrepreneurs and investors in America. By enabling non-accredited individuals (the vast majority of the population) to invest in early stage startups for the first time, these new regulations have not only leveled the playing field of investing, but also uncapped a completely new source of funding for new growing companies. The new rules were a long time coming, as they were first passed by congress and signed into law in 2012. Only last year, after years of debate and discussion, did the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) actually begin to implement the first of these rules. So needles to say, it's a very exciting time to be in the crowdfunding industry. 

LeBron James famously declared after the Cleveland Cavaliers won their first NBA title this past June that “It’s Cleveland Against The World”.

If you haven’t been paying attention since then, Cleveland is still on a winning roll. And I’m not just talking about the Cavs or the Indians, who are playing the Chicago Cubs in the World Series this week vying to win their first baseball championship in 68 years. This past July, every hotel room downtown was sold out for the week when the Republican National Convention came to town.

Many early startups find themselves in a difficult spot when it comes to capital.

Friends and family may not be in a position to get you off the ground. If you are not heavily networked, you may not have access to angel capital. And without two years of history with revenue, a traditional bank won’t take your call.

As the IoT reels from and struggles with ongoing security issues stemming from DDoS and botnet and SSH and DNS and innumerable other interrelated problems, the industry needs outside input and leadership to give it strategic guidance.

According to a recent announcement, one such source of guidance will be in the form of the Rockville Innovation Center (RIC) in Montgomery County, Maryland, where BioHealth Innovation (BHI) has partnered with The MITRE Corporation, a not-for-profit corporation that operates federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs), including the National Cybersecurity FFRDC, to look for innovative solutions to next-generation security threats.

A team of Chinese scientists has become the first to test CRISPR gene-edited cells in a human. The researchers, from Sichuan University in Chengdu, injected the cells into a patient with lung cancer. The experiment uses CRISPR—a cheap, easy, and accurate way to edit DNA in living cells—to disable a gene that suppresses immune response. By editing a small number of cells then growing them outside the body, the team was able to inject a large number back into the patient, with the intention of having them fight off the cancer. Human trials of CRISPR have been proposed in the U.S., but so far none have been carried out. Carl June, a researcher from the University of Pennsylvania who hopes to carry out some of the first such experiments in America, told Nature that he thinks that the news could “trigger ‘Sputnik 2.0’, a biomedical duel on progress between China and the United States.”

Knowledge@Wharton: Give us a brief overview of your research.

Gideon Nave: I came to Wharton from a neuroscience department, and my work is mostly focused on the biological basis of how people make decisions. We all know that the way we make decisions is influenced by our biological state. Things like hunger, sleep deprivation and stress influence the process of decision-making, and I’m trying to study this in a rigorous way, using lab experiments and some biological data.

Why do some songs stick in our heads for infuriatingly long periods of time? According to the first large-scale study of its kind, it’s all about their combination of upbeat tempos, easy-to-remember melodies, and a little something unexpected. The new research looked at some of the most popular songs with this “stick factor”—and gives advice for how to get them unstuck, as well.

Tunes that we can’t seem to shake are sometimes known as earworms, or referred to in the scientific community as involuntary musical imagery. It makes sense that recent chart-toppers that get lots of radio play are more likely to find their place deep in our brains, but that theory—and the reasoning why some songs are catchier (and stickier) than others—has not been widely examined in a scientific way.

We all know the stereotypes: Great CEOs are extroverted. They’re self-promoting. They’re risk takers. But are these stereotypes true? Which traits actually differentiate CEOs from other executives? And, most important, which attributes separate successful CEOs from other CEOs?

There is a great deal of conjecture and mythology about CEOs and the attributes that define their success. So what should companies look for when they hire a new CEO?

Despite the East Coast roots of technology entrepreneurship and venture capital (VC), by the 1990s Silicon Valley had gained a major advantage over the Cambridge-Boston area. In 1995 Silicon Valley’s share of all VC investments in the U.S. stood at 22.6%, more than twice New England’s 9.9% share. It is less well-known that Silicon Valley’s share of U.S. venture capital has skyrocketed since then, unaffected by wide fluctuations in the total pool of VC investments during this period. With an almost 50% share, the Bay Area now towers over New England, whose share has stayed put at around 10%.

The lure of the top corner office is strong, but there’s a reason not everybody grows up to be the head of a company—the job is a massive undertaking. CEOs are asked to do it all: setting strategy, closing deals, hiring people, firing people, calming irate customers, fixing broken light switches. And sometimes that’s just by 10 a.m. on Monday.

Sure, you may want to found the next "Uber for (insert service here)," but that's not the only entrepreneurial path you can walk. In fact, it may not even be the best one. Many aspiring entrepreneurs forget that they can become successful business owners simply by taking over an existing small business. And now couldn't be a more opportune time to consider that option.

Cross-functional collaboration and customer-focused design thinking can help companies reap more value from the energy and resources they use.

Over the past 150 years, companies have steadily refined their ability to invent products and produce them efficiently, delivering a wide range of goods to consumers and improving financial returns to shareholders. In other respects, however, this system is far from optimal. Specifically, companies have hardly begun to reckon with the waste that occurs after products are purchased.

MANY advances in 21st-century health care will emerge from small organizations. Digital technologies will enable individual innovators to conquer pain, disease and despair. Insights will arc from other industries. Patients will manage their own health and care as never before.

Health-care innovation is beginning to resemble the information technology revolution that transformed life over the last 25 years—how we work, play, shop, communicate, relax, learn and travel.

Pfizer (NYSE:PFE) and Astellas (NASDAQOTH:ALPMY) share profit on the blockbuster prostate cancer drug Xtandi, and AbbVie (NYSE:ABBV) and Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ) split profit on the blockbuster lymphoma and leukemia drug Imbruvica. However, these companies took very different paths to adding these drugs to their portfolios. 

Pfizer and AbbVie waited until these medicines were already top sellers before they bought their way in, while Astellas and Johnson & Johnson took the risk of licensing them while they were still in clinical trials.

Though other people may think you are.

It’s a crazy thing for most people, this whole “I want to start my own company” business. There’s no steady paycheck, no set framework for how to build it, and a huge risk that all of it will come crashing down. But for those of us bitten by the entrepreneur bug, all of that is worth it.

While hopefully you will never find yourself in a life-or-death situation, if you ever do, just know that an entrepreneurial background can definitely help increase your chances of survival.

At least it did for Richard Branson.

Richard faces a number of perilous moments in the excellent documentary Don't Look Down, the story of his transoceanic hot air balloon voyages that is now playing in theaters and available on VOD. (Here's my review of the movie.)

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Richard_Branson_March_2015_(cropped).jpg 

A supermoon, which appears up to 30 percent brighter and 15 percent larger than other full moons. That's because the full moon — in which the sun, moon and Earth are approximately aligned and the sunlit face of the moon is facing Earth — occurs at the spot in the moon's orbit when our satellite is closest to our planet. Because of that closeness, the full moon appears brighter and bigger than normal. Sometimes an extra-special occurrence makes this bulging supermoon even more spectacular. That occurrence is the total lunar eclipse, when the moon moves behind Earth's shadow. Check out these spectacular images of supermoons and eclipsed supermoons.

At the World Economic Forum in China last year, a panelist was asked for his best advice on innovation and his answer was “fail fast, fail often.” It’s surprising that a so called expert of this caliber believed this to actually be true. 

“Fail fast, fail often” is a popular myth promoted by mainstream Silicon Valley and the Lean Startup movement. In fact, this myth is even beginning to mistakenly be associated with Thomas Edison whose statements clearly show otherwise.

A new patent search tool developed by engineers at Michigan Technological University makes it easier to discover and track inactive patents. 

Many innovators and inventors feel they have squandered hours fruitlessly rifling through old patents on the US Patent and Trademark Office website, trying to figure out which are still active and how they may relate to developing technologies.

Global carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels stayed flat in 2015 for the third straight year despite economic growth, a new assessment has found. However, this pause in the growth of emissions is likely to be short-lived unless new emissions policies are accelerated, scientists say. 

The report, from researchers at the University of East Anglia and the Global Carbon Project, found that the world has slowed its annual growth rate of emissions from about 2.3 percent per year prior to 2013 down to a projected 0.2 percent in 2016.