Among patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer disease, a daily dosage of 2,000 IUs of vitamin E, compared to placebo, was effective in slowing functional decline and in reducing caregiver time in assisting patients, according to a study appearing in the January 1 issue of JAMA.

Alpha tocopherol, a fat-soluble vitamin (E) and antioxidant, has been studied in patients with moderately severe Alzheimer disease (AD) and in participants with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) but has not been studied in patients with mild to moderate AD. In patients with moderately severe AD, vitamin E was shown to be effective in slowing clinical progression. The drug memantine has been shown to be effective in patients with AD and moderately severe dementia, according to background information in the article.

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This is the time of year when many people renew their determination to lose weight with yet another New Year's resolution. What can you do differently this time to make a success out of your new plan? Apparently the latest Eating (Photo by Dezidor/Creative Commons via Wikimedia) idea for getting yourself to eat less is a simple one -- switch hands. By eating with your non-dominant hand you will cut calories automatically according to researchers.

Image: Eating (Photo by Dezidor/Creative Commons via Wikimedia) - See more at: http://inventorspot.com/articles/need_new_innovation_lose_weight_changing_hands#sthash.EHzCYwdp.dpuf 

Teams that are convened to generate new ideas often wind up recycling old ones. But it’s not impossible to innovate your innovation process.

A new year marks an opportunity for renewal, so a lot of executives at this very moment are doing more thinking than usual about how to spark innovation and bring in new ideas. (Signs to look for: furrowed brows, longer hours, more references to Good to Great in meetings than usual.)

Image Courtesy of artur84 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

A survey conducted by the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and the Dow Jones VentureSource, predicted a higher number of venture capital investments from both venture capitalists and COE’s in 2014.

Approximately 59% of the venture capital firms surveyed stated they expected a greater level of venture investments. Likewise, 57% of CEO’s reported the same in their survey. These numbers represent a clear up tick from the year before. When this same survey was conducted in 2012, only 27% of venture capitalists and 43% of CEO’s thought there would be an increase of venture investments in 2013.

Since I made everyone else share a selection of their best photos, it is only fair that I post my own favorites from the past year. Click on each to view large.

Image: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com 

San Francisco-based technology executive Ben Nelson has set out to kick Harvard off its pedestal.

Nelson, 38, is launching a new college via the Minerva Project, which he refers to as the “reimagined university.” Students can live anywhere in the world and enroll in courses online. Now his vision is becoming a reality via the Minerva Schools at KGI, a joint venture between Nelson’s Minerva Project and the Keck Graduate Institute, a member of the Claremont University Consortium in southern California.

Image: Minerva chief executive Ben Nelson 

Want your colleagues to remain effective teachers and researchers after tenure? Then prioritize quality over quantity in publishing during the tenure process, avoid collegiality as a tenure criterion and make sure your administrators aren’t rubber-stamping faculty tenure recommendations. That’s according to a new study out in this month’s PS: Political Science and Politics, a journal of the American Political Science Association.

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Consider the typical laboratory space: dropped ceilings, linoleum floors, fluorescent lighting, veneer countertops. Windowless caves where scientists hunch over their microscopes and computers, utterly sterile and isolated.

That’s a far cry from Harlem Biospace, New York’s first biotech incubator, located in a former industrial stretch of west Harlem. I am standing in the reception area with cofounder Christine Kovich, where fat silvery ductwork snakes overhead on the 15-foot ceilings and a whimsical “chandelier” of exposed Edison light bulbs, designed by Cassidy Brush of Brooklyn’s Urban Chandy, hangs from a base of reclaimed wood,

Image: Christine Kovich and Sam Sia 

For the first Elevator Pitch of the new year, we're spotlighting a guy who's taking on a new challenge. Bobby Franklin was named head of the National Venture Capital Association in the fall, replacing 20-year NVCA veteran Mark Heesen.

Franklin, a longtime Capitol Hill tech lobbyist, was recently in Silicon Valley on a fact-finding tour. Over lunch, he was frank about the learning curve he's facing -- while also sounding eager to dive in.

Image Courtesy of artur84 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Education technology enjoyed a headline-grabbing year in 2013. Debate about the potential, and the limitations, of massive open online courses reached a fevered pitch. Technology-enabled, competency-based degrees got a green light from the U.S. Department of Education. And data analytics proved to be an increasingly important reference point in campus operations.

My fellow HBR blogger Bill Taylor recently made a pitch for all of us to stop using the word “innovation” in 2014.  Despite his plea, I suspect this word isn’t going anywhere.  It’s too important as a driver of growth and renewal. What can be done, in the spirit of Bill’s admonishment, is to stop getting tangled up in all of the variations, nuances, tools, techniques, models, frameworks, and paradigms of innovation.  Somehow we’ve taken a simple concept — the idea of systematically finding, encouraging, and implementing new ideas for growth — and we’ve made it horribly complex.  And of course, by complexifying innovation, we’ve probably started to kill it.

Image Courtesy of thaikrit / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

It was just a middle-school tennis match against a manifestly worse player, but I became overwhelmed with anxiety. Before we’d started, the most important thing was to win. But during the match, I just wanted to get off the court fast. Burping uncontrollably, afraid of throwing up, I hit balls out. I hit them into the net. I double-faulted. And I lost 6-1, 6-0. After shaking hands and running off the court, I felt immediate relief. My distended stomach settled. My anxiety relented. And then self-loathing took over. This was a challenge match for a lower-ladder JV position. The stakes were low, but to me they felt existentially high. I’d lost to the overweight and oleaginous Paul (not his real name), and the result was there on the score sheet, and on the ladder hanging on the locker room wall, for all to see.

Image Courtesy of Rawich / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

While we are seeing more attention to addressing the paucity of useful national entrepreneurship data globally, efforts to develop comparable city-level information have been less of a focus with only a handful of global city rankings. How are city leaders now moving beyond dated “cluster and technology park” thinking to appeal to entrepreneurs and investors?

As I reported often in 2013, entrepreneurship policy is getting much more attention on the national policymaking agendas of governments around the world. Nations have started to compete in a race to build healthy entrepreneurship ecosystems, demanding better data – such as the World Bank Doing Business Indicators, OECD-Eurostat Entrepreneurship Indicators and more – to fuel and measure their efforts. In contrast, comparable city-level data is even more scarce and global city rankings are few. Nonetheless, city leaders are seeking to have entrepreneurs and investors pin their cities on their map and they are doing so with efforts that make clusters and technology parks look more like obsolete civil engineering projects as opposed to efficient local entrepreneurship policy.

Image: http://entrepreneurship.org 

There’s no shortage of technology wunderkinds under the age of 30 transforming business, society and our day-to-day lives. We’ve all heard the startup stories behind Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Aaron Levie of Box, Dustin Moskovitz of Asana, Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi of Dropbox, to name just a few.

But for every well-known young techster out there generating headlines, there are literally hundreds more smart, energetic, enterprising and unusual thinkers working on everything from new algorithms and apps to gadgets and online services. We know because of the many nominations we received calling out their accomplishments.

Image: http://www.forbes.com 

The “aha” moment — that moment of sudden realization, the defining moment where wisdom is revealed, the moment of inspiration. Many companies start with that insight, but from that moment to a product and then to an actual sale to a customer can take many years, cost a lot of money, and require the company to overcome numerous hurdles as we learned when we talked with five winners of Connect’s 2013 Most Innovative New Products Awards:

Werner Sievers, CEO, Nextivity, winner in the hardware and general technology category for the Cel-Fi Smart Signal Booster, which maximizes a user’s indoor wireless experience by eliminating in-building dead zones.

Image Courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

A new game controller announced at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) Sunday could let PC gamers control the action with their eyes. The device, which is slated for release this summer, will likely mark the debut of eye tracking for a video-gaming product. Similar technology is typically used for psychological research or user experience testing.

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com 

If there's one job market that isn't slowing down, it's tech. As legacy companies continue to digitize and exciting new startups pop up everywhere, we're encountering an increased demand for qualified tech professionals.

According to a recent survey from recruiting company Robert Half Technology, 16% of chief information officers plan to expand their teams in the first half of 2014. That means right now employers are looking to fill positions for software engineers, mobile developers and IT managers — a few of the hottest tech jobs this year.

Image: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, MATTHEW ROTH 

Today is the most depressing day of the year.

Psuedo-science types monitored sentiment on social media and found that the first Monday back to work supposedly ranks as the crabbiest day of the year. You've returned to the 9-to-5 routine, the Christmas tree is on the curb and the weather sucks.

Rather than tweet your gloominess or complain on Facebook, take a look at random things guaranteed to bring you a little cheer.

Image: IMGUR, ADAMBAKE 

Record-breaking cold winter temperatures today (Jan. 6) means global warming must be a farce, right?

Wrong. Here's why:

What's most important to remember is that weather isn't climate. A single storm isn't evidence for or against global warming. "It is important to understand that weather is like one play in a football game. Climate is the history of the NFL," Mike Nelson, chief meteorologist for KMGH in Denver, wrote in a Facebook post.

Image: NOAA/NASA GOES Project 

When I was a very young mother (and this was a very, very long time ago) my mantra was ‘people are more important than things’. It worked the way a good mantra should, as an all-purpose stress reducer. It was especially handy after some bauble had been broken by the crashing of a particular toddler into a coffee table, or to calm things down after that same toddler started pounding on a sibling with a purloined toy. In other words, my mantra served equally as a reminder to myself, and as an influence on the moral development of my offspring.