Businesses like rankings. How else to explain the seemingly endless parade of new research purporting to identify the best cities, states, countries, and solar systems in which to do business. Well, it’s fine to measure the number of jobs startups have created or amount of venture financing raised. Extrapolating the data to name the “best” seems like a silly practice.

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The world’s richest countries are increasingly offering tax benefits to encourage multinational companies to invest in research and development, at the expense of innovative SMEs, according to a new report.

"Supporting Investment in Knowledge Capital, Investment and Innovation," a report by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), found that 27 of the organisation’s 34 members provided tax incentives to support business R&D during 2011, more than twice the number offering such incentives in  1995.

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Back in the old days, say in 2009, Twitter was a relatively unknown social network that was beginnign to spread like wildfire. In 2007, Twitter users posted some 400,000 tweets per quarter, by June 2010, they were posting 65 million each day. Today, there are 200 million registered users who send around 400 million tweets every day.

During this short time, Twitter has become so popular that its technical argot has entered the common language. Words like hashtag and @name would have seemed little more than gibberish just a few years ago. But even the word tweet is now a verb officially recognised in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Deep in the base of the brain, a cascade of events including oxidative damage and inflammation can kill neurons, resulting in the debilitating symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.

An international team of researchers has now developed a technique that might be used to prevent this cell death. They engineer immune cells to carry protective stowaway molecules, and the hope is that these Trojan cells can help prevent neuron death by delivering treatments across the blood-brain barrier—a layer of cellular structures that blocks most molecules from passing into the brain. The researchers have so far tested the approach successfully in mice.

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America has a skills deficit.

U.S. employers have been saying it for years, frustrated by job openings they can’t fill with qualified workers who even have basic skills. Now a new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development proves it in pretty stark terms.

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We are in a bull market for advice to women on how to get ahead in their companies.

For most of my career, I lived it. I worked in some of the most male of companies (OK, I never worked for Twitter). I learned, through trial and error, how to communicate in a way that I could be heard (research tells me: not too tough and not too soft); how to ask for a raise (advice books say: use facts, not emotion); and how to raise my hand for the next opportunity (studies show: similarly qualified females raise their hands for the next job far less often than men.)

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There have been more than 30 initial public offerings of biotechnology companies so far this year, and there’s a line around the block of promising new entrants looking to debut on the public markets.

But don’t call it a bubble. Those in the know are calling it a boom, and saying the good times are likely to continue for biotech, even in the face of clinical setbacks and other bumps in the road.

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In 2007, before YCombinator and AngelList had changed the industry, I worked in a nondescript office park in the heart of the venture capital industry off Sand Hill Road. Amid the leafy sprawl of buildings next to 280 and Stanford University, billions of dollars were and are invested out of the fancy offices of VC/PE firms you’ve never heard of. The whole industry has been shrouded in opaqueness since it was created decades ago, built on relationships from business schools, professional networks, and investor referrals. In 2007, I worked at a big firm as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence, and did my best to make sense of this world.

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Five years into the future, doctors will be empowered with a wide array of exponential technologies and will become the most efficient they have ever been. Physicians or artificial intelligence systems will have the ability to know your health status, perhaps even before you do, thanks to the combination of three important factors: artificial intelligence, electronic medical records/digital medicine and sensor technology.

Research in environmental sciences has found that the ergonomic design of human-made environments influences thought, feeling, and action. In the research reported here, we examined the impact of physical environments on dishonest behavior. In four studies, we tested whether certain bodily configurations—or postures—incidentally imposed by the environment led to increases in dishonest behavior. The first three experiments showed that individuals who assumed expansive postures (either consciously or inadvertently) were more likely to steal money, cheat on a test, and commit traffic violations in a driving simulation. Results suggested that participants’ self-reported sense of power mediated the link between postural expansiveness and dishonesty. Study 4 revealed that automobiles with more expansive driver’s seats were more likely to be illegally parked on New York City streets. Taken together, the results suggest that, first, environments that expand the body can inadvertently lead people to feel more powerful, and second, these feelings of power can cause dishonest behavior.

A top physicist says the so-called brain drain may be one of the reasons for New Zealand's "disappointing" slip down the ranks of an international innovation survey.

The latest Global Innovation Index - published by New York's Cornell University and World Intellectual Property Organisation - ranked this country 17th out of 142 nations, down from 13th in last year's report.

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The study, which is published in the journal Pediatrics, found that irregular bedtimes could disrupt natural body rhythms and cause sleep deprivation, undermining brain maturation and the ability to regulate certain behaviours.

Professor Yvonne Kelly (UCL Epidemiology & Public Health), said: “Not having fixed bedtimes, accompanied by a constant sense of flux, induces a state of body and mind akin to jet lag and this matters for healthy development and daily functioning.”

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A small New York firm, ff Venture Capital, will finish raising its third fund using new rules permitting it to advertise the offering, looking to become a leader of what it says will be a revolution in venture capital fundraising.

While numerous startups are publicly soliciting capital using online vehicles such as AngelList, ffVC appears to be the first venture firm to declare that it will take advantage of the move by the Securities and Exchange Commission lifting a decades-old ban on general solicitation for the sale of private securities.

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Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has restructured the way it invests in early stage companies, cutting its investment committee to just five partners, according to a memo sent to Kleiner’s limited partners that was seen by VentureWire.

The change applies to the current Fund XV–which closed in May, 2012, at $525 million–and any future early stage investing. The firm’s growth funds and growth stage investments are not affected.

You don't have to be a National Geographic fellow like Dan Buettner to know that one of the things that we Americans hate most on a daily basis is our commutes.

"If you can cut an hourlong commute each way out of your life," he told NPR, "it's the (happiness) equivalent of making an extra $40,000 a year if you're at the $50,000 to $60,000 level. It's an easy way for us to get happier. Move closer to your place of work."

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In case we needed another reason to close the 15 extra browser tabs we have open, Clifford Nass, a communication professor at Stanford, has provided major motivation for monotasking: according to his research, the more you multitask, the less you're able to learn, concentrate, or be nice to people.

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European Commission will invest some £170m over the next two years as a part of an action plan to make European cities smarter. Leaders of European cities have met today in Brussels with industry and research community representatives to discuss the next steps in the framework of the Smart Cities and Communities Partnership.

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Vinod Khosla, famed investor in Indiegogo, Storify, Jawbone, and more, went on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2013 and said: “95 percent of VCs add zero value and 70 to 80 percent of VCs add negative value to a startup in advising you.” The statement was met with a huge round of applause by a room full of hundreds of entrepreneurs in the room. At the StartMeUp event in April, Singaporean investor Jeffrey Paine also told us that “you shouldn’t listen to anybody who wasn’t a founder. Only founders understand founders.” These bits of wisdom come from investors from San Francisco to Singapore. But does anybody take this advice?

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You have the idea, you have the drive; all you’re missing is the money. Whether you want to make the next hit indie film, rock album or to raise funds for a non-profit, online crowd funding can be a great way to back your project.

How Crowd funding Works

Donation-based crowd fundraising rewards those who give money with some sort of perk such as a shout-out by the artist, a spot as an extra in a film, an autographed picture or a first edition of a new product. There are typically various tiers of donations with different incentives. This model is the most common and how online crowd funding began, although investment crowd funding has recently begun to build steam.

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Angel investors and venture capitalists don’t invest in non-profits. The simple reason is that it’s impossible to make money for investors when the goal of the company is to not make money. Yet I still get this question on a regular basis, so I’ll try to outline the considerations in common-sense terms.

A non-profit organization is generally defined as an organization that does not distribute its surplus funds to owners or shareholders, but instead uses them to help pursue its goals. Examples include charitable organizations, trade unions, and public arts organizations. In the US, a non-profit is technically any company who qualifies as tax exempt through IRS Section 501(c).

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