In the latest leap of mind-reading, scientists say they were able to decipher a person's emotions through brain scans.

Patterns of neural activity can give away what people are thinking and feeling, that is, if scientists can make meaning out of brain scans obtained through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In past studies, researchers have shown they can determine what number a person is thinking of, predict where people are standing in a virtual reality environment, and even figure out what a person is dreaming about, all by looking at brain scans.

Last year, we blogged about more students pursuing entrepreneurial careers at Wharton – more Wharton MBAs working at startups, more MBAs being accepted into top incubator/accelerator programs, and more Wharton alumni entrepreneurs hiring Wharton MBAs to join their teams.  These trends have all continued to rise – this year, there are more than 70 students interning at startups (up from 61 last year) and the number of students starting businesses upon graduation continues to grow.   

We’re still a ways away from electric sheep roaming the fields pretending to bleat but robotics researchers continue to look to nature for four-legged inspiration. Meet Cheetah-Cub, a European Commission-funded research project, out of Swiss University the École Polytechnique Federale De Lausanne‘s biorobotics lab, that’s about the size of a house cat.

As its name suggests, Cheetah-Cub takes its cues from feline morphology with strings replacing tendons and actuators sited in the legs to do the work of muscles. The result is a robot that runs like a cat and is, according to its inventor Alex Sproewitz, the fastest robot for its size (under 30kg). To look at it’s like a miniature and less scary version of Boston Dynamic’s terrifying Big Dog bot. The latter is likely faster, being much taller, but for a bot with a mere 0.15m leg-length Cheetah-Cub can really go some — hitting a max of 1.42m/s or almost seven body lengths per second.

BlueCross BlueShield of Louisiana and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts will provide online healthcare to their members with technology from American Well.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana plans to leverage American Well's telehealth platform as an added feature of its new Quality Blue Primary Care population health and quality improvement program, and will create multiple avenues to use this technology in other programs.

This is the season of inaugurations and internships, with the class of 2014 college grads starting a new chapter in life in a recovering yet still challenging job market, and with students beginning a summer of exploring what to do beyond school lives. Whether it’s a full-time job or an internship, the experience is as much about learning the knowledge and skills as it is about self discovery.

I recently met a white, middle-aged American, who is highly fluent in Mandarin and successful running a center whose work requires fluency in East Asian cultures and languages. With an impressive list of life experiences under his belt, he was obviously happy with his life and career. When asked how he got to this point in life, he insisted it was pure “dumb luck” because he couldn’t have foreseen the many opportunities related to his interests when he was a young man. I can relate to that. I am more confident and content with my work life than ever before, having finally found my ways of relating and contributing to the world around me. I wish I could say this was all by design, when in fact for the first decade in this country my life was defined by heartbreaks and headaches. As a liberal arts major and a generalist with broad interests, I was not as readily employable as those with technical such as IT and engineering, so I struggled for a long time to find my footing.

The US-Russia Innovation Corridor, administered by American Councils for International Education, provides assistance to start-up companies, innovative projects and universities wishing to explore U.S.-Russia collaborations and partnerships around commercializing innovations.

Here you can learn about our unique program and the services we provide to start-up companies and university projects, as well as take advantage of free online resources for entrepreneurs, university researchers, and regional governments working in the fields of innovation and entrepreneurship.

With such a wide landscape of job search resources out there, it can be a struggle to navigate mixed messages. Many job search strategies become muddled and the core advice is lost.

How can you determine which strategies won’t help you with your job search? Here are five tips to unlearn:

Some call it a miracle. Others an enigma of the culture. But the statistics surrounding the amount of high-tech startups that are conceived in Israel is astounding. A small country, with roughly 7.6-million people, has approximately 4 800 startup companies and attracts far more venture capital per person than any other country in the world. Dubbed as the Startup Nation, Israel outweighs the United States in venture capital investment per person, totaling US$170 per person compared to US$70 per person in the US. Not too bad for a country that was established 65 years ago.

How important is it for entrepreneurs to have specific domain experience prior to founding their startup? As an entrepreneur you are bound to run into this question sooner or later. My journey with startups brought me face-to-face with this question right from the start. I joined a group of friends directly after university to found our first startup. We built mobile applications for SMEs and enterprises that allowed them to manage distributed workforces effectively. Based on my experience, if your customers are other businesses, you have two options: either work your ass off to build domain expertise or start off with some.

At its core, reverse innovation describes solutions adopted first in poorer, emerging nations that subsequently—and disruptively—find a market in richer, developed nations. But can reverse innovation be relevant in the world of high-technology? The very definition of "high-technology" hints at something typically reserved for the developed world. Furthermore, for the past half-century, technology solutions have inevitably come from developed nations and occasionally "trickled down" to the emerging markets.

My favorite mobile device isn't my phone, my iPad, or my car. It's my Canon digital SLR camera. What makes that camera different from all the others Canon makes is not its serial number, but a QR code like the one on the left, called a TalkTag. Canon didn't put the code there. I did. For both of us.

Think of the TalkTag as a cloth on the table I've set between Canon and myself — a table across which we can both share whatever we like. (What matters is not the QR code, but the table itself. There are many other possible tablecloths, all of which can also be TalkTags. More about the QR code choice below.) For example, I can share links to all the photos I've shot with the camera, or notes to service people saying, "Be sure to fix the fracture in the eyepiece lens." Canon can share and update the owner's manual and service records, provide links to firmware updates, make lens recommendations, or share whatever makes sense for both of us.

Business, civic, and political leaders in St. Louis are coming together to raise $100 million in private funds over the next five years to support the Regional Entrepreneurial Initiative, a new effort aimed at helping emerging regional businesses grow and thrive. The project was launched with funding from the federal government and will draw on several ongoing fundraising initiatives in the community. About 80 percent of the funds will be used to provide capital support for startup businesses, with the remaining 20 percent directed toward entrepreneurial support and mentoring, according to the St. Louis Beacon.

In April 2012, the city and county of St. Louis invited stakeholders to develop a regional economic development strategy that would guide efforts to grow and retain high-growth startups. The St. Louis Regional Entrepreneurship Initative Report received financial assistance from the Economic Development Administration (EDA), the state of Missouri, and the St. Louis County Economic Council. The findings of the report suggest that the St. Louis region has a growing cluster of resources to support entrepreneurship, but that they are not of uniform quality and not distributed evenly across sectors. For example, the region's bioscience sector is relatively well-supported through the efforts of such organizations at BioSTL, BioGenerator and the Helix Center Biotech Incubator. Information technology companies, however, have few local organizations and programs to rely on for support. Resources for the agricultural, energy and advanced manufacturing sectors remain scarce and uncoordinated.

Over the last week, several states have announced/passed new programs focused on increasing the capital available to spur small business growth and innovation. Officials from New Jersey announced the state's new angel tax credit will take effect July 1. In Arizona and Wisconsin two bills await gubernatorial approval that would rework the Arizona R&D tax credit program and establish a $75 million venture capital fund in Wisconsin. Meanwhile, the Minnesota state legislature did not approve an additional $5 million for its popular Small Business Investment Tax Credit.

Johnson & Johnson (J&J) today upped its efforts in open innovation by opening a partnering office at the Stevenage Bioscience Catalyst in Stevenage, UK. The move is part of the global healthcare company's wider innovation efforts in the UK, which has at its focus the company's London Innovation Centre – one of four regional hubs planned to collaborate with local scientists and accelerate early stage research.

High up in the student chain of Oxford University’s business go-getters is John Stringfellow. From the US, Stringfellow is President of Oxford Entrepreneurs, founding member of the Saïd Business School Seed Fund, and is studying for his MBA while developing an app-based startup.

I was in the navy for six years beforehand. I’d always come up with a bunch of ideas on the ship, but out in the middle of nowhere there’s not much you can do about it. So, I always wrote down those ideas and told myself that as soon as my commitment for the navy is up, I’d put some of them into practice.

Social Media can be an important part of B2B strategy. But to make an impact within the content ecosystem, you have to have a message and move fast

Based on a conversation with Hari Krishnan, Managing Director, Asia Pacific and Japan, LinkedIn   Social media campaigns – the leveraging of online platforms for strategic purposes – represent an increasingly important part of many organisations that are, or want to engage in direct contact with their end-customers and other important stakeholders. For instance, many FMCG companies, such as Procter & Gamble’s Old Spice campaign or political organisations (e.g. US President Barack Obama during the 2008 and 2012 Presidential campaigns) effectively used online tools to further engage customers or mobilise their voters and foster actual purchases or votes.

Since their creation in the 1940s, the Department of Energy’s, or DOE’s, National Labs have been a cornerstone of high-impact, federally funded research and development. The labs have helped seed society with new ideas and technologies in leading disciplines such as energy, biotechnology, nuclear physics, and material science. While the labs’ primary mission must continue to focus on supporting the nation’s research needs not met by the private sector, the time has come to move the DOE labs past their Cold War roots and into the 21st century.

When you overhear a person five spots ahead of you at the coffee shop ordering a mocha light decaf no whip one pump, it might be enough to make you abandon your place in line and walk out of the store. But what if the context is different, and what's at stake isn't a handcrafted drink, but your health -- or even life itself?

The factors influencing people who face this dilemma are analyzed in "Waiting Patiently: An Empirical Study of Queue Abandonment in an Emergency Department" by Christian Terwiesch, Wharton operations and information management professor, and University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Robert J. Batt, a recent Wharton doctoral graduate. Knowing what compels emergency room visitors to wait -- or bail -- is a key piece of information that has been missing from the equation, despite its critical consequences, says Terwiesch.

When people think of tech startups, two places typically come to mind: the Silicon Valley and New York City. The average person probably can't think of a major tech company from anywhere else.

That's why it's such a surprise to see the huge startup community blossoming in Kansas City, Kansas. Entrepreneurs are rushing to the city thanks to Google launching an incredibly fast broadband network there last summer called Google Fiber.

When you live in a city,  you can sense its pulse, experience its pace of life and get to know its unique character. It’s almost as if a city is a living, breathing entity in its own right. 

That may be little more than the fantastical imaginings of city dwellers who tend to humanise all things inanimate. And yet, there is much demographic evidence to show that cities have their own unique identity, even though they are made up of millions of seemingly independent individuals.