Maybe there's a hundred presents under your Christmas tree. Maybe there's one. Doesn't matter. Soon you'll be opening them (or it) and making the decision whether or not to open slowly (saving the wrapping paper) or tearing like a maniac.

The givers, assuming they're in the room, will be watching you for telltale signs of whether you like what they bought you, and you, aware that you are being watched, will be a little too expressive -- in a kind-hearted attempt to calm the fears of your loved ones.

A fun peek into how the news would have gotten out differently 2,012 years ago if social media tools had been around.

Ask scientists of a certain age about their childhood memories, and odds are they’ll start yarning about the stink bombs and gunpowder they concocted with their chemistry sets. Dangerous? Yes, but fun.

“Admittedly, I have blown some things up in my time,” said William L. Whittaker, 64, a robotics professor at Carnegie Mellon University who unearthed his first chemistry set, an A. C. Gilbert, in a junkyard around age 8. By 16, he was dabbling in advanced explosives. “There’s no question that I burned some skin off my face,” he recalled.

In the past few years just about every country with a high-speed network and a national budget has hatched a “startup ecosystem.” From http://readwrite.com/2012/04/17/move-your-startup-to-chile-con to the Silicon Taiga, these programs offer entrepreneurs funding, infrastructure and support in an effort to lure a critical mass of promising young companies and spawn the next Silicon Valley.

None has succeeded. The Dropboxes and Instagrams of the world still flock to the original Silicon Valley.

Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists don’t always speak the same language, metaphorically speaking, but they do share common goals. VC deals, then, should be considered a matter of cooperation.

Negotiation Between Healthcare Professionals and Venture Capitalists, a new white paper from virtual data room Merrill Datasite, outlines some of the common mistakes entrepreneurs make in negotiating deals, and offers guidance on how to prepare for negotiations. It starts with the fundamental idea that both parties should come to the table open to new options for making something together that they could not do separately.

What do European startups want for Christmas? We’ve come up with a list of ideas. Feel free to add your own in the comments.

1. Inspiration – We want European tech founders to think more collectively, lobby government more effectively and put themselves out there as heroes for the next generation to emulate. Don’t be shy!

2. Great local capital where they are – Europe is awash with wealthy individuals and ‘family offices’ style funds that have previously invested in property and traditional businesses. We need those opened up to tech entrepreneurs. These people are not going to make interest on their money sitting in a bank account. There is talent all over Europe but the investment money tends to reside in big hubs like London. Let’s get more of that money unlocked in places where it’s capitally efficient to build new startups, like Barcelona, Athens or Rome or Warsaw or Berlin.

The holidays are typically slow at many companies. The lack of business can seem daunting to ambitious, always-on-the-go entrepreneurs. Colin Sprake, motivational business speaker and author of the upcoming book The Entrepreneur Success Recipe (Morgan James Publishing, 2013) says the best way to avoid anxiety during the holidays is to be prepared.

Related: An Introvert's Guide to Surviving the Holiday Season

"Many entrepreneurs don't plan for slower periods, this adds a huge amount of stress over the holiday season and often has the entrepreneur living a life of anxiety and fear rather than one of enjoyment with family and friends," says Sprake. He offers these six tips to make use of your holiday downtime.

Any entrepreneur who has launched a company will tell you that running a startup is stressful, time-consuming and full of high risk. But before a company is truly able to transition into the growth stage of is business, it must pass through many ups and downs. But while roughly 80% of startups fail in the first five years, there are a number of things that entrepreneurs can do internally to help push their company past startup and into phase two. Below, you'll find the most important things to keep in mind.

Every new startup I know dreams of being funded early by one of the 318,000 active Angel investors in the USA alone. But many entrepreneurs don’t realize that Angels are also extremely discerning in the projects that they will invest in, rejecting approximately 97% of the proposals submitted to them, according to the California Investment Network.

Most of these investors are members of Angel groups that have a rigorous filtering and screening process, to select the top 3% and most fundable proposals. What is this daunting process, and what can you do to optimize your chances of surviving it? Over the past 10 years, I have had the opportunity to see how the process works, several times from the startup side, and more recently from the Angel perspective (as a member of an Angel group screening committee).

Happiness is the only true measure of personal success. Making other people happy is the highest expression of success, but it's almost impossible to make others happy if you're not happy yourself.

With that in mind, here are nine small changes that you can make to your daily routine that, if you're like most people, will immediately increase the amount of happiness in your life:

Our lives are peppered with mentors, bosses, colleagues and teachers who have helped us with our professions. But I bet you're like me and got your first career lesson from family.

I'll never forget mine. I think of it almost daily around the holidays.

For no other reason than that he wanted to, my father would regularly write up the results of my 11-year-old youth soccer matches and submit them to our hometown newspaper. Like all good community papers back in the '80s, the paper printed my dad's three-paragraph reports verbatim. My father later told me the only thing he made sure to do was by season's end reference every player on my team. He always included the names of a few kids from the opposing team, too.

A small business owner’s life can be a real roller coaster. There’s no road map, and pitfalls lurk around every corner. While making mistakes may be a great way to learn, it’s a lot better to avoid them in the first place.

Having started a few businesses in my career, and having helped thousands of small businesses launch across the country, I thought it would be useful to highlight some of the hard-won experience I’ve learned throughout the process.  Below are 7 deadly sins for starting a small business:

We all have our favorite songs. Some of them are by artists that had long and inspiring careers.

As we enjoyed song after song, album after album, a relationship formed. We began to understand what to expect from that artist. And that awareness creates a fan who organically checks out every new album and live event in their area — with a nudge, of course.

There is something to be said for repeat impressions. Twelve songs in, I know what to expect from Anita Baker, the mellow side of Coltrane, and Sade.

Amid rising concerns over post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental illnesses, two MIT startups are developing wrist-worn sensors that can detect physiological changes—including perspiration and elevated temperature—that may signal the onset of events like anxiety attacks.

The data collected by these devices can be fed into an algorithm that aims to learn what triggers anxiety, or when people may be about to engage in a risky behavior. One goal is to head off destructive behavior, from drug abuse to suicide and violent outbursts, and to help with treatment.

As we anticipate a new year characterized by unprecedented interest in healthcare innovation, pay particular attention to the following three emerging tensions in the space.

Tension 1: Preventive Health vs Excessive Medicalization

A core tenet of medicine is that it’s better to prevent a disease (or at least catch it early) than to treat it after it has firmly taken hold.   This is the rationale for both our interest in screening exams (such as mammography) as well as the focus on risk factor reduction (e.g. treating high blood pressure and high cholesterol to prevent heart attacks).

A look at the life of Benjamin Franklin as an entrepreneur and innovator. Economist Mark Skousen, a descendent of Franklin’s, has studied the founding father for years and is the author of several books about him including “The Wit and Wisdom of Benjamin Franklin.” In this talk, Mr. Skousen looks at Franklin as a successful businessman who made enough money to retire at the age of 42. Franklin’s rags to riches self-help book, “The Way to Wealth” has been in print for over 200 years. The Kansas City Public Library hosted this event.

We’re really excited about a new feature that we’ve released on CoFoundersLab: the Entrepreneur Archetype Assessment. This is the first step toward measuring deeper dimensions to help you find the perfect co-founder.   Sign in to your CoFoundersLab account to take the assessment and add your Entrepreneur Archetype to your profile. This will help us recommend the best candidates to build your founding team.   Don’t have a CoFoundersLab profile? Sign up for free!

The aging of star clusters is linked more with their lifestyle than with how old they actually are, according to a new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope study coauthored by Steinn Sigurdsson, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State.

“Our observations of star clusters have shown us that, although they all formed over ten billion years ago, some of them are still young at heart,” Sigurdsson said. “We now can see how fast the clusters are racing toward their final collapse. It is as if each cluster has its own internal clock, some of which are ticking slower than others.” Sigurdsson is a Penn State theorist working in collaboration with the European Research Council’s Cosmic-Lab project. The study is published in the current issue of the journal Nature.

A lot of scientists have been busted recently for making up data and fudging statistics. One case involves a Harvard professor who I once knew and worked with; another a Dutch social psychologist who made up results by the bushel. Medicine, too, has seen a rash of scientific foul play; perhaps most notably, the dubious idea that vaccines could cause autism appears to have been a hoax perpetrated by a scientific cheat. A blog called RetractionWatch publishes depressing notices, almost daily. One recent post mentioned that a peer-review site had been hacked; others detail misconduct in dentistry, cancer research, and neuroscience. And that’s just in the last week.