In 1492 Columbus sailed off the map and thought he discovered a western route to the East. He called the inhabitants Indians being sure that he had reached the Indies. Actually he landed at Watling Island in the Bahamas and discovered the Americas. It made him one of the most famous explorers of our times.

Columbus was a great navigator. But unfortunately his estimates on the distance he needed to travel were wrong. He guessed the distance from the Canary Islands to Japan to be about 3,000 Italian miles (3,700 km, or 2,300 statute miles), while the correct figure is 19,600 km (12,200 miles).

Eco-conscious small businesses can take precautions this winter to ensure staff and visitors to their premises stay safe, while having the peace of mind that their de-icing activities involving rock salt are not having a negative impact on the environment. Even better, eco-friendly practices can be readily adapted to be used in a domestic setting too, so ecopreneurs who work at home can get in on the act too.

Sensible de-icing practices are important – and useful – because they balance practicality and safety with protection for wildlife, water sources and soil.

I am concerned that both patent and copyright protection, though particularly the former, may be excessive.

To evaluate optimal patent protection for an invention, one has to consider both the cost of inventing and the cost of copying; the higher the ratio of the former to the latter, the greater the optimal patent protection for the inventor. The ratio is very high for pharmaceutical drugs. The cost of inventing a new drug, a cost that includes the extensive testing required for the drug to be approved for sale, is in the hundreds of millions of dollars, yet for most drugs the cost of copying—or producing an identical substitute—is very low. And so the ratio of the first to the second cost is very high, making it hard for the inventor to recover his costs without patent protection (and for the additional reasons that the present value of the revenue from sale of the drug is depressed because of the length of time it takes to get approval, and that the effective patent term is truncated because the patent is granted, and the period patent protection begins to run, when the patent is granted rather than, years later, when the drug can begin to be sold).

It used to be more than one in four Wharton grads took jobs at investment banks. That number plunged to 16 percent in 2012.  According to the Financial Times, greater job insecurity in an industry struggling to adapt to regulatory change is driving MBAs away from investment banks. Grads are seeing more promise in private equity right out of school instead of after spending two years at a bulge-bracket bank. 

Welcome to fiscal year 2013! Of course in SBIR FY-13 is not handled in a uniform manner, so it's not easy to tell where a particular agency is at any given time. It is also not easy to know when each agency will implement particular provisions of the new SBIR law and policy directives.

The battle for SBIR reauthorization may have been won, but it is very questionable as to what you have actually won. There is not an "individual" "Darth Vader" at work, but small businesses are once again a victim of circumstance due to a combination of congressional disrespect (from a few but powerful forces), irresponsible knee-jerk reactions to the misdeeds of a few small businesses (let's call them what they are, "crooks"), subordination of small business interests to the "K" street lobbyists (let's call them what they are, the bosses of many of our most powerful congressional leaders).

Consequently SBIR has congealed into a blob of complexity that few understand, let alone agree upon, and it's affecting everyone including SBA, the agencies, small businesses, universities, primes, and the support networks.

Upgrading old laptops is more energy-efficient than purchasing newer, 'greener' models, German scientists said on Monday (1 October).

The German Öko-Institut study showed that the manufacturing part of information and communication technology (ICT) devices, such as notebooks or portable computers, counts for a very large part of the carbon footprint of the product, because the process is highly energy-intensive.

The production phase, with about 56% of the total greenhouse gas emissions of a notebook, casts a significantly higher impact than the use phase, the study showed. More exactly, if the lifetime of a notebook is assumed to be 5 years, 214 kilogrammes of carbon dioxide equivalents arise from its production and 138 kilogrammes or 36% from use.

In August 2009, President Obama announced a $2.4 billion grant program designed to create an electric vehicle battery industry in the United States. Three years on, the factories funded by those grants are sitting idle or operating well below their originally intended capacity.

The problem is simple. People aren't buying enough electric cars, and most of those that are being sold contain batteries made by established battery makers in Asia.

It's still early days for electric vehicles, but the idle factories point to the difficulty of starting a new high-tech industry from scratch.

The first chart, top left, shows the gap between the planned capacity for 2013

The braincase of a skull may well be, as advertised, a strongly built and cleverly engineered structure, but listening to all that incessant banging coming from the direction of the crab apple tree in the garden, one has to wonder: is it really strong enough to keep a woodpecker from having the most terrible headache? Multimedia

Slide Show Form That Follows Function Related

A Magnet for Pseudoscience (October 2, 2012) RSS Feed

Get Science News From The New York Times » And what about those rams and deer you see butting heads with such determined ferocity? The echoing, crashing sounds, the visions of extreme and repeated violence, the frequent tangling of horns — how do animals with an instinctive need for such brutish behavior prevent their brains from turning into rice pudding?

Parody products are making their ways to crowdfunding site, Kickstarter. What's more: they're actually getting funded. The Ostrich Pillow was posted on September 18th and it has already exceeded its $70,000 goal by more than $30,000 (via AllThingsD's Mike Isaac). It's been covered by Glamour, TechCrunch and The Next Web and more than 1,000 people have pledged to buy it.

Taking enough omega-3 fatty acid supplements to change the balance of oils in the diet could slow a key biological process linked to aging, new research suggests.

The study showed that most overweight but healthy middle-aged and older adults who took omega-3 supplements for four months altered a ratio of their fatty acid consumption in a way that helped preserve tiny segments of DNA in their white blood cells.

These segments, called telomeres, are known to shorten over time in many types of cells as a consequence of aging. In the study, lengthening of telomeres in immune system cells was more prevalent in people who substantially improved the ratio of omega-3s to other fatty acids in their diet.

Changes in ocean and climate systems could lead to smaller fish, according to a new study led by fisheries scientists at the University of British Columbia.

The study, published today in the journal Nature Climate Change, provides the first-ever global projection of the potential reduction in the maximum size of fish in a warmer and less-oxygenated ocean.

The researchers used computer modeling to study more than 600 species of fish from oceans around the world and found that the maximum body weight they can reach could decline by 14-20 per cent between years 2000 and 2050, with the tropics being one of the most impacted regions.

You like your current position, and you're doing well, but you just got a surprisingly attractive job offer. It's exciting. Your friends say they're happy for you. You expect to accept the offer.

But hold on just a minute. Let's assume that if you take that offer, you'll shift to a new function (or a new industry), and you'll enter a very different culture. You'll be required to move halfway across the country, and there'll be more business travel.

Should you take the plunge? Should you make a big bet or play it safe?

Any new job offer is an opportunity. But with opportunity comes risk. Deciding whether to take the new role or stay where you are is a tough choice. What if it doesn't work out?

When you start a company, you have to decide how you're going to get it off the ground. The question every entrepreneur faces is how to fund operations before money starts coming in the door. You have three broad options: Bootstrap: Fund it yourself, or with other members of the founding team.

(Reuters) - Venture capitalists, long the lifeblood of medical technology firms, are growing cautious on the sector after seeing their returns squeezed in a time of growing cost pressures for healthcare, a report by Ernst & Young said.

While venture capital investment levels have stayed fairly steady over the past five years, those funds were mostly raised before the financial crisis, the report said. The medical device industry's recent challenges have prompted investors to seek out more mature companies that can offer quicker and less risky exits and have made it harder for start-ups to finance their operations.

Could you pack more into each day if you did everything at the optimal time?

A growing body of research suggests that paying attention to the body clock, and its effects on energy and alertness, can help pinpoint the different times of day when most of us perform our best at specific tasks, from resolving conflicts to thinking creatively.

Most people organize their time around everything but the body's natural rhythms. Workday demands, commuting, social events and kids' schedules frequently dominate—inevitably clashing with the body's circadian rhythms of waking and sleeping.

It’s no secret that entrepreneurship is white-hot right now at Wharton. With all the buzz surrounding the likes of Warby Parker, the Lore guys, and the Firefly / Airtime for email teams, Josh Kopelman’s big move to 4040 Locust (fun fact: 4040 was Urban Outfitters’ first location), plus new clubs and competitions and course offerings across Penn, students have noticeably begun to take a strong interest in the startup world. This is the reason many of us applied to Wharton in the first place — to learn how to build a successful business, at the best place in the world to learn about business. Poll the class of 2013 and most would consider themselves “entrepreneurial,” yet they are still churning out cover letters and suiting up to meet with a laundry list of prestigious firms, in higher numbers than ever. There are certainly legitimate reasons to pursue a corporate position right out of college, but the peer pressure to lock down a high power job is discouraging to those who want to pursue an idea or a nontraditional academic/career path. I’d like to add some substance to the oft-repeated claim: There are other opportunities out there that may be better for you. And fortunately, this is especially true if you dream of being an entrepreneur.

The success of the India Innovation Growth Programme has inspired Lockheed Martin, one of the world’s largest defence contractors, to launch a global innovation future programme in August.

The winning idea in each of the three critical areas chosen — cyber security, energy security and healthcare — will get a funding of $25,000. This also commemorates the 100th anniversary of innovation at the Bethesda, US headquartered $46.5 billion turnover (2011) company, said John Evans, Corporate Vice-President, Technology and Innovation.

Get too many emails? Sick and tired of sorting through them? Want to jump start an email etiquette revolution? Here's your starter kit -- my email liberation rant just published in the Huffington Post.

(Yes, you can forward it to others and still honor what it's all about).

PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA—Last month, SLAC Labs (the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) reached its golden anniversary. After 50 years of operation the organization has built up quite a résumé. For instance, it claims six different Nobel prize-winning scientists for research that discovered two different fundamental particles. And today the facility keeps on churning out science: 1,000-plus papers come out of SLAC each year from the roughly 3,400 scientific professionals from across the world that utilize the facility.

Despite all the incredible work that has taken place within its walls, SLAC has rarely been open for media members to see (understandable, since a particle accelerator could get a tad dangerous). But on its most recent milestone, SLAC shut the power down for an afternoon in order to invite Ars and others in for a look (some Stanford staff members eagerly joined for their first glimpse, too). I'm not an expert in particle physics by any means, but I jumped at the chance to partake in this rare treat. Below are some images of the crazy things found within these intensely private walls.