The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, in collaboration with the Johns Hopkins Health System (together known as Johns Hopkins Medicine, or JHM), has been awarded a $19.9 million grant by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), over a three-year period, to improve the quality and efficiency of health care delivered to JHM patients.

The grant is part of CMS’s $1 billion Healthcare Innovation Challenge, a competitive initiative that seeks to identify and support innovative opportunities to improve care delivery and achieve its three-part aim of “improving the individual experience of care, improving the health of populations, and reducing the per capita costs of care for populations.”

Two swimming strokes—one that pulls through the water like a boat paddle and another that whirls to the side like a propeller—are commonly used by athletes training for the Olympic Games. But elite swimmers and their coaches have long argued over which arm motion is more likely to propel an aquatic star toward a medal.

A university research study has picked a winner. A team supervised by a Johns Hopkins fluid dynamics expert has found that the deep catch stroke, resembling a paddle, has the edge over sculling, the bent-arm, propeller-inspired motion.

Sometimes you know your job just isn't right for you. Maybe you're in the wrong field, don't enjoy the work, feel surrounded by untrustworthy coworkers, or have an incompetent boss. Most people would tell you to find something that's a better fit. But that may not be possible. There are many reasons you may not be able to leave: a tough economy, family commitments, or limited opportunities in your field. So what do you do when you're stuck in the wrong job?

What the Experts Say According to Gretchen Spreitzer, professor of management and organizations at University of Michigan's Ross School of Business and coauthor of "Creating Sustainable Performance," people are highly dissatisfied when their job has no meaning or purpose to them, provides little opportunity to learn, or leaves them depleted at the end of the work day.

The Subcommittee on Technology and Innovation today held a hearing to learn about different approaches universities and nonprofits are taking to transfer the results of federally-funded research. Passed in 1980, the Bayh-Dole Act was designed to improve collaboration between commercial concerns and nonprofit organizations, including universities, in addition to promoting the utilization of inventions arising from federally supported research and development.

"The transfer of knowledge from universities into the marketplace can have profound economic and societal impacts, so we are always looking for more ways to encourage this process," said the Subcommittee's Vice Chairman, Rep. Judy Biggert (R-IL). "The collaborative efforts encouraged under the Bayh-Dole Act have brought about the commercialization of many new technological advances that impact the lives of millions of people across the nation."

The previously untold story of how an unprecedented network of high-achieving women from the world's largest companies, innovative startups, philanthropic organizations, government, and the arts combined forces to change the lives of girls and women everywhere.

Developing the Asian Innovation Scoreboard  

Published by : Korea Institute of Science and Technology Evaluation and Planning(KISTEP)

Project Director : Dong-hoon Oh, Research Fellow, KISTEP

Project Participants : Herin Ahn, Researcher, KISTEP                               

• Yong-hee Kim, Associate Researcher Fellow, KISTEP                              
• Hye-jung joo, Associate Researcher Fellow, KISTEP                              
• Yun-mi Ko, Associate Researcher Fellow, KISTEP

Peter Thiel is putting his Facebook proceeds back to work.

The billionaire investor, best known for his contrarian views and his early bet on the social network, has opened a new venture capital firm, Mithril Capital Management, with a $402 million fund. While it’s unclear how much Mr. Thiel, who sold some $640 million worth of shares in Facebook’s I.P.O., contributed to the pot, he is the fund’s largest investor, according to a statement issued on Wednesday.

The firm, which is based in San Francisco, will fit somewhere between Mr. Thiel’s other investment firms, Founders Fund, which tends to focus on earlier stage investments, and Clarium Capital, a global macroeconomic hedge fund.

The economy was falling apart when Mark Kurtzrock launched Metis Secure Solutions into the headwinds of one of the worst recessions in the nation’s history.  

“It was pretty tough to find resources,” said Kurtzrock, president and CEO of the Oakmont-based maker of emergency notification systems, which opened its doors in November 2008.  

The company was fortunate to have an advantage: $300,000 in funding from a local business development agency, which bought it time to focus on product development and finding customers during a liquidity crisis that severely restricted financing for businesses throughout the United States and much of the world.

With the cost of drug development continuing to increase and venture funding in a drought, changes in the works for federal Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants aim to help fill the funding gap.

New rules in the reauthorized SBIR program that include funding increases, along with broader accessibility provisions, are expected to go into effect over the next six months or so and run until 2017, Michael Weingarten, director of the National Cancer Institute’s NCI SBIR Development Center, told a panel at the BIO 2012 convention, running June 18-22 in Boston.

Christin, 31, of Orange County, Calif., was laid off from her job as a digital music consultant in 2008. "I became so desperate that I even applied for minimum-wage retail jobs," she says.

After three months of trying to get back into the traditional workforce, Christin committed to getting herself back on track, just a completely different one. She shifted her thought process and started looking for a new opportunity. The result? She started Green 4 Your Soul, a one-stop shop for all things green. She'd been developing the idea for three years, but never had time to pursue it while working full-time.

The National Institutes of Health's Biomedical Workforce Working Group (PDF) spent a year examining available data on the number and fate of biomedical researchers through different stages of their careers, and last week it released its report(PDF). The recommendations of this subcommittee of the Advisory Committee to the NIH Director include providing supplements to training grants that help graduate students prepare for alternatives to academic careers, capping how long a graduate student can receive NIH funding, and shifting graduate student funding out of investigators' grants to training grants and fellowships. Frustrated by the lack of comprehensive data, the panel also recommends that NIH require institutions receiving NIH funds to report on the career outcomes of both graduate students and postdoc researchers, and that it work more closely with other federal agencies to create and coordinate data collection efforts. A second report, this one from the Diversity in Biomedical Research Working Group of the ACD, was released the same day. Its recommendations include increasing attention to tracking, reporting, and evaluating the outcomes of trainee activities; exploring efforts to determine and combat real or perceived biases in the NIH peer review system; piloting implicit bias and diversity awareness training for reviewers and program officers; and appointing a chief diversity officer for NIH.

“Realism is a philosophical state of mind that professes that truth consists in the mind’s correspondence to reality” ~ Wikipedia

I remember the first time one of my mentors told me I had to accept that things were not as I wanted them to be. They went on to encourage me to always take reality and use all of my skills, talents and intangibles to make things happen within it. Some of the best advice I ever received.

Prior to the recession, many companies and even startups were acclimated to prosperity, maybe too comfortable. We have now been through some turbulent times, but has your strategy really changed? All too many simply hunkered down to wait out the economy.

Smart entrepreneurs are making changes now, to be more agile in defining strategy, making organizational changes, and analyzing markets for change. The rebound may be here, but business will never be the same. Look for new volatility, caused by inflation or deflation, new government regulations, and of course new technology and even more determined competitors.

Indiana has moved up the life sciences ladder and is now at the top of the leading national list. According to a Battelle/Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) Report “State Bioscience Industry Development 2012″ released today at the BIO International Conference in Boston, Indiana is one of only two states (along with Puerto Rico) that have specialized bioscience employment in four of the five subsectors – Agricultural Feedstock & Chemicals, Drugs & Pharmaceuticals, Medical Devices & Equipment, Research, Testing & Medical Laboratories, and a new subsector, Bioscience Distribution (which includes agricultural seeds, biomedical equipment and supplies, and drugs and pharmaceuticals). New Jersey is the only other state to share this distinction. No state is specialized in all five areas.

The four subsectors that have an employment concentration of 20 percent or more of total U.S. employment are: Agricultural Feedstock & Chemicals, Drugs & Pharmaceuticals, Medical Devices & Equipment, and Bioscience Distribution.

Garage Entrepreneurship – Where is Your Garage At?

Dean Stell has looked at the pros and cons of Express Licenses, new contracts coming out of TTOs designed to speed up the technology transfer process. Essentially an Express License is a one-size-fits-all agreement available on a TTO’s website:  print it, sign it, submit it.

Pros

• Transparency in pricing. Organization A pays the same as organization B, and everyone knows what that is.

Scientists trying to understand why some people excel — whether as world-class athletes, virtuoso musicians, or top CEOs — have discovered that these outstanding performers have unique brain characteristics that make them different from other people.

A study published in May in the journal Cognitive Processing found that 20 top-level managers scored higher on three measures — the Brain Integration Scale, Gibbs’s Socio-moral Reasoning questionnaire, and an inventory of peak experiences — compared to 20 low-level managers that served as matched controls. This is the fourth study in which researchers have been able to correlate the brain’s activity with top performance and peak experiences, having previously studied world-class athletes and professional classical musicians.

The Johns Hopkins University (JHU), America’s first research university, in Baltimore, Md., USA, and the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI), a mobile and information technology development leader based in Berlin, Germany, have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to jointly research the innovative medical applications of integrated optical sensors: small, highly sensitive devices with disease-recognition capabilities.

Under the terms of this agreement — signed on June 19 at the 2012 BIO International Convention in Boston, Mass., USA — the two entities will study how the technology developed by HHI can be used in the detection, diagnosis and treatment of medical conditions. Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine researchers with clinical expertise in a variety of specialty areas, including oncology and infectious diseases, will collaborate with HHI’s scientists and engineers.

Many technology investors avoid hardware startups, fearing high costs, manufacturing headaches and distribution problems. A new hardware startup accelerator, HAXLR8R (“Hack-celerator”), is building on technology advances and the “maker movement” and hoping to change that.

The firm describes itself as the first seed-stage accelerator for hardware startups. In order to make it easier for hardware startups to develop, the 111-day program was based in Shenzhen, China so that the companies could get their prototypes quickly built while working closely with manufacturers.

The JOBS Act and crowd funding — are they the new paradigm?

The act is designed to allow small companies to go public with less red tape and fewer Securities and Exchange Commission regulations. Crowd funding is a model that allows the little guy, the small investor, to invest in promising young companies and give himself the opportunity to lose his shirt, same as the big guys who bought Facebook at $38 per share.

In early June, at the 10th Annual Venture Summit, sponsored by the San Diego Venture Group, 650 entrepreneurs, innovators, service providers and venture capitalists descended on the Manchester Grand Hyatt where they mingled, perused the 30 cool companies that were being showcased, and listened to Roger McNamee, an icon of venture capital.