Suppressing a newly discovered gene, drr-2, lengthens the lifespan of roundworms without reducing caloric intake, University of Michigan scientists have found.

Scientists who study aging have long known that significantly restricting food intake makes animals live longer, due to less oxidative damage in animal cells and a slower decline in DNA repair, a decline that normally occurs with age. It’s thought that limiting oxidative damage and slowing the decline in DNA repair could help postpone or avoid many age-related diseases.

When Carter Cleveland, the CEO of the art-trading website Art.sy, moved his fledgling company from Palo Alto, Calif., to New York City he left behind arguably the best place to start a tech business in the U.S.

Home to giants like Facebook, Google, Apple, Intel and eBay, Silicon Valley is well known as the Mecca for high-tech companies – and entrepreneurs hoping to start one. One third of US-based venture capital investment happens in the Valley, according to PriceWaterhouse Coopers and the National Venture Capital Association. By Cleveland’s own admission, he “couldn’t go into a cafe without hearing pitches” in San Francisco.

So why go east? A recent Princeton grad, Cleveland said he left primarily because of his customers. Art.sy is an online trading post for fine art and, according to Cleveland, over half of his market is in New York City. But Cleveland added that location isn’t everything. New York’s tech scene is booming, and Cleveland wanted to join the party.

China, that contradictory land of coal, smog, and renewable energy, may be on the verge of leadership in another green technology sector: electric and hybrid vehicles. The Chinese government announced today a plan to invest up to $15 billion in a state-run venture that will research, develop, and generate standards for upcoming hybrids and EVs. The venture will also put millions of electric cars on the road in the coming years, according to 2010/08/20/business/energy-environment/20car.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss" target="_blank">The New York Times.

The news will come as no surprise to anyone who follows the Chinese vehicle market. GM recently teamed up with Chinese state-controlled automaker SAIC to develop fuel-efficient engines and transmissions, for example, and we declared Chinese car company BYD as one of our Most Innovative Companies this year.

Have you heard about Travis Lloyd Kevie’s business venture? It seems that Kevie, a homeless man in Penryn, CA, discovered an innovative, if not legal, way to make a buck. He bought a six pack of beer at a convenience store, broke into a vacant bar across the street,  put up the “Open” sign and started serving customers. As sales went up and inventory went down, he headed back across the street to buy more booze. With that initial investment of a six pack, Kevie grew his gross revenue to over $1300 in cash and merchandise before he was arrested four days into his venture.

The Placer County sheriff’s office arrested Travis Lloyd Keyes on charges of burglary and selling alcohol without a license. According to the sheriff’s department, Keyes had been serving about 30 customers a day for the four days.

These microscopic life forms are blooming as a result of the oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico from the Macondo 252 deep-sea well

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill added roughly 800 million liters of hydrocarbons to the Gulf of Mexico. One quarter of that has been burned, captured or skimmed, according to U.S. government estimates. That leaves the rest for trillions of microbes to feast on—a petroleum cornucopia that first became available April 20 when the oil platform exploded and the spill started.

If the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, Carol Browner, are to be believed, those microbes have made quick work of the spill, consuming as much as 50 percent of the remaining oil already. Actually, the bacteria, fungi and other life that consume hydrocarbons do not work that fast, taking weeks to months to years to degrade oil. And, unfortunately, the microbes' speed is limited not by the availability of oil—or even its droplet size, which is why chemical dispersants have been used to break up the oil into microbe-friendly globules—but by the availability of various nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus that wash into the ocean via rivers carrying sediments from the continents.

The EU's new innovation strategy must do more to link research, education and entrepreneurship if it is to tackle Europe's "innovation gap", Dr. Georg Schütte, Germany's junior minister for education and research, told EurActiv in an interview.

Germany wants to see the European Research Area anchored in the European Plan for Research and Innovation, and is pushing for less red tape as well as mutual recognition of common national funding procedures.

"We expect a clear commitment to the principle of excellence and to a simplification of procedures and reduced bureaucracy at national and European level," said Schütte, state secretary at the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

Enjoy this peaceful, and impressive, mid-afternoon thought-break, courtesy reader Demarcus via Submitterator.

Your Web content is your portal to your customers. It’s how you will build interest in your business, tell them about yourself, and put them on the right path for whatever your end goal is. So when you’re writing it, what should you be keeping in mind? How do you make sure your Web content accomplishes everything that you need it to?

Here are four things to consider when writing Web content. Just a little something to get you started.

Your Customers

The main goal of your content is to attract your customers. That’s whose attention and interest you’re vying for. But just because you’re on the Web in front of a global audience doesn’t mean that EVERYONE has no become your customer. They haven’t. Your customers are only the people in your area who would benefit from the product you sell or the service that you provide. When you write your content, you want to be creating information that will specifically benefit them. In order to do that you.

Ah… the joys of summer. That time of the year when people gather for backyard barbecues, children sign up to play in baseball leagues, and families turn their attention to summer vacation plans.

Summer is also a time to reflect on the reasons why you decided to become a small business owner and declare independence from the traditional 9-to-5 workforce.

So, why did you decide to declare independence?

Was it because you wanted more flexibility and freedom in your life? Perhaps you were tired of working for someone else and wanted the independence that comes from working for yourself.

Becoming a self-employed writer is a dream career for many academics, particularly those in the humanities. Writing is what we do, after all. Surely we can claim that particular expertise after all those years spent alone with a laptop? And having your own business is tremendously appealing because we're not used to working for someone else or being in an office for the traditional 9-to-5 shift.

Susan Geib has worked for herself for 20 years, gradually shaping her writing business into a marketing-communications consultancy, based in New Hampshire and focused on serving colleges and universities. The skills she learned while earning a Ph.D. in American studies at Boston University serve her well in her work. But, in an interview, she offers a few important caveats to graduate students and faculty members who are considering a professional writing career.

After carefully studying different poses adopted by successful entrepreneurs at different stages of a startup life-cycle, Sid has arrived at a recommended routine. Adopting the right pose at the right time is likely lead to greater success.

After decades investing in “white male nerds who’ve dropped out of Harvard or Stanford,” venture capitalist John Doerr broke a pattern in July: he invested in a woman.

Not that Kathy Savitt was a risky bet.

The former CEO of American Eagle Outfitters and a senior executive at Amazon, Savitt built Lockerz.com, a social networking and commerce site for ages 13 to 30. She grew it from 50 college and high school students to 15.5 million users in less than twelve months, leveraging natural networks of friends and social influence. In the web technology world, she’s a rock star.

Combining various imaging techniques, an interdisciplinary team of scientists in Europe have developed a way to visualize and quantify early embryogenesis in zebrafish, according to a study published this week in Science.

"We want to turn all the verbal descriptions of biology into something that's going to be quantitative and formal," said embryologist and coauthor Nadine Peyriéras of the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France. "We've been largely unable so far to do that."

The team used two imaging techniques that take advantage of the fact that signals are emitted when lasers interact with living tissues. One type of light emission, known as the third harmonic generation, provides information about the contours of the cell. The second harmonic generation, in contrast, provides information about mitotic spindles. Together, these two signals yielded a three dimensional view of developing zebrafish embryos, a model organism of vertebrate embryogenesis, allowing the researchers to measure cell size and shape and track cell lineage throughout the first 10 cell divisions. 

I pride myself on being a man of substance. A wonk. A nerd, even. And like most nerds, I don’t have a great eye for fashion. So I ask this question seriously: what did you think of Chelsea Clinton’s Vera Wang wedding dress? Want to buy it? What if I can sell it to you really, really cheap?

On Aug. 5, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) introduced S.3728: the Innovative Design Protection and Piracy Prevention Act. He’s got 10 cosponsors—including three Republicans—and a big idea: to extend copyright protections to the fashion industry, where none currently exist. That’s right: none. I—well, not I, but someone who can sew—can copy Vera Wang’s (extremely expensive) dress and sell it to you right now (for much less), and Wang can’t do a thing about it.

New Jersey – Yesterday New Jersey Governor Chris Christie signed the Offshore Wind Economic Development Act, a law that will help spur the development of a vibrant offshore wind industry in the state.

The bill directs the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities (BPU) to develop an offshore renewable energy certificate program (OREC) that calls for a percentage of electricity sold in the state to be from offshore wind energy. This percentage support the development of at least 1,100 megawatts of generation from offshore wind projects, according to the announcement from the office of the governor.

From Amazon's product recommendations to Pandora's ability to find us new songs we like, the smartest Web services around rely on machine learning--algorithms that enable software to learn how to respond with a degree of intelligence to new information or events.

Now Google has launched a service that could bring such smarts to many more apps. Google Prediction API provides a simple way for developers to create software that learns how to handle incoming data. For example, the Google-hosted algorithms could be trained to sort e-mails into categories for "complaints" and "praise" using a dataset that provides many examples of both kinds. Future e-mails could then be screened by software using that API, and handled accordingly.

Maybe you have wondered how successful entrepreneurs got that entrepreneurial killer instinct. They see opportunities and capitalize on them. Are those people born with it or is it a skill that can be learned?

There are probably some people where it runs in their veins, but I know that I am not like that. My shift from working for large coporations to entrepreneurship has been a bumpy ride. However, I am sure that, as long as you learn from your mistakes and you have a lot of desire to start a business of your own, you can make a success of owning and running a business.

However, if entrepreneurship does not run naturally in your veins, then you will have to spend more time learning the nature and principles of owning a business. During that learning process you will of course make mistakes, but that in itself is not a bad thing. If you do not make mistakes you will never learn.

The U.S. Department of Energy announced today that it has earmarked $120 million to be divided among about 120 organizations working to weatherize buildings for greater energy efficiency. The grant money will be distributed under the banner of its Weatherization Assistance Program, which has already retrofitted thousands of homes across the country.

Like all of the DOE’s funding initiatives, this drive toward more innovative weatherization methods is expected to create thousands of jobs for construction workers, plumbers, electricians, contractors and manufacturers in local communities, while also shaving power use and greenhouse gas emissions.

Huffington Post contributor and DoubleClick co-foundedr Kevin O'Conner reports that "Venture Capital firms screen through hundreds--if not thousands--of investment "opportunities" each month.

"To differentiate yourself from your competitors, it's important to avoid the classic mistake companies make while trying to sell themselves to VC firms--not presenting a solution to a consumer need--and to learn what steps you can take to have VCs wanting to invest in your idea.