INTERNET buffs are often accused of being flabby couch potatoes. Tell that to the several hundred people who battle it out in Los Angeles on July 29th-31st for the title of the fittest person on Earth. The finalists of the CrossFit Games are the the sturdiest of more than 26,000 competitors from 59 countries who responded to challenges posted on the internet.

The participants filmed themselves lifting barbells and performing calisthenics in busy streets, driveways, or public parks, then uploaded their feats on the web for other aspirants to judge. Few are professional athletes (though sponsorship is growing). Many have careers in physically taxing vocations like the army or firefighting, though a surprising number are school teachers (not just PE, mind you). What unites them is a passion for practical fitness—and the voyeuristic camaraderie of watching others punish themselves through the same task, often against the unlikeliest of backdrops and using whatever (typically hefty) objects happen to be to hand.

Through the launch of his 20 Under 20 Fellowship initiative, billionaire entrepreneur and hedge funder Peter Thiel is engaging in one of the most radical experiments yet about the future of American higher education. He is, essentially, paying 20 of the best and brightest students in the country to drop out of college and, instead, to move to Silicon Valley to pursue their personal entrepreneurial passions for two years. He is bankrolling each of the students to the tune of $100,000 each, hoping that the combination of youth, passion, genius and a significant amount of capital backing will result in truly world-changing innovations. Instead of getting tied down with tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt, these college students will have two years of freedom to pursue their entrepreneurial passion. Is this the new American dream?

It's hard to ignore that we're currently in the middle of a fundamental change in the way that we think about higher education. A number of significant trends - like the skyrocketing cost of a college education and the emergence of new, distributed models of learning across the Internet - have led many to challenge the conventional wisdom of plunking down $100,000 or more for a four-year college education - especially if that pricey college education means that you'll basically have to become an indentured servant on Wall Street if you ever want to pay off all your student debt. (This assumes, of course, that your last name is not Rockefeller or Forbes or Gates)

At a recent biotech conference, we heard a speaker start his remarks by pointing to the "threat from Asia." He talked about the large number of Ph.D.'s in molecular biology now being trained in China and felt certain that the next stage would be an attempt by Chinese companies to move strongly into the development of new medicines. To the speaker, this was anathema.

But think about that for a moment. Right now, bright young Chinese students are studying hard at their universities. In a few years, they'll burn the midnight oil at Chinese biotech companies or research institutes. They'll work for another dozen years doing experiments and clinical trials—all so they can invent new drugs, which may save millions of lives. How mad should we be?

Many people start businesses because they enjoy doing something a recreationally. Since we’re all told to do what you love, what makes more sense than to start doing as a business something that you love to do as a hobby?

The most obvious example I can think of, are people who start restaurants because they love to cook. Unfortunately, there’s much more to the restaurant business than just cooking. Marketing, staffing, inventory, and customer relations all take up more time than cooking for new restauranteur. So do the unglamorous jobs like cleaning the toilets. Unfortunately, I think that many small business entrepreneurs are not prepared for this reality and this is reflected in the failure rate for small businesses.

An international team of astronomers led by the California Institute of Technology and involving the University of Colorado Boulder has discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe.

The distant quasar is one of the most powerful known objects in the universe and has an energy output of 1,000 trillion suns — about 65,000 times that of the Milky Way galaxy. The quasar’s power comes from matter spiraling into the central supermassive black hole, estimated at some 20 billion times the mass of our sun, said study leader Matt Bradford of Caltech and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Because the quasar — essentially a voraciously feeding black hole — is so far away, its light has taken 12 billion light years to arrive at Earth. Since one light year equals about 6 trillion miles, the observations reveal a time when the universe was very young, perhaps only 1.6 billion years old. Astronomers believe the universe was formed by the Big Bang roughly 13.6 billion years ago.

More than seventy-six million men and women in the United States are presently feeling a major change. That would be the Baby Boomers, and they are the most powerful demographic in history. This represents the largest single sustained growth of the population in the nation’s history.

It also represents the largest group of creative people all alive and kicking – making music, writing books, purchasing and selling, and helping other people.

Your brain is gathering and processing details all the time. Well, this group of individuals, collectively, has amassed an incredible quantity of knowledge: facts, figures, images, ideas, words, and music, all in the course of fifty plus years.

Fundraising is brutal. Actually, according to Paul Graham, “Raising money is the second hardest part of starting a startup. The hardest part is making something people want.” More startups may fail for that reason, but a close second is the difficulty of raising money.

A while back, I outlined “Most Startups Get No Professional Investor Cash” for startups, listing angel investors as alternative #6. I still get a lot of questions on these mysterious and often invisible investors, so here is another attempt to bring them out of the ether.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo's economic development program, which he began to unveil last week, is either the greatest thing since sliced bread or an effort that could create big-time winners and big-time losers among the 10 regions of New York state.

Depends on who you talk to.

First the upside. I called Jerry Kremer, who was an influential state legislator for 23 years. Now he's CEO of Empire Government Strategies, a lobbying firm based on Long Island that focuses on economic development.

Investors pumped a total of $8 billion into U.S.-based venture companies during the second quarter, a decrease of about five percent on the previous quarter, according to new data released by Dow Jones VentureSource.

In the energy and utilities industry, investment levels fell more precipitously.   The sector saw investment of roughly $566 million in 29 deals, which amounts to less than half the capital raised in the second quarter of 2010.

Venture investments into the U.S. energy sector were dominated by renewable power capital commitments, which accounted for $540 million of the $566 million total invested in the sector.

The changes taking place around us right now are at a fundamental level – they reflect the fact that whole economies have begun to function differently. That change manifests also in transcendent events, like a potential US debt default, and the huge US debt.

As new economic dynamics emerge, however, we still tend to put old questions to ourselves like: how can American companies be more innovative?

Is American innovation suffering?  Frank Moss, of the MIT Media Lab says new technologies that could transform human life are being developed, but America is in danger of losing the edge that comes from cutting edge research.

Moss, director of MIT Media Lab from 2006-2011, tells Steve Fast that technology is currently being developed that turns science fiction concepts into reality.

“Cyborg” robotics, artificial intelligence and button-sized computers are detailed in Moss’s book about the Lab, “The Sorcerers and Their Apprentices.”

In the last several years, China's leadership has placed high priority on shifting its economy from a "factory model" based on low-cost manufacturing of products designed elsewhere, to one that includes more original Chinese technology and design. To do this, Beijing has instituted so-called "indigenous innovation" policies resulting in massive investments in research-and- development infrastructure and higher education.

As a result, China is expected to overtake Japan soon as the world's second-largest R&D investor, although it still remains far behind the U.S. China's domestic doctorate awards in science and engineering have also increased more than tenfold since the early 1990s, and its share of the global pool of researchers has grown from less than 14 percent in 2002 to more than 20 percent today.

Only a few years ago, China's approach to innovation hardly played a role in international economic diplomacy. Today, it is a hot topic in U.S.-China economic relations, adding further to contentious disputes about exchange rates, trade and foreign direct investment.

Embracing the open innovation trend, Cleveland Clinic has issued to the public a $30,000 challenge to design a surgically implantable microsensor to monitor the healing of soft tissue.

The microsensor challenge is the first of what’s slated to be many featured on the Clinic’s new “innovation pavilion,” which is hosted on the website of InnoCentive, a Massachusetts company that specializes in open innovation and crowd sourcing. The pavilion was set up to spur innovative medical research.

Each of the challenges will present a medical problem or situation where a better, yet unknown, solution could be available for patients, according to a statement from InnoCentive.

In February, we wrote about Lool Ventures a new Israeli seed fund looking to fill the country’s surprising void for true seed-stage funding and mentorship. Today, another one is launching. It’s called Initial Capital, but it has a strange twist: The firm will also be investing in seed deals in Brazil.

There aren’t many obvious synergies between those two markets. Israel has a deep entrepreneurial culture; while Brazil is only recently associating entrepreneurs with something other than the villains in telenovelas. Meanwhile, Brazil has a massive market full of domestic opportunities, while Israel typically has to build companies for other markets.

Blackboard Inc., maker of the popular college course-management software, announced on Friday that it had agreed to a $1.64-billion buyout by a private-equity firm, Providence Equity Partners.

The announcement came after the company said in April that it had received offers, setting off fevered speculation about the identity of its suitors. Blackboard plans to close the deal in the last quarter of this year.

The buyout is a big change in direction for one of higher education’s most prominent vendors, which had faced mounting pressure to both produce quarterly profits and shore up a declining market share for course-management software against an increasingly well-financed field of competitors.

The lines between states and even countries are pretty arbitrary: The ties you have with people 50 miles away aren't going to be too-much affected by some imaginary line drawn up 200 years ago. What if you could remap the United States -- not by geography, but rather social ties?

MIT's Senseable City Lab has done just that, by analyzing mobile-phone calling patterns across the country. By looking at calls between cellphones, they've revealed states and cities that are closely connected -- and similarly, regions which aren't nearly as closely connected as you'd think. Here's their main result, color-coded by regional affiliation:

Every startup wants to be a predictable success, yet so few ever achieve this enviable position. In reality, getting there is not a random walk, and requires an understanding of the stages that every business must navigate and the organizational characteristics necessary at each stage.

Les McKeown, in his recent book “Predictable Success” outlines these stages and characteristics for any business. He points out, for example, that every business should anticipate the early struggle stage, a possible fun stage, and probably a turbulent whitewater phase, before they can hope for the predictable success stage.

This stage is defined as a point where you can set and consistently achieve your goals and objectives with a consistent, predictable degree of success. Unlike previous stages, where you may not know how or why you have survived, you now know why you are successful, and can use that information to sustain growth in the long term.

It's a great time to be a tech startup founder right now, but as valuations are getting off the charts and with hordes of investors wanting to get bigger stakes in the startup market, raising money is becoming a tricky affair.

"Don't overoptimize," says Mark Suster, venture capitalist at GRP Partners. "And raise at the top end of normal."

Suster explains what he means in the video below, and shares invaluable advice for startup founders about how to raise capital and what common mistakes entrepreneurs make.

That desk job of yours is probably more dangerous than you think it is.

Plenty of things you do every day in the workplace are slowly chipping away at you. From the printer to your keyboard, the dangers presented in an office can have real effects on your physical well-being, just as mental strains can hurt you in the long-term.

For inventors, Silicon Valley has a whole lot going for it: Lots of like-minded people, an economic ecosystem that’s supportive of entrepreneurs, sunshine, and, of course, non-compete agreements.

In California, as well as in states such as Alaska, Connecticut, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Washington and West Virginia, non-competes are essentially unenforceable. Lee Fleming, of Harvard Business School, Matt Marx, now at MIT Sloan School of Management, and Deborah Strumsky, of the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, wanted to find out if non-compete agreements were influential in inventors’ decisions about where to live. Their conclusion: States that insist on enforcing strict non-compete agreements are shooting themselves in the foot. They’re encouraging a brain drain that is already leading their most productive, most collaborative innovators to work elsewhere.