Vacations are pretty great already. But as psychological researchers discover more about how the human brain works, we’re gaining insights into exactly how to crank up the enjoyment factor—and why you should. Here are nine strategies for getting the most bliss out of your precious vacation days, and returning without needing a vacation from your vacation.

Manufacturing may no longer drive the U.S. economy, but industrial growth remains a powerful force in many regions of the country. Industrial employment has surged over the past five years, with the sector adding some 855,000 new jobs, a 7.5% expansion.

Several factors are driving this trend, including rising wages in China, the energy boom and a growing need to respond more quickly to local customer demand and the changing marketplace.

I love the job title "growth hacker." It’s an indictment of the entire field of marketing.

How many marketers had to forget to do their job before we had to create a new title to remind them about the growth part?

I have the privilege of being Executive Director of a nonprofit whose sole mission is to help advance the adoption of solutions related to sustainability. We execute our mission, in part, by the award of two $100,000 grants to early stage companies with working prototypes. (Intrigued?  Go to OceanExchange.org.) People often ask me what our voting delegates and sponsors—who represent business, capital markets, NGOs, governments, and academia—look for in these early stage companies.

It’s an ongoing debate just how much influence universities have over the startup landscape anymore. There’s an exhaustive list of entrepreneurs who never finished their degrees  ho actively speak out against the importance of higher ed in the tech industry, and accessing all the pertinent skills has never been easier. Meanwhile coding bootcamps churn out job-ready developers in a mere fraction of the time it would take to get a traditional degree (albeit, for about the same price tag).

PayPal started trading as an independent company on Monday, following its spin out from eBay last week — and it's already worth more than some of the biggest tech companies.

According to this chart put together by Statista, as of early Monday, PayPal had a market cap of $49.5 billion, which is higher than that of Netflix, eBay, and Twitter. That means the market is giving PayPal a much higher value than its former parent company, eBay — the company that previously acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion back in 2002 — before splitting it out due to pressure from activist investors like Carl Icahn.

Innovation in America, and Silicon Valley in particular, has never waited for permission. The ease of starting companies, the low barriers to accessing capital, and (of course) the existence of an open and free internet on which anyone can build anything have all been major contributors to the vitality of Silicon Valley and the wider tech industry, which permeates nearly everyone's daily life. The most successful companies of our time — Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter and more — didn't have to ask anyone for permission to innovate. They didn't have to explain their businesses and get special licenses. They just came up with an idea and built it.

It's hard to predict when we might die, but the hope is that it won't happen until we're fairly old.

But researchers don't want to stop there. For years, scientists have been struggling to figure out what our DNA can tell us about how and why we age. 

And scientists may be getting closer to figuring out how to work with specific genes to do things like help people live longer.

SETI—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—has been one of the most captivating areas of science since its inception in 1960, when the astronomer Frank Drake used an 85-foot radio telescope in the first-ever attempt to detect interstellar radio transmissions sent by beings outside our solar system. Yet despite its high public visibility and near-ubiquity in blockbuster Hollywood science fiction, throughout most of its 55-year history SETI has languished on the fringes of scientific research, garnering relatively scant funding and only small amounts of dedicated observation time on world-class telescopes.

Image: The Green Bank Telescope is the world's largest steerable radio telescope, and one of three telescopes Breakthrough Listen will use extensively in its groundbreaking search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Geremia

It’s hard to see history when it’s happening around you. But for all of us right now, the world around us is dramatically, if almost invisibly, changing, turned on its head by technology. 

In just a few decades, we can expect our everyday lives to be significantly different from now, in ways that would be incomprehensible to those who laid the foundations for the modern world through the 19th century breakthroughs in how we used coal, made metal and generated power. 

IBM (NYSE: IBM) is introducing a new commitment to enable the next generation of developers with the Academic Initiative for Cloud, aimed to mentor and energize them to innovate using IBM Cloud technologies. The new program will create cloud development curricula using Bluemix, IBM's platform-as-a-service, in over 200 universities, reaching more than 20,000 students in 36 countries.

Additionally announced today, is a series of industry Hackathons reaching tens of thousands of new developers and a set of diversity programs for women coders, all based on Bluemix, aimed at creating innovative hands-on experiences that propel radical ideas and innovation in cloud application development.

Why wear a special activity-tracking wristband if you can get the same features from the glasses you’ve already got on your face?

VSP Global—whose Marchon eyewear division makes and distributes glasses for brands such as Nike and Calvin Klein—is building glasses that it says can accurately track the wearer’s steps. And unlike Google Glass, the obtrusively in-your-face headgear that Google stopped selling to consumers in January, VSP’s so-called Project Genesis glasses use technology that is mostly hidden.

Some of the secrets behind Amazon’s phenomenal success as an online retailer can be discovered inside a million-square-foot warehouse that sits amid bucolic scenery in the town of Robbinsville, New Jersey. The building is one of Amazon’s most advanced fulfillment centers, and it houses technologies that allow the company to deliver products to customers at amazing speed. Goods are identified, sorted, and packaged with computer-assisted precision, while employees work in tight collaboration with the plant’s automated systems in shifts that run around the clock.

How do you ensure that your business remains relevant in an age where technology evolution is taking place so rapidly? What is the best way forward when designing a digital product for a consumer in the digital age? The answers to these questions are less daunting when you realise there are digital product design experts more than willing to guide your design team in realising your next digital product.

What motivates individuals to achieve goals differs depending on their cultural background.

Most of us have set goals for ourselves before, whether it’s losing weight, saving money or training for a marathon. Goals help us to focus our minds on achieving what we set out to do. We know that setting goals makes us more likely to attain what we want. But there are differences in what motivates people to achieve goals, which has implications for managers who have to use them to generate a behavioural response, either in customers or employees.

Regain control by better understanding your inner “purpose”.

Like most executives, I travel a lot. This can mean a lot of planning, anxiety, frustration and tiredness. In the past, I would return from a trip in a bad mood, having had no time for myself, and plunge back into work and family life. I’d moan and complain, creating a ruckus if my tea wasn’t just right.

No ocean creature can match the enthusiasm of this 6-month-old orca. Sorry, giant squids.

The excited young calf, named J50 by the Pacific Whale Watch Association (PWWA), was spotted swimming with her family in the Salish Sea near British Columbia. The baby whale must have seen one too many Red Bull commercials, as it tried to fly right as photographer Clint Rivers aimed his camera.

The most valuable assets of a new startup are the people on the team, and the most challenging task of the entrepreneur and team leaders is to spend their leadership time and energy productively. Cash isn’t always the scarcest resource startups have to invest – more often it’s the leadership capital of under-experienced and over-stretched entrepreneurs and co-founders.

Most new startup founders start out by assuming they need to spread their leadership efforts evenly across all team members. They soon find that doesn’t work, and they fall back to dedicating their efforts to the performance issue or crisis of the moment. Unfortunately this often makes them enablers of team member bad behavior, and spiraling down to a dysfunctional team.

The U.S. healthcare sector, which represents one-sixth of the nation’s US$17 trillion economy, is experiencing a number of simultaneous upheavals. Indeed, it’s difficult to think of another industry of this size that is facing as much disruption and change in the way its services are delivered and financed, and even in how it is regarded, in such a short time. The causes are a unique combination of technology and innovation, and of regulation and reform.

Almost every company will face disruption in 2015: The dynamics of reaching customers are changing, technology shifts are speeding up demand for new products and innovation, and efforts to maintain margins have become a high-wire act. But when you look hard enough, these hurdles represent opportunities. Pulling from Strategy&’s recent analysis of industry trends, we’ve unearthed the hidden strategic gem for the most threatened sectors.