After a planned launch of space station supplies next week, the first stage of a SpaceX rocket will perform a high-speed U-turn above the atmosphere, fire its engines and fly back to Cape Canaveral.

The booster's landing attempt minutes after liftoff will be the latest in CEO Elon Musk’s quest to develop reusable rockets, a breakthrough he sees as revolutionary for spaceflight and essential to one day colonizing Mars.

Image: http://www.floridatoday.com

The region’s work in technology and innovation was described Friday as “game changing” by a powerhouse of business leaders — including General Electric chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt.

“Industry will expand in places that have the talent to support advanced manufacturing, the leadership to provide a competitive business environment, and … the will to compete,” Immelt said. “Ohio gets this. It’s why GE has a rich history in the state and an equally strong future.”

Image: http://www.mydaytondailynews.com

It’s the same old story: batteries are holding us back. Technology is advancing so quickly across so many industries, but the next-generation batteries needed to power all of these advancements more efficiently are nowhere to be found. Researchers are hard at work on improving existing battery tech though, and they’re also developing exciting new kinds of batteries that could someday proliferate. Now, scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology think they may be on an exciting path toward building a new type of liquid battery that uses gravity to generate energy.

Image: http://bgr.com

In April, Michigan Strategic Fund approved $3.5 million in funding to support the acceleration of technology transfer from Michigan’s higher education institutions, nonprofit research centers and hospital systems.

Michigan State University’s Translational Research and Commercialization Program has received $1 million of that funding, matched by $1.27 million from MSU, designating the university as the first “innovation hub” in the state.

Kellogg Co. in June joined the ranks of big food companies with venture capital arms, unveiling "eighteen94 capital" (1894 for short) to make minority investments in companies pursuing next-generation innovation.

The company has earmarked $100 million to invest in start-up businesses pioneering new ingredients, foods, packaging, and enabling technology.

"As consumer preferences move toward more diverse tastes and trends, the pace of innovation in the packaged food industry continues to intensify," said Vice Chairman Gary Pilnick. "By investing directly in the most promising entrepreneurs and ventures, we can increase greatly our access to game-changing ideas and trends that could become significant sources of growth for us. 

San Francisco — What's good for unicorns isn't necessarily good for other tech start-ups.

Such is the climate in the venture-capital world that unicorns — dozens of privately-held start-ups valued at more than $1 billion — are gobbling a higher percentage of VC-funded investments in the U.S., according to a report Thursday from market researcher PitchBook Data.

A record 39% of capital investments, or $8.78 billion, went to unicorns in the second quarter, more than double the $4.06 billion (20%) in the same quarter a year ago.

BOSTON — He came to America on a student visa, earned a master’s degree from Babson College and is now starting a new business, but Abhinav Sureka worries that he’ll have to return to India. To stay, he needs an H-1B visa, a temporary work permit typically obtained through a lottery with lower odds of winning than a coin toss.

To help foreign students like Sureka beat those odds and keep their companies here, Babson and at least five other U.S. schools are using a new approach that critics describe as exploiting a legal loophole.

Image: Abhinav Sureka, right, of India, types in his work space at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass. The alumnus of its graduate school has started a business and hopes to get an H1-B visa with Babson’s help. (Charles Krupa/AP)

The most requested amenity by leisure travelers at hotels is not a heated pool, free breakfast, or even a minibar. It’s free Wi-Fi, according to Hotels.com, and it could be a symptom related to Americans’ inability to unplug.

While vacations are supposed to be the time to get away from the office and relax, 68% of Americans are unable to do so, checking personal and work email at least once a day, according to a study by Intel Security. Less than half abstain from checking work emails while on vacation, even though 65% of people who do so say their vacation was more enjoyable.

When college tuition rises, fewer people take the plunge into entrepreneurship, according to a new working paper by Harvard Business School economist Gareth Olds.

The paper isn’t studying Millennials and how student debt affects their career choices. Instead, it’s focused on their parents.

Olds found that in the U.S., a 10% increase in the average price of in-state college tuition corresponds with a 13.9% decrease in the number of parents with college-age children who become self-employed. The effect is strongest for parents with multiple children and holds up even after controlling for factors such as state economic conditions.

Being a nonsmoker and living in a dorm with roommates who all smoke can be a recipe for disaster — especially when they see no issue with lighting up inside.

An unfortunate university student from Nanning in southern China found himself in this exact situation.

But instead of resigning himself to fate, the 26-year-old, who goes under the pseudonym of Shandianzhililiang on Weibo, came up with an idea that has bewildered Chinese netizens.

Image: WEIBO

Following in their Senate colleagues’ footsteps, a House subcommittee signed off on a budget increase for the National Institutes of Health Thursday. The increases for fiscal-year 2017 confirm lawmakers’ public pledges to establish a pattern of improved budgets for the agency, which before last year saw more than a decade of flat funding. 

Image: Lydia Polimeni/National Institutes of Health

MONTREAL, QUEBEC--(Marketwired - Jul 7, 2016) - Networks of Centres of Excellence

Canada's publicly funded health care system is a source of pride and a defining value for Canadians. They rely on it for timely access to universal, high-quality and innovative treatments and services that are based on need, not on the ability to pay. To support Canadians battling cancer, the Government of Canada is investing $15 million over five years in the Centre for Commercialization of Cancer Immunotherapy (C3i). Immunotherapy is an emerging area of medicine that uses the power of the immune system to combat cancer. When brought to market, C3i's form of cancer treatment stands to revolutionize cancer care by providing access to non-toxic, highly efficient cures that do not rely on chemotherapy.

Knowledge@Wharton: Based on the research that you have done, how many people on average are not having a good day when they are going to work?

Caroline Webb: There are a lot of surveys that suggest that around half of the workforce are not particularly enjoying their everyday working life. That’s pretty sad when you think about how many of our hours each day we spend at work. Even for the rest of us, those of us who might love our jobs, deep down the day-to-day can be not as great as the big picture. Small stuff can get us down, even when we love our jobs. I became very interested in what it would take to make everyday life a little bit easier as we go through our tasks and our priorities for the day.

After years of puzzling over how its grant-review process might be shortchanging younger scientists, the National Institutes of Health appears to have figured out a more fundamental truth: There just aren’t enough of them applying.

A report published on Thursday by several federal-grant experts breaks down NIH award rates by age groups, finding that older scientists aren’t necessarily any more successful than are their younger counterparts.

Just two Silicon Valley startup accelerators — Alchemist Accelerator and Y Combinator — are better options than St. Louis-based Capital Innovators for aspiring startups hoping to raise venture capital.

That’s according to a study published by investment research firm CB Insights on Tuesday.

The ranking is sorted by the median amount of money raised by founders who go through its program. Alchemist Accelerator out of San Francisco came in at No. 1 on the list, with median post-program funding of $8.1 million. Y Combinator, long said to be the most successful accelerator program in the world, was No. 2 on the list, with median post-program funding of $4 million. At No. 3 was Capital Innovators, led by CEO Judy Sindecuse, with median post-program funding of $3.5 million.

Image: Judy Sindecuse, CEO of Capital Innovators

Who says congress can’t get anything done?

Despite the ongoing gridlock that has seemingly left the legislative branch unable to accomplish even the most routine of tasks, there does seem to have been one area where Republicans and Democrats have consistently found common ground: opening up restrictions on capital markets. It was a trend that continued on Tuesday, when the House of Representatives passed HR bills 4854, the Supporting American Innovators Act, and HR 4855, the Fix Crowdfunding Act, each by wide margins.

Image: https://www.equities.com

The Kleinanlegerschutzgesetz (Small Investor Protection Act), the law regulating crowdfunding in Germany went into force on the 10th of July 2015. A year after, the German Crowdfunding Association takes stock of its positive impact on the German crowdinvesting market and points to strong needs for improvement.

As the name of the law reflects, the legislator’s intention when publishing this law was to better protect investors from dubious offerings of securities after several bankruptcies occurred in the grey capital market.

Image: https://www.crowdfundinsider.com

The crowdfunding bill recently passed by state legislators and awaiting Gov. Pat McCrory’s signature would make it easier for small businesses to raise money from investors, but it isn’t expected to unleash a flood of fundraising deals.

“The people who are following crowdfunding aren’t seeing tons and tons of state offerings” in the more than two dozen other states that have passed crowdfunding laws, said Raleigh attorney Jim Verdonik of Ward and Smith. Verdonick was a proponent of the bill that was passed unanimously by both the House and Senate last month.

Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan, who is also the chief mentor of Kochi Startup Village, and others will launch the world's first digital incubator for student startups, here on July 13, a statement said.

The statement by the Kochi Startup Village said the country needs more than one million new jobs a month for the next 20 years to employ all its youth and these jobs would mostly come from new start-ups if the right environment is created.

A new analysis of major startup accelerators finds that Boulder-based Techstars has the highest portion of companies landing follow-on funding from investors after the program.

New York City-based investment analysis firm CB Insights published an analysis of results from the most active U.S. startup accelerator boot camps. The point is to give entrepreneurs a sense of how well the programs help startups become “fundable” businesses.

Image: David Cohen, TechStars founder and CEO, in a 2011 file photo