Think about the last business meeting you held. Was it dynamic and engaging? Did your employees furiously scribble key takeaways in their notebooks and leave fired up about their projects? Did everyone get a chance to contribute to a meaningful discussion?

If your meetings look like something out of an "online productivity" stock photo, then well done. For many of us though, our meeting reality looks a little more like resentful employees hunched over laptops, multitasking during a half hour of unstructured conversation. If that sounds familiar, read on.

Clothes speak volumes about us, conveying messages about wealth, taste, and personal beliefs. So in this age of ubiquitous screens and social sharing, it's no surprise that textiles have become another platform for electronic communication.

Yet up to now, price and material limitations have restricted these garments to couture and concept—red-carpet spectacles like Nicole Scherzinger’s Twitter dress, which spelled out in microLEDs fan tweets, scrolling the across "The X Factor" judge’s lap in real time. But two new efforts are commercializing the technology, creating consumer fashions that allow the wearer to project any electronic text or image she desires.

Image: http://www.fastcodesign.com

You may not realize it, but your brain is working against you.

Think about it: How many times have you tried to focus in a meeting, only to succumb to a burning desire to check your Instagram?

Or how about the time you were told to come up with 10 new ideas—and found you couldn’t even brainstorm one?

Turns out there are a slew of psychological tendencies that can get in your way at work, affect your productivity, and even hurt your rise through the corporate ranks.

Outbreak alert: six students at the Chicago State Polytechnic University in Illinois have been hospitalized with severe vomiting, diarrhoea and stomach pain, as well as wheezing and difficulty in breathing. Some are in a critical condition. And the university's health centre is fielding dozens of calls from students with similar symptoms.

This was the scenario that 17 third- and fourth-year undergraduates dealt with as part of an innovative virology course led by biologist Tammy Tobin at Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania. The students took on the role of federal public-health officials, and were tasked with identifying the pathogen, tracking how it spreads and figuring out how to contain and treat it — all by the end of the semester.

A young great white shark had a near-death experience when the retreating tide left it stranded on a beach in Cape Cod on Monday afternoon. Beachgoers spotted the giant fish writhing on the sand, and threw water on its gills to help it breathe.

State officials arrived soon after, and dragged the shark into the water using a long rope attached to a motorboat, as seen on video of the shark rescue. At first, the shark looked limp and lifeless. But it came to after the officials held it close to the moving boat, allowing water to flow over its gills.

Image: ATLANTIC WHITE SHARK CONSERVANCY/WAYNE DAVIS

In January, I participated in the Chicago Booth Private Equity and Venture Capital Lab, where I had the opportunity to work with the great team at Second Century Ventures, a consumer and SMB tech focused VC based in Chicago, for 6 months. Having spent a considerable amount of time talking to entrepreneurs, sourcing deals, conducting due diligence, and developing investment theses, I thought I would share my learnings with all those interested in Venture Capital as a career path.

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 in January, VSP’s so-called Project Genesis glasses use technology that is mostly hidden.

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com

When it comes to starting a business, you need funding, right? After all, if you don’t have money to get started, then how do you actually expect to, you know, get started?

Luckily enough, there are a variety of ways to go about obtaining investments for your business. Of course, depending on the specific type of company you plan on starting could determine the course of action you take.

Marketing operations is certainly not the sexiest part of marketing, but they are becoming the most important one. With businesses unable to keep pace with evolving consumer behavior and the marketing landscape, the pressure is on to put marketing operations—skilled people, efficient processes, and supportive technology—in a position to enable brands to not just connect with customers but also shape their interactions.

Arlington County benefits greatly from its location on the border of Washington DC. It is home to the Pentagon, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (whose research created the Internet) and the National Science Foundation. More than 8,000 Federal employees work there, and tens of thousands more private-sector and nonprofit jobs are enabled by Federal spending. The concentration of nationally-known universities has given the county a remarkably educated workforce, in which more than 73% of adult residents has a graduate degree. Its high-tech public school system is ranked in the top 2% nationwide.

Researchers at Oregon State have patented a new strain of seaweed that tastes like bacon when it's cooked.

The seaweed, a form of red marine algae, looks like translucent red lettuce. It also has twice the nutritional value of kale and grows very quickly. Did we mention it tastes like bacon?

There may be a thousand definitions of success, all true, but there are 50 qualities that every modern day entrepreneur is likely to possess. When you examine the list, you’re likely to find many qualities that you’re personally familiar with. If you can’t identify with all of them, don’t fret. With practice and a winning attitude, each quality on the list can be developed with time, commitment, and a winning attitude.

Few terms are more misunderstood than "urban sprawl." Generally, it refers to the spatial expansion (dispersion) of cities and has been use to describe urbanization from the most dense (least sprawling) in the world (Dhaka, Bangladesh), the most dense in the United States (Los Angeles) and also the least dense in the world (such as Atlanta and Charlotte, low density world champions in their population categories).

Image: http://www.newgeography.com 

Venture capitalists increased their bets on U.S.-based technology and health-care companies in the second quarter, confident that the underpinnings of the business are sound despite signs that parts of the market are overheating.

Investment totals are approaching levels last seen in the dot-com era, with $19.19 billion invested from April through June, according to Dow Jones VentureSource. That was a 24% increase over a year earlier and nearly matched the fourth quarter of 2000, when $19.72 billion was invested.

In the winter of 2013, something unusual happened. Y Combinator backed its first nonprofit, accepting Watsi into its batch and sending the message that nonprofit organizations could operate like startups, and that tech companies could learn a lot from the social sector too. Suddenly, that leap of faith Grace Garey had taken two years earlier — deciding to join Watsi’s tiny founding team rather than getting a traditional job — seemed remarkably prescient. Just out of school, she found herself running marketing for an organization that had captured the attention of both the tech and nonprofit communities.

Rudeness in the workplace isn’t just unpleasant: It’s also contagious.

Encountering rude behavior at work makes people more likely to perceive rudeness in later interactions, a University of Florida study shows. That perception makes them more likely to be impolite in return, spreading rudeness like a virus.

Today I have a founder who discusses why it’s so important to start a company for the right reasons.

The biggest lesson from that business was that he’ll never do it that way again.

Nir Eyal is the founder of AdNectar which is a virtual goods deployment system allowing social networking sites and applications to monetize their virtual goods inventory.

Whether this is a conversation you have in your head, or one that’s happened to you in talking to your boss, you know the hard truth: as your team grows, it becomes geometrically more complex to manage your team. As this image from StackOverflow below shows, every person you add to a team adds many more lines of communication, making everything harder for your team.

Image: https://getlighthouse.com 

Tattooed shoulder to wrist, Neki Davis is sitting in the small, comfortable space that is her second home. Workers in white aprons and hair nets mill around while she settles down at a small work table/breakfast nook that's always crowded with something or other.

This is no hipster hangout—it's Davis's shared factory, where for a year and a half now, she’s been baking sheet after sheet of her Early Bird granola with the help of a handful of locals from the Brooklyn area. Here in the Red Hook neighborhood, behind the only colorful door on an otherwise drab, industrial drag, Davis spends her days working alongside two other female artisans: Betsy Devine, proprietor of Salvatore Bklyn, and Homa Dashtaki, the California transplant behind White Moustache yogurt.

Image: http://www.fastcompany.com 

Whether you're applying for a job or hiring for one, you inevitably have to have a potentially awkward conversation about salary. But who should offer the number first and what's the best way to bring it up?

Career expert Alison Green (aka Ask A Manager) helps this reader figure out how to broach the subject of salary in a way that is mutually beneficial.