Keith Larrabee’s farm sits on 4,000 acres of California’s Sacramento Valley, between a coastal range of mountains to the west and the tall Sierra Nevadas to the east. It’s an area that traditionally gets much more rain than most of the drought-stricken state. Even so, Larrabee is always worried about the cost and availability of water for his orchards of walnuts and pecans and his 3,000 acres of rice.

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Researchers at the University of Southern California and Facebook’s Oculus division have demonstrated a way to track the facial expressions of someone wearing a virtual-reality headset and transfer them to a virtual character. That could make for much more rewarding socializing, work, or play in virtual worlds, because the expression of a virtual body double or otherworldly avatar could perfectly mimic that of a person’s real face.

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The Young and Restless—25 to 34 year olds with a bachelor’s degree or higher level of education, are increasingly moving to the close-in neighborhoods of the nation’s large metropolitan areas. This migration is fueling economic growth and urban revitalization.

• Well-educated young adults are disproportionately found in a few metropolitan areas. Two-thirds of the nation’s 25-34 year olds with a BA degree live in the nation’s 51 largest metropolitan areas, those with a million or more population.

The iPhone in your pocket has more computing power than the Voyager spacecraft that left the solar system two years ago. High-tech cancer drugs are being approved every month. A few years into the future, Google’s Calico project promises to extend our life span.

It’s easy, indeed, to be excited about the scientific and technological prowess of American companies.

Apple, Procter & Gamble, 3M — American businesses dominate the list of the most innovative companies in the world. And new companies trumpeting new products, financed by dynamic venture capital operations, continue to emerge from Silicon Valley, the Boston region, New York, Northern Virginia and elsewhere.

Image: Charles A. Haas, an engineer, inspects a model of the Telstar experimental communications satellite at the Bell Telephone Company lab in 1962.  - Associated Press

Is too much noise and unwelcome distractions from work colleagues killing your productivity and creativity?

And have efforts to create trendy open-plan offices and hot-desking left you feeling isolated, lacking privacy and having to work longer to catch up?

So much for productivity, creativity and feeling part of the joint. 

I considered the downside of open-plan offices and excessive hot-desking after a few recent story interviews went astray because of crazy workplace design.

The image below is a relic from my first out-of-college job with the Disney Company. A page from a “While You Were Out” message pad. (I re-discovered this as a bookmark in my copy of George Orwell’s 1984).

I was a marketeer at the Disney Vacation Club (Disney’s non-timeshare timeshare) when it first launched in ’92. We call it DVC, for short.

Do you dream of starting the next Snapchat or GrubHub? With an abundance of business success stories permeating every corner of the media, most aspiring entrepreneurs don’t get to hear about the reality of what business ownership is like for 99.99 percent of those who start a new venture.

Here are five of the most common myths -- and one really big truth -- about entrepreneurship you need to know before getting started. 

O ne of the most pressing issues for our society today is income inequality. That is, the rich get richer while the poor struggle to access meaningful opportunities. Janet Yellen, President Obama, and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich have all cited it as a growing concern for our economic well-being.

Joey Hundert — social entrepreneur, start-up consultant and founder of the “Sustainival,” the world’s first green carnival — has been working for a decade and a half to promote ventures that both make money and make the world a better place. And, when he can, he spends some time at Wharton as the School’s social entrepreneur in residence.

In a recent interview, Wharton management professor Tyler Wry talked with Hundert about his experience as an entrepreneur, the social enterprise energy among students, and what it takes to succeed in a business that has dual social and financial aspirations.

ROCKVILLE, Md., May 20, 2015  -- Today, Relevant Health, a newly launched innovative health technology startup accelerator focused on bringing products to market, announced that it is now accepting applications from health tech startups for its Fall 2015 class. Additionally, the accelerator launched its website and the portal to its streamlined application process. U.S. and international startups are encouraged to apply.

Relevant Health's five-month program involves an intensive product-focused curriculum that gives founders of health tech startups the skills to define, develop, position and launch a viable health tech product. The new accelerator will be based out of a brand-new cowork space in the Rockville Innovation Center, centrally located in the heart of the Montgomery County (Maryland) life sciences corridor. Companies admitted to the accelerator will have access to the cowork facility along with other support that includes up to $50,000 in funding, mentorship, development support from a pool of software engineers, and access to the local health tech ecosystem.

A new report released by MIT’s Industrial Performance Center shows if Massachusetts can help facilitate more collaboration among manufacturers, it would help strengthen the innovation economy within the state.

Manufacturing is vital to any economy, yet its importance to the U.S. has been steadily declining for decades. Despite that fact, the United States remains the world’s second largest manufacturer.

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In medical school I was taught that the incidence of chronic, disabling disorders, particularly Alzheimer's disease, increases inexorably with age. I therefore expected that people older than 95 years, often called the oldest old, would be my most debilitated patients. Yet when I became a fellow in geriatrics, I was surprised to find that the oldest old were often the most healthy and agile of the senior people under my care. In fact, the morning I was scheduled to interview a 100-year-old man as part of a research project, he told me we would have to delay the visit. He had seen 19 American presidents take office, and he would be busy that morning voting for the next one.

Self-managed teams may sometimes adopt task divisions that are all wrong for the project. Managerial intervention can help avoid this.

Suppose you were on a team tasked with manufacturing a single handmade wooden toy. For this project, a few component objects must be made from scratch and slotted together to form the finished piece. How would you break the project into manageable tasks to be divvied up among the team?

Robots are learning how to accomplish more than simply moving from place to place or maybe vacuuming a floor. In fact, researchers at the University of Maryland recently used videos to teach a robot how to make salads. The robot, named Julia (after Julia Child), learned each step of the salad making process after watching YouTube videos of people completing those same steps. It was then able to emulate those steps itself, though not without some difficulty. In certain areas, most notably pouring the dressing there were challenges. The video below spells out more:

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Google’s announcement Friday that it will test small, pod-style autonomous cars on public roads might seem surprising to anyone enthusiastic about—or just familiar with–conventional cars. The vehicles look cute but hardly impact-resistant, and they have a top speed of only 25 miles per hour.

But some experts suspect that the unconventional two-seater vehicle, known within Google as “Prototype,” represents a practical strategy to get fully autonomous cars into everyday use.

Image: Cars like this one will start driving themselves around Mountain View, California, this summer.

One of the most appealing benefits of becoming an entrepreneur is gaining control over your professional life. As an entrepreneur, you are singularly responsible for making all decisions about the business, and while others might be able to give you advice and point you in a certain direction, ultimately you have the final say.

PitchBook's latest Global Private Equity and Venture Capital Benchmarking Report examines over ten years' worth of global private equity and venture capital fund performance. Powered by data from the PitchBook Platform and sponsored by R.R. Donnelley, the report analyzes fund performance utilizing metrics such as IRRs, fund return multiples, fund cash flows and more.

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Venture Capital (VC) is often regarded as Vulture, Vapour and Vampire Capital. Although VC investment is a great startup tool, it can become a real pain at times. Things will go fine as long as your company is growing steadily. But when you start differing with your VC’s views on your product, hiring, market, etc., that’s when the bubble bursts.

Our shift from bureaucratic to distributed leadership took nearly a century. According to Deborah Ancona, a professor of management and organizational studies at MIT, companies in America circa 1920s were "super bureaucracies." Then, in the 1960s, people focused on interpersonal relationships and lots of discussions centered around trust and empathy. In the 1990s, it was all about organizations needing to undergo large-scale changes and vision. Finally, today’s workplace centers on what’s called variously eco-leadership, collaborative leadership, or distributed leadership.

A lot of factors go into finding the right job, and like many things in life, location plays a huge role. And while the coasts have long been considered industry hotspots, the best cities for jobs might surprise you.

According to Glassdoor’s Best Cities for Jobs report, the top three are Raleigh, North Carolina; Kansas City, Missouri; and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, based on a comparison of the 50 most populated U.S. metro areas.