Epidemiological studies have shown that drinking caffeinated beverages reduces one’s chances of developing some types of cancer, including UV-associated skin cancer. Now, researchers propose a possible mechanism for this observation—the inhibition of a DNA repair pathway that sensitizes cells to death after sun exposure.

The results, published today (August 15) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, lend support to the idea that caffeine could be added to sunblock to increase its protective effects.

“At the cellular level, they’re showing that caffeine…is working in this way of inducing an apoptotic mechanism,” said cancer epidemiologist Joanne Kotsopoulos of the University of Toronto, who was not involved in the research. “It’s biologically plausible, and it has good implications” for potential skin cancer prevention strategies.

Let me guess -- you are reading this article because you doubt your audience is online? Welcome to the club! Many marketers and business owners share your hesitation and dip their toes into the waters of inbound marketing with caution. But the truth is, your business needs to transform in order to match the needs of a new marketplace.

Today, we tap into online social networks to search for product recommendations, ask for reviews, and share experiences. We conduct research by typing keywords into search engines and browsing through the list of results. We feel delighted when customer service representatives instantaneously respond to our questions and challenges with an email or a tweet.

Founders, who are desperate for financing, debate whether the faucet will turn on if they engage a placement agent. This is a question to be addressed in a real-world context. In the first place, the great majority of first-round financing is not economically interesting to an investment-banking firm. The fee for a placement is usually in the range of 2 to 5 percent of the amount raised. Assuming a $1 million first-round financing, a fee of $20,000 to $50,000 is not likely to attract many takers in the investment-banking fraternity, when fees for acting as financial adviser in contested merger-and-acquisition transactions run into eight figures. There are exceptions to this, as in any other proposition. Encore Computer, because of the splendid reputation of its founders, attracted a high degree of interest from major-bracket investment bankers in the seed round; William Poduska, on leaving Apollo Computer and organizing Stellar, was able to titillate investment-banking appetites to a fever pitch. (Neither firm, it should be noted, remains as an independent entity.) However, the traditional founder is wasting his time beating down the doors of the elite investment bankers to help raise money in the early rounds. Smaller investment-banking houses sights are set lower than Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs, are more likely candidates, but even they are not enthusiastic about hitting the pavement to arrange a first-round investment because the amount of work is enormous and the payoff is often uncertain.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, the U.S. Department of the Treasury announced the approval of applications for State Small Business Credit Initiative (SSBCI) funding from 11 states and Washington, D.C.  This funding will help create new private sector jobs and spur more than $3.6 billion in additional small-business lending. The SSBCI, which supports state-level, small-business lending programs, is an important component of the Small Business Jobs Act that President Obama signed into law last fall.

“These funds will provide critical support to state-level programs that help expand small-business lending and spur private sector job growth,” said Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Neal S. Wolin. “Unlocking credit for small businesses will provide a powerful boost for investment and job creation in local communities across the country.”

People often say, “Apple doesn’t do consumer research.” This usually precedes an argument against the need for market research of any kind. But the designers at Apple do conduct research--it’s just not the traditional kind found in consumer-behavior textbooks. It’s informal, impromptu, and driven by acute observations of the context in which their products are used. Being insightful isn’t a question of talent; it’s a question of awareness.

Awareness is essentially being mindful of the cultural and social constructs that surround you and the people for whom you are creating something new. You’ve felt it before. The moment you decide you’re going to buy a yellow MINI Cooper, you start seeing them all over town. Of course, they were there before, but the difference is that now your awareness has been focused.

There’s no doubt that managing a biotech company is an enduring challenge, even during less tumultuous economic times. Now, entrepreneurs are contending with resources that are incredibly tight, an economy that is unsettled, a stock market on a roller-coaster ride, and research and development budgets that are being slashed. The stewardship role entrusted to the management teams of biotech companies has become especially tricky as they are required to make tough choices that balance the needs of investors and the pursuit of scientific discovery. They must also manage the chaotic world of innovation within the regulatory boundaries of FDA approval process, and give freedom to creative scientists without letting go of the fiscal discipline.

So how are biotech companies handling the pressure? At BDO USA, our analysis of the 10-K SEC filings of publicly traded companies listed on the NASDAQ Biotechnology Index (NBI) over the last four years provides a window into the impact of the economic turmoil on biotech’s operations, and strategies that management teams are using to remain financially viable. For the purpose of the analysis, biotech companies were classified as “large” (between $50 million and $300 million in revenue) and “small” (less than $50 million in revenue).

Many Americans root for their hometowns, whether they do so by supporting a sports team, participating in local government or just bragging about their origins and environs. Even those who have lukewarm feelings about where they live would agree on one thing: not all cities are created equal. As part of its "Cities" special issue, Scientific American has gathered lists ranking metropolises across the U.S. on aspects of green living, pollution, health and technology.

Today we feature lists that rank cities based on their green living opportunities, and then add up each city's rankings to find the best overall green living cities. Admittedly, this summed result may be invalid. (For starters, what if other lists were generated and added in to change the outcome or what if the methods across each list are inconsistent?) We think, however, it still offers a benchmark worthy of consideration.

True leaders realize that, by definition, the word "leader" places one at the front and not the rear. Yet many, many executives try to lead through fear and intimidation. This isn’t really leading at all. It’s pushing. Those of you with time in the military probably understand this concept well.

In startups, leading from the front means that you are not afraid to get your hands dirty, pitching in to get the job done. If you are the type of leader that likes to sit back and delegate, you shouldn’t have left your nice job at American International Group (AIG), unless you had no choice, of course.

Delegation is a great skill to have, but you have to lead effectively to earn the right to use it. Intimidating or berating other team members from a position of power doesn’t work in lieu of leadership. If one of your executives hasn’t learned that, you need to get rid of them. Otherwise they will kill you in the end, one way or another.

Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) has invested some money in the Singaporean government's Clearbridge Accelerator, a tech incubator supported by the country's National Research Foundation (NRF).

The Clearbridge Accelerator was launched in 2009 to focus on "emerging and disruptive technologies." It has four current tenants in the medical and biotech fields.

The amount of Draper's investment has not been disclosed (sigh), but he was described as a "super-angel" in a statement from the incubator. Additionally, incubator managing director Johnson Chen noted that Draper's "extensive networks will be crucial in helping (us) enter global markets." Chen said the incubator plans to double the number of its tenants within the next year.

Need to raise money for your business? Here are a few tips from entrepreneurs who have been there and funded that.

Micro Loans

If you are looking for a loan under $50,000, a microloan may be the way to go.

The Small Business Administration’s Microloan Program provides small, short-term loans through specially designated intermediary lenders, which are usually nonprofit community-based organizations.

The New Jersey Economic Development Authority has launched an initiative to advance a state-wide technology accelerator program.  The program will provide tech entrepreneurs in the state a showcase for their products, ideas and business and opportunities to receive funding.  The EDA will support the program with $450,000 over three years.

The EDA is calling for members of the tech community to submit overviews of how to develop the tech accelerator, including the overall structure of the program, the role of the EDA as an advocate, and the ability of the interested partners in engaging the technology service industry and supporting NJ businesses.

“Have you ever had a failed startup?” I asked Mark Wachen, the managing director of DreamIt Ventures’ New York accelerator program.

He laughs, “Well, in the mid 1990s, I had what one might call a start-down.” It was between graduating from Harvard Business School, helping to launch the original Sony Music website, running music promotions with Yahoo, leaving Sony and then returning to Sony that Wachen tried to launch his own company. He became distracted by the freneticism of the time, and people around him who said “I don’t like your idea, but hey there’s this other opportunity…” Shortly after, Sony recruited him back to start a corporate venture group, which Wachen cites as a great learning experience for his current role leading fresh young startups into the world.

At times, we hold ourselves back from taking a considerable financial risk associated with launching a new idea that has been stayed in the corners of our head. Crowd-finding websites and web applications as well let the designers to execute what they want to do without any worry of the financial loss.

Crowd-funding websites are planned to pull the risk out of that creativity and innovation that holds many designers. If you’ve been restraining due to financial risk associated with your idea, these sites can help you finance your idea, business startup or music project.

Your startup is gone, it’s never coming back, and you are in mourning. An entrepreneur whose business fails grieves similarly to anyone who has lost a loved one. The pain of losing a business is not only about a significant loss of income, but can send an entire identity into turmoil.

Most entrepreneurs define themselves by their business projects. They calibrate self-worth by what they accomplish or do not accomplish. In other words, if a project fails, then they are failures. If a project takes off, then they are wonderful. It’s the universal entrepreneur reaction.

The person who paid $70,000 to tour Facebook might have been trying to get some insight into how the company works.

Hopefully, that person read the walls.

When visiting Facebook, it's impossible not to notice the motivational posters peppered throughout the building. They seem to be there to remind Facebook developers to keep thinking like a startup, even as the company grows.

In what can only be described as a triumph of bad policy and craven politics, Congress and the Obama administration have spent the year focused on budget cuts, as the economy has faltered and unemployment has worsened. Official unemployment is 9.1 percent, but it would be 16.1 percent, or 25.1 million people, if it included those who can only find part-time jobs and those who have given up looking for work. For the past two and a half years, there have been more than four unemployed workers for every job opening, a record high, by far. In a healthy market, the ratio would be about one to one.

By a large margin, Americans have told pollsters that job creation is more important than budget cuts. Yet Republican leaders are wedded to austerity and appear to think that high unemployment will hurt President Obama politically more than it will hurt them, so they will likely resist efforts to create jobs, no matter how great the need.

MASSACHUSETTS IS blessed to be home to the greatest concentration of world-class hospitals, universities, and biopharmaceutical companies in the world. But a stagnating economy and looming federal debts will fundamentally alter our innovation ecosystem. How the Bay State adapts to change will have important implications for our local economy, and for medical innovation in the United States and globally.

Right now, the Bay State innovation economy is an enormous strength for our region and has provided great benefits to the nation and the world. Hospitals such as Mass. General and the Brigham regularly lead the rankings for patient care and innovative research. Universities such as Harvard and MIT attract the best professors and students from around the world. Leading local biotech companies such as Biogen, Genzyme, and Vertex have discovered and brought to market life-saving drugs for hepatitis, cancer, and other diseases. Small biotech companies such as Momenta have brought innovative biosimilar drugs to market. Key academic discoveries of the last decade, such as RNA interference and the elucidation of key mechanisms governing aging and diseases of aging, have spawned innovative emerging biotechs such as Alnylam and Sirtris. All of this has attracted the world’s great pharmaceutical companies, such as GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Novartis, and Sanofi. The vibrancy of our region’s academic and innovative environment is unmatched.

Point and counterpoint is an appealing construct when it comes to movie reviews, sports predictions, and even politics. But what does it mean when you have two conflicting conclusions about new directions in scholarship? That seems to be the case in recent discussions of the state of interdisciplinary research.

In her book Interdisciplinary Conversations: Challenging Habits of Thought (Stanford University Press, 2010), Myra H. Strober, professor emerita at Stanford, provides

Private equity firms can boost the value of their investment portfolio by applying a systematic innovation method along the entire investment value chain - before, during, and even after the investment.

Private equity firms are collections of investors and funds that put money into privately-held companies. Private equity investments provide working capital to a target company to nurture expansion, new product development, or restructuring of the company’s operations, management, or ownership. Private equity firms are betting on their ability to take control of the target, clean it up, make it more competitive, and then sell it for a higher price.  It is like "flipping" a home in the real estate market.

Do you have a favorite innovation video?

We asked you the global innovation community, to suggest videos for the Top 10 Innovation Videos of 2011.

Many people did, and they had the chance to win some of the $3,650 worth of prizes up for grabs.

Here are the Top 10 Innovation Videos of 2011 based on the submissions:

• Where Good Ideas Come From
• Innovation Acceleration
• Do Schools Kill Creativity?
• ABC Niteline – IDEO Shopping Cart
• Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy – First Followers