Airplanes powered by coal -- at first blush it sounds about as attractive as the toddler chainsaw. But Accelergy in Houston says it has come up with a way to convert the ubiquitous rock into an economical, clear, and arguably clean form of jet fuel.

The company will initially try to sell fuel to the U.S. military -- the Air Force has already begun initial testing -- and has also started to field inquiries from China and some commercial aircraft and engine manufacturers. Biomass can also be substituted for coal, or at least part of it, in the recipe, depending on the desired characteristics of the final fuel.

The Department of Defense will likely set its standards for synthetic jet fuels in 2013, and CEO Tim Vail claims that Accelergy's fuel will be able to meet those standards.

It was September, 2005. I was fresh off of a workshop with a media company where the company's CEO noted, "Trees don't grow to the sky forever." The company's core business was strong, but the CEO told the group it had to innovate to sustain success in an increasingly turbulent environment.

A couple of days later, I was talking to my colleague Matt Eyring. He said, "So Scott, you've been a big supporter of Apple over the past few years. What do you think about buying some stock?"

"Trees don't grow to the sky forever," I told Matt.

Whoops.

Since late 2005, Apple's stock has quintupled. With a market capitalization of close to $250 billion, Apple is (at least today) the third most valuable company in the world, behind ExxonMobil and Microsoft.

Boston mayor Thomas M. Menino told a business breakfast audience this morning that the city intends to develop 1,000 acres on the South Boston waterfront and the Marine Industrial Park into an "Innovation District," and that the venture capital firm Spencer Trask & Co. will be holding a startup competition starting in July that will award the winner $25,000 to locate a business in that part of the city.

Menino revealed the award during his keynote speech at the annual "Globe 100" breakfast at the New England XPO for Business conference in the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center. In addition, Menino said that Spencer Trask would make "a standing $25,000 award" the following year to an Innovation District business to help it grow.

(Washington, DC) –Today, House Committee on Science and Technology Chairman Bart Gordon (D-TN) willintroduceThe America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010. The bill is expected to be considered under suspension tomorrow. Bills considered under suspension cannot be amended and need to pass with support from two-thirds of those present, rather than a simple majority.
 
The bill is identical to H.R. 5116 with two exceptions: it reduces the authorization period from five to three years, and it adopts language from the Motion to Recommit banning the use of the authorized funds to pay the salary of federal employees disciplined for looking at pornography at work. It includes the 52 amendments to H.R. 5116 adopted on the House Floor.
 
“The reintroduced America COMPETES Reauthorization Act is a 50 percent cut in the funding path from H.R. 5116 as introduced. While I certainly would have preferred the stability a five-year authorization would have given our science agencies, I am willing to compromise with the Minority, in the interest of getting a good bill through the House and to our colleagues in the Senate. This legislation is too important to our nation’s scientific and economic leadership to let it fall victim to political gridlock,” said Chairman Bart Gordon (D-TN).  “The bill has a less steep funding trajectory than the 2007 COMPETES, H.R. 2272, which passed the 110^th Congress 367 to 57, with the support of 143 Republicans, 101 of whom are serving in the 111^th Congress.”  
 
For more information on the Committee’s work on COMPETES, please visit our website.

The phenomenal growth of women-owned businesses has made headlines for three decades—women consistently have been launching new enterprises at twice the rate of men, and their growth rates of employment and revenue have outpaced the economy.

So, it is dismaying to see that, despite all this progress, on average, women-owned business are still small compared with businesses owned by men. And while the gap has narrowed, as of 2008—the latest year for which numbers are available—the average revenues of majority women-owned businesses were still only 27% of the average of majority men-owned businesses.

There are those who will say that these numbers substantiate what they always knew: Women just don't have what it takes to start and run a substantial, growing business. But I don't buy that: More than a quarter of a million women in the U.S. own and lead businesses with annual revenue topping $1 million—and many of these businesses are multimillion-dollar enterprises. Clearly, many women have the vision, capacity and perseverance to build thriving companies.

The results of a major study into mobile-phone use and cancer were released this week, but media interpretation of the findings has varied wildly.

One British newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, stated that the study had "found people who speak on their handset for more than half an hour a day over 10 years are at greater risk of brain cancer". Reporting on the same work, the French news wire AFP said that the study showed "no clear link to brain cancer".

Nature looks at the results of a study that has led to such contradictory reports.

I'm pleased to let you know that the US Senate approved the amendment to improve the Financial Reform bill last night, May 17th. These amendments fix the language on Regulation D and improve the language related to accredited investor standards, better ensuring that entrepreneurs will more easily be able to raise angel capital and more accredited investors can continue making the angel investments they love to make.

Amendment #4056 was sponsored by Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) and ten other Senators in a bi-partisan effort: Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-CT), Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA), Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA), Sen. Mark Begich (D-AK), Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT), Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS), Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), and Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV).

You may be interested in two items related to the amendment:

• The amendment language - SA 4056 to S.3217
  
• Press release from the Senate Banking Committee
  

Long live the Rust Belt.

I [Author] am still trying to process the mammoth Brookings "State of Metropolitan America" report. I plan to dig deeper into the chapter about educational attainment. For now, the big story is how Brookings has boldly served up a novel perspective on US geography:

May 17 (Bloomberg) -- China risks driving away innovative companies if its investment environment is perceived to be hostile, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said today.

“America continues to have concerns about the business climate in China,” Locke said during a speech in Hong Kong, where he addressed the city’s American Chamber of Commerce.

“If innovative companies perceive an unfriendly investment environment, one of two things will happen -- they’ll either stop inventing or they’ll decide to innovate someplace else.”

U.S. companies in China are concerned by the “increasingly difficult regulatory environment” and protectionist industrial policies, the American Chamber of Commerce in China said in a report last month. Foreign companies are disadvantaged in bids for contracts valued at about $80 billion, Locke said.

We just finished reading Fortune editor David Kirkpatrick's upcoming book The Facebook Effect.

It's a must-read.

The Facebook Effect is not a Gladwell-wannabe. It's a fast-paced, can't-put-it-down, story about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook founding.

The book is brilliantly-reported and full of details about how Facebook's biggest deals came together – and how some even bigger deals did not. It even features tales of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll.

We consider ourselves pretty well-versed in Facebook and Facebook's early days and we learned a TON reading this book. Go buy it now.

Seeing a window of opportunity, secondary investor Industry Ventures is launching a program aimed at the hundreds of venture firms with funds at the end of their ten-year lifecycle.

The San Francisco-based firm, which buys stakes in both venture funds and venture-backed companies, thinks it is well-positioned as an unprecedented number of venture funds reach the end of the runway in the next few years.

Principal Hans Swildens, the firm's founder, said Industry Ventures has done the types of deals it is proposing multiple times, but now has begun a concerted push to sell its approach to general partners as its looks to expand its portfolio and increase its ownership stake in promising companies. The firm closed its $265 million fifth fund in March 2009 and can call more capital through side funds from its limited-partner base or strategic investors.

The initiative comes as the fund-raising wave driven by the tech bubble at last washes ashore. From 1999 through 2001, a total of 1,203 venture funds closed on $179 billion, according to Dow Jones LP Source. Most of these funds had 10 years to make and then exit investments, although extensions of one or two years are common. The challenge for the venture industry is not only the large numbers of funds from those vintage years, but also the number of companies remaining in many portfolios, the result of over-investment during the bubble and a generally poor exit climate afterwards.

There has been a lot talk in the past year about job creation, entrepreneurship and economic recovery. Under the economic pressures, it became more important to than ever to examine closely how to unleash the entrepreneurial potential of various groups in society. We know for example that women are under-represented among business founders in high-tech and other high-growth fields despite their increasing participation in science and engineering. Fortunately, we are better prepared every day to inform policy. Today, I examine some of the most recent findings on the factors that affect the survival and growth of startups founded by women.

With women representing over half of the population in the U.S. and the majority at U.S. colleges and universities, it is important to explore whether successful, high-growth women entrepreneurs differ from successful men entrepreneurs. The Kauffman Foundation has recently released a new study, "Are Women Entrepreneurs Different from Men?" which suggests the answer is both yes and no.

Developing countries are turning to each other for affordable and targeted solutions to national health problems, a study of South–South biotechnology collaborations has found.

'Brother–sister' trade relationships between developing countries allow cheaper drugs and vaccines to reach more poor people than do 'parent–child' relationships with the developed world, according to a study published in Nature Biotechnology (May 10).

The study was a collaboration between researchers from Canada and five developing countries who interviewed 300 biotech company staff from 13 nations. The researchers said it was the lack of information about such collaborations that prompted the study.

Canada is putting 225 million Canadian dollars (US$220 million) into a fund that it says will uniquely help developing world scientists solve health problems facing their regions.

Grand Challenges Canada, launched last week (3 May), claims to break new ground with its approach, which includes seeking developing country scientists to lead its first raft of projects.

The scheme also claims to be the first in which a G8 government links an independent, not-for-profit organisation with its international assistance budget.

There is consistent discussion and often lively debate about California’s venture capital activity versus the activity of the typical #2 and #3 states, Massachusetts and New York, respectively.  A great deal of this discussion tends to discuss California as if it is a single monolithic market with the underlying implied assumption that California = Silicon Valley.  Of course, Silicon Valley does dominate nationally and globally, but CB Insights’ data about Southern California’s venture capital activity indicates that the region’s venture capital tallies are far from immaterial.  In fact, SoCal beats New York on a dollars and deals basis and comes very close to the venture capital levels seen in Massachusetts.  (Note:  Southern California’s venture capital activity includes deals done in the counties of Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange and San Diego.)

On a dollars basis, SoCal’s 2009 venture capital activity was more than double the dollars that New York saw in 2009. And Southern California’s venture capital haul in 2009 was only 2% less than Massachusetts, the perennial #2.

Since it launched in 2005, YouTube has become one of the few Internet properties that's much more than a domain name. Like Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, and Twitter, YouTube has become an essential service of the Internet. It's a utility, a social network, a search engine, a source of online storage, and an endless source of consternation for content owners. Some quick numbers:

YouTube now gets 2 billion views per day, 30% of which come from the U.S. The three most popular videos are Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance," at 196 million views and change, with "Charlie bit my finger" and "The Evolution of Dance" following behind at 186 million and 143 million, respectively. About 24 hours of video are uploaded every minute these days, and it'd take 1,700 years to watch all the video currently available.

The challenges YouTube faces in the future are both familiar and foreign. How to make money, for one thing, a challenge the site has not yet overcome (that's about the nicest way I could possibly say that--it's YouTube's birthday, after all, and I don't want to be rude). How to provide mainstream, for-profit content is another challenge, one that's the subject of constant work, from Vevo to the new movie rental service.

You gave up your cushy job and stepped out of your comfort zone in pursuit of your dream of becoming an entrepreneur. And now that you have realized your dream and are ready to scale-up and take the next step, are you facing hurdles as far as HR is concerned?

If your answer is yes, don’t worry – it’s what every entrepreneur faces at some point or the other during operations expansion.

When you started out, the entrepreneurial energy kept the company going. Being a small team, everybody knew what everybody else was doing and there was ‘collective will’ to make things happen.

In yet another example of how small our world really is, the crisis emanating from a little country like Greece is rocking the global economic system. Fear that a Greek default on its sovereign debt could upset a fragile global economic recovery is fueling panic. All of this turmoil once again underscores the need to restructure the global economy—and this time for real.

But what does "restructuring the global economy" mean? And how can it be done? The global economy is a patchwork of imbalances in need of equilibrium. In a nutshell, restructuring the global economy requires the following:

A reader asks: My co-founder and I are ready to hire a couple of key employees, and one of our advisors suggested we set-up a stock option plan and offer that as an incentive. What is a stock option and what are some of the issues we need to worry about?

Answer: The formal answer here is: An employee stock option is a security that gives select staffers the right to buy a certain number of shares of the company’s common stock at a predetermined price at some point in the future. The answer that might mean more to you, though, is: Options are a way to give employees an incentive to work harder to ensure the company succeeds, since as the stock price increases, their options gain value.

Because it provides employees with this opportunity to benefit directly from any gain in the company’s value, stock options are quite common in startups. From a founder’s perspective, they’re appealing since they avoid any cash outlays and align the interests of the owner and workers.

The FT reports that Google, Intel and Sony will announce a “significant breakthrough into consumer electronics and the broadcast industry” later this week with the launch of a so-called “Smart TV” platform.

In case that sounds familiar, that’s because Bloomberg and the WSJ reported as much on April 29, apart from the apparent name of the Web TV platform that would be making its debut at Google I/O.

Google’s developer conference will be held May 19 – 20 in San Francisco.