The end-of-August announcement that the National Football League will pay $765 million to settle a lawsuit involving thousands of its former players over problems related to head trauma is just one sign of the growing concern that the sport’s collisions pose a serious risk to long-term player health. But little is known about how a season of head hits affects the largest group of football athletes: the nearly 4.5 million youth and high school student players.

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From biology class to “C.S.I.,” we are told again and again that our genome is at the heart of our identity. Read the sequences in the chromosomes of a single cell, and learn everything about a person’s genetic information — or, as 23andme, a prominent genetic testing company, says on its Web site, “The more you know about your DNA, the more you know about yourself.”

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One well-known feature of social networks is that similar people tend to attract each other: birds of a feather flock together.

So an interesting question is whether these similarities cause people to behave in the same way online, whether it might lead to flocking or herding behaviour, for example.

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BMW has taken a huge step toward revolutionizing the role of robots in automotive manufacturing by having a handful of robots work side-by-side with human workers at its plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

As a new generation of safer, more user-friendly robots emerges, BMW’s man-machine collaboration could be the first of many examples of robots taking on new human tasks, and working more closely alongside humans. While many fear that this trend could put people out of work (see “How Technology Is Destroying Jobs”), proponents argue it will instead make employees more productive, relieving them of the most unpleasant and burdensome jobs.

Later this week I will be presenting my webinar “How the lean start-up is accelerating innovation” at the Global Women’s Leadership Summit. Next week I will be in Brussels presenting my paper on “Re-inventing entrepreneurship education” at the European Innovation Conference.

“Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn’t then it is of no use to us.” – Carlos Castaneda

Educating young people is the key to future innovation, so it’s probably a good idea to ask ourselves if we are on the right track.  The question about what to teach, how to teach and why to teach is perennial, and thousands of years old.  But the ongoing debate we are having about STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) and STEAM (science, technology, engineering and math with a dab of the arts thrown in to pacify the Liberal Arts folks) seems a particularly strange one.

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Email. The bane of your existence, a tool that seems to define many of your waking hours, a mode of communication invented only two decades ago.

We all use it, some of us love it, and many of us dread it.

There are plenty of tips and tricks about making email more efficient--using specific tools like boomerang, limiting yourself to certain hours per day and chasing the dream of inbox zero.

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In my book, there are two types of entrepreneurs — the serious variety who use technology and innovation to disrupt industries and deliver major impacts and revenues, and the lifestyle variety who have swapped a job at a corporate for a startup that delivers incremental improvement on a problem set that is minor in nature.

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Freedom to fail Draper University is an experiment. It is a new kind of education. People said to me, “Entrepreneurship can’t be taught.” And whenever somebody says I can’t do something, I always think, “How would I, if that were a possibility?” Now, I’ve always had an interest in education. In fact, I had a tremendous education. I went to Andover, and Stanford for electrical engineering, and Harvard Business School.

Personalized learning Whenever people imagine virtual something, they sometimes put it at odds with the physical incarnation of it. That is exactly not what we imagine when we think of Khan Academy. When we think of Khan Academy, yes, if you have nothing, if you are a villager in some rural part of India and you have no school, hopefully we can get a device out to you and then get you access. We can help you learn and move up your knowledge edge.

Elite colleges from Mexico to Morocco prepare intelligent and driven graduates to become future leaders. So here’s a pop quiz: which country’s universities are most likely to attract high-flying women to the STEM fields: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics? If you answered “those in the United States,” think again. Just 4 percent of US women identified as high performers study STEM subjects, according to a McKinsey survey.1 In fact, the country ranks last of the nine we examined, and it’s not even close. In India, 57 percent of high-performing women study STEM subjects. In Morocco, it’s 37 percent and in Turkey 25 percent. Brazil, Germany, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and the United Kingdom all rank higher than the United States.

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Forget incremental versus groundbreaking–the real problem is that companies are spending billions of dollars and not getting results. Our “Global Innovation 1000” report found that spending reached an all-time high of $600 billion in 2012 among the top 1,000 spenders. But only a quarter of them say they’re highly effective at innovation.

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Basic chemistry teaches that dissolving carbon dioxide in seawater will increase acidity. With atmospheric CO2 levels rising—touching 400 parts per million for the first time in millennia this past May—it is therefore a safe bet that the world's oceans are becoming more acidic. But just how much more? And how much do those levels change from place to place—at the coast or out in open waters, or at the surface versus in the depths?

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A little more on the news that seed-stage investor Innovation Works has raised $12 million for a new venture fund.

Terri Glueck, director of community development and communications, confirmed the group did indeed raise $12 million, as reported in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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I worked at WordPress.com, the 15th most popular website in the world to write The Year Without Pants, a book about what we can learn from the amazing and progressive culture they use to get work done. One major challenge I faced there was learning how to work without email. That's right. While all employees had email accounts and were free to use them, they rarely did. I didn't either: 95% of the email I received while employed there was from people at other companies. How, you may ask, can any modern organization function without email, much less one as successful as WordPress.com? I'll explain everything you need to know.

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I’m a big fan of afternoon naps.

In fact, I was super excited when I joined Buffer to hear that the team is pro-napping. It’s not every day you come across a company that’s open to letting employees take a snooze whenever they want one.

While the first half of 2013 saw a surge in initial public offerings (IPOs) by venture-backed biopharma companies, the overall financing environment for privately held life science companies remains slow.

The average valuation increase for life science companies receiving venture capital financing during the first half of 2013 was roughly even with 2012 results, and the percentage of "up round" financings declined slightly. Fundraising by life science venture capitalists continued to decline as well.

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Q.What one skill do you think young people looking for startup jobs should possess?

The following answers are provided by the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, the YEC recently launched #StartupLab, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses via live video chats, an expert content library and email lessons.

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Vinod Khosla’s recent comment during an interview with Michael Arrington that 95 percent of VCs don’t add value (and that 70-80 percent might actually add negative value in their advising) got me thinking about the underlying dynamics of the question.

You’ve spent years working hard to hone your skills in science, medicine, or business. You’ve accomplished things, and you have the talent and desire to do more. You may be bored, or stuck at a dead end job in academia, Big Biotech, or Big Pharma. You are intrigued by a job posting you just saw at a biotech startup, and the company appears to be showing some interest in you.