As the baby boomers grow older, America is getting older, too. According to the 2010 census, the nation’s median age has increased to 37.2, up from 35.3 in 2000. The aging trend held up in every state — only the District of Columbia has a younger median age now than a decade ago. For states, changing demographic patterns, visualized below as “population pyramids,” have major implications for policy and politics. Older states, such as Maine, Vermont, West Virginia and New Hampshire, may have less time than others to prepare for challenges such as providing long-term care for a growing elderly population. At the same time, younger states such as Utah and Texas must wrestle with educating relatively large school-age populations — Christopher Swope

Working closely with a team of researchers from Duke University, scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute have helped identify a molecular pathway that plays a key role in stress-related damage to the genome, the entirety of an organism’s hereditary information.

The new findings could explain the development of certain human disorders, and also offer a potential model for prevention and therapy.

While the human mind and body are built to respond to stress — the well-known “fight or flight” response, which lasts only a few minutes and raises heart rate and blood glucose levels — the response itself can cause significant damage if maintained over long periods of time.

The relentless, daily stream of Google news tends to hide one important fact about the company: They've been buying a lot of smaller companies, in their ever-evolving quest to dominate the online ad market and shore up their defenses against disruptive innovations or nagging patent lawsuits.

Here's an infographic illustrating that, created by Antonio Lupetti, the founder of Italian tech site Woorkup:

GM Ventures' Jon Lauckner promises that the venture-capital fund he runs isn't a "ZIP code investor." Still, four of the six firms in which General Motors has invested now have ties to the company's home state of Michigan.

Sakti3, an electric-vehicle battery maker, is based in Ann Arbor and run by a University of Michigan professor. Powermat, which makes wireless charging mats for cell phones, has its sales headquarters in Commerce Township.

And once GM Ventures was on board, plug-in hybrid developer Bright Automotive and solar-energy company Sunlogics both moved some operations to vacant space in Rochester Hills. A fifth company, battery materials firm Envia Systems, may have a Michigan office in the works next year, CEO Atul Kapadia said.

Despite the economic uncertainly south of the border, it is fascinating to see the flurry of venture capital deals being announced.

In Canada, meanwhile, it’s pretty much the same landscape, with a modest number of VC deals happening.

Even then, most of them are small investments aimed to support the growth of an idea or early-stage startup, rather than the aggressive expansion of a company looking to exploit a major growth opportunity.

Entrepreneurs always work hard to create an innovative product or service, but often count on standard seller marketing for sales. But the reality is that sellers are no longer in charge of the customer buying process. Recent reports suggest that 90% of today’s shoppers skip marketing pitches, to research online before they buy, and over 50% check user reviews before making a decision.

The Internet and smartphones have changed everything. Kristin Zhivago, in her new book “Roadmap to Revenue,” makes the point that the selling system is broken, since sellers no longer sell the way customers are buying. Here is my summary of her detailed roadmap to get you back on the right track with a “customer-centric” approach rather than a “company-centric” approach:

Sick and tired of headlines that read “Hottest entrepreneurs under 30,” or “Top 40 under 40,” or “Top 20 under 20”?

Stories about technology entrepreneurs often ignore the grown-up crowd. But some of Canada’s hottest tech entrepreneurs launched their businesses after 40 – the arbitrary age that often acts as the upper limit of the “best of” lists.

A recent column by Netscape co-founder, software entrepreneur, and noted Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen caused a stir in the tech community. Andreessen postulated that the software industry was “eating the world” and “poised to take over broad swathes of the economy.” This is delusional.

It’s a clear case of someone with a hammer – Andreessen developed software, ran software companies, and now invests in software companies – seeing everything as a nail. The irony is, software is hardly a hotbed of innovation.

While technology races ahead in many other fields, software has advanced but meagerly in the past 20 years. In terms of solving grand challenges, software has largely failed to deliver. Take the case of voice recognition. It’s much better than it was in areas like airlines’ reservation phone trees. But despite billions of research dollars no company has produced commercially available, affordable voice recognition software that can understand and transcribe, from voice to text, conversations involving multiple voices. Likewise, voice recognition software requires training to work well – it’s not speaker independent. Yes, an IBM (IBM) team did take on live Jeopardy! champions and beat them but the Herculean effort required to program a supercomputer to accomplish this just illustrates the enormous chasm that continues to exist between software and the solution of truly great challenges.

The biggest obstacle to European success in the digital economy is a lack of entrepreneurial culture, according to a panel of European investors and entrepreneurs.

Speaking at an event in Berlin yesterday, the panel decried Europe’s lack of hunger, its antisuccess culture and called for changes in education to encourage young people to look at entrepreneurialism rather than head for a big corporation and a steady job.

While Germany has traditionally been Europe’s economic powerhouse, even Germany was not aligned with successful business practices in the new economy. Indeed Germany’s greatest strengths — its methodical and deliberate approach to business — may yet be one of its biggest weaknesses, said panel member Eran Davidson, president and CEO of HassoPlattner Partners.

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Investment in 4G networks could help create a whole bunch of new jobs during a time the U.S. sorely needs them.

New research from Deloitte shows that investment in 4G networks will be critical not only to maintain the mobile broadband lead America achieved with 3G, but also to help with the country’s economic recovery. The accounting and consulting firm predicts that 771,000 jobs could be created with aggressive 4G network investment over the next five years. The dollar value attached to it: $53 billion through 2016. And 4G investment could account for up to $151 billion in GDP growth over the same time period. But that’s only if the U.S. government avoids a “business as usual" approach, which could result in only half that many jobs being created and a GDP increase of only $73 million.

Michigan Economic Development Corp. has renamed and retooled its economic development programs to reflect the restructuring of the state's business tax.

The replacement programs are called the Michigan Business Development Program and the Michigan Community Revitalization Program. They replace MEGA and Brownfield and Historic tax credit programs.

Beginning Oct. 1, the new programs will initially provide $100 million in incentives for competitive projects in the state.

As technology integrates seamlessly into our lives, causing little disruption beyond the need to push a button or voice a command for service, the innovators behind many of those technologies insist we can do better.

"We think we're living in an information age now and we're really not. We're just sort of dipping our toe in the water and there's quite a long way to go," said Mickey McManus, CEO of Maya Design.

Mr. McManus, along with VoCollect's founder and chief technology officer Roger Byford, discussed how far they see their respective technologies advancing Tuesday night at the Pittsburgh Technology Council's discussion "Making Technology Invisible: Future Trends of Human-Computer Interaction."

Steve Jobs gave one of the best commencement speeches of all time at the Stanford graduation ceremony in 2005.

It continues to be quoted, revered, and even plagiarized to this day. See below for the inspirational video, or read the full text of the speech here.

My recent posts in this series have offered thoughts on what to write in pitch documents aimed at VCs.  If those documents are written well, and your business idea is a good one, and you are impressive, and you are lucky, and, and, and… then you will hopefully be on the receiving end of a termsheet, and ideally more than one.  A termsheet is usually a longish document of 3-10 pages with many clauses and terms.  In this post I list the most important of those and explain what they mean.  A lot of what you read below is drawn from the excellent Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer And Venture Capitalist by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson which I thoroughly recommend to anyone thinking of doing a venture deal.

Consider your workplace e-mail style. When asked a question, do you confer with others and attribute your response to the group? Do you avoid making a decision in case you might need to reverse course? If so, you may be a buck-passer, causing a productivity drag in an organization.

In the latest in digital employee monitoring, new software can identify such people and discern a range of other traits and behaviors, potentially allowing management to intervene or assign people to tasks better suited to them, boosting productivity.

In an article he wrote last year in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Andy Grove called himself "a onetime factory guy." It was a reminder that the 74-year-old retired chairman of Intel knows from experience how costly and risky manufacturing can be. Given these challenges, Grove argues, the U.S. government should do far more to nurture manufacturing, or else the country will face dire consequences.

For one thing, losing the ability to manufacture things domestically will make it harder for innovators to scale their ideas into products, he says. Indeed, although photovoltaic technology was invented in the United States, many key innovations in solar power are happening in Asia now, largely because the necessary manufacturing prowess is there. Second, he argues, only manufacturing can meaningfully reduce unemployment. That's why Grove thinks the United States shouldn't necessarily focus solely on "high-value" production of advanced technologies; it might also be wise to boost manufacturing of some lower-value goods.

As engineers begin to build tiny aircraft for tasks such as military-related surveillance and post-disaster search, they are turning to nature for inspiration. Conventional ­aircraft designs can be scaled down only so far, but birds and bugs are a fruitful source of alternative blueprints for cheap, agile miniature flying vehicles.

"Big ideas start as weird ideas," Patri Friedman, an ex-Googler and the grandson of the late economist Milton Friedman, recently told Details. And Friedman's idea is weirder than most. The libertarian blogger is tired of the restrictions he feels are imposed on him by American society. The solution? Floating chains of micro-countries, each little colonies in the vast Petri dish of the sea, and each an experiment in a new form of government. The idea, which Friedman terms "seasteading," caught the eye of PayPal founder Peter Thiel (who recently made headlines for paying kids to drop out of school), who sunk $1.25 million into the idea. Thiel's picked a few winners before—he was one of the earliest investors of Facebook.

LANSING, Mich.—“Though this be madness, yet there is method in it!” Shakespeare, it seems, understood entrepreneurship as well as he did the English language. Fear of being cheated, hunger for new business, obsession with adding unique value, and the satisfaction of loyal teamwork—highly chaotic and unstructured, this has been my summer as an entrepreneur-in-training.

I took this job as a business analyst for a global engineering services startup, hoping that the experience would illuminate the secrets behind starting a successful new business. What makes entrepreneurs tick? How do you build the right team? How do you guarantee a profit—especially when the financial stability of so many families depends on you?