A decline in testosterone levels as men grow older is likely the result—not the cause—of

deteriorating general health, say Australian scientists, whose new study finds that age, in itself, has no effect on testosterone level in healthy older men.

The results, to be presented Tuesday at The Endocrine Society’s 93rd Annual Meeting in Boston, are the first findings released from the Healthy Man Study, according to principal investigator David Handelsman, MD, PhD, professor and director of the ANZAC Research Institute at the University of Sydney.

“Some researchers believe that an age-related testosterone deficiency contributes to the deteriorating health of older men and causes nonspecific symptoms, such as tiredness and loss of libido,” he said.

Less than a year after opening its doors, the University of Connecticut’s Cell and Genome Sciences Building in Farmington has filled its 4,500 square feet of incubator space.

With about eight companies now operating in the 117,000 square foot state-of-the-art research facility — and more knocking on the door — it’s a sign, school officials say, that the region can become a hub for bioscience, luring tech startups and entrepreneurs who want to collaborate with researchers at the UConn Health Center.

And, in conjunction with the recent passage of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s $864 million Bioscience Connecticut initiative, which will renovate and add hundreds of thousands of square feet of research and incubator space in Farmington, the future possibilities are stoking optimism.

HAWAII'S decade-old vision of launching a vibrant life sciences industry to diversify the state economy hasn't come to fruition, though scientists still hope it will.

At the core of this vision is the University of Hawaii John A. Burns School of Medicine, which opened its campus in Kakaako in 2005 and was touted as the magnet to attract high-technology companies that would share research and lucrative ventures.

That critical mass was never established partly because of economic problems that prevented installation of costly laboratory and research space for companies that develop biotechnology, health therapies and medical devices.

I know through hard experience that I’m one of the dumbest investors I know. Here are two examples: the time I cost Yasser Arafat $2 million (and lost investors another $100 million in the process) and the worst VC decision ever made (of course, it was made by me). Both happened around the same time period (2000-2001) and solidified my reputation in history as possibly the worst investor ever.

However, I learn from my experiences. After a few successful startups following that period (Stockpickr.com notably, which sold to thestreet.com in 2007) I’ve started to do more angel investing and, in doing so, have figured out a check list to help me avoid my prior mistakes. If you follow this checklist I think you can do well as an angel investor.

Everyone trashes angel investors but angels have one critical edge over VC investors: we don’t have to do anything. I don’t have to put any money to work ever if I don’t want to. I can pass on deals all day long. VCs, because its their job, often have a strong financial incentive to eventually (say, over a 5-year period) put money to work since they take fees on the money that’s out there. VCs also have a psychological reason to put money to work. It’s their job. So if they are doing a good job they often feel the need (for better or worse) to put money to work.

Recognizing the need to boost the sagging post-war economy, provide jobs for veterans, and grow the economy to employ the children born in the post-war baby boom, the United States Congress created the Small Business Investment Company program, known as the SBIC, in 1958. This focus on assisting entrepreneurs is credited with creating the economic world dominance of the U.S. during the rest of the century. Besides starting an SBIC, there are many ways for an individual investor to participate in the growth of U.S. small business and reap the financial rewards such an investment can offer.

Have you ever wondered how we got from this:

Last night in Mountain View, five venture capitalists sat down for a grilling from an audience of hungry entrepreneurs.

The event was run by the Churchill Club, and the five came from pretty different backgrounds -- from Ray Rothrock of Venrock, who's been investing in tech firms since the 1980s, to Aydin Senkut, who founded his angel investment fund Felicis Ventures after retiring from Google in 2006.

I’m convinced I have a strategy that allows me to get a meeting with any person I want, no matter how famous, rich, busy, or difficult they are to reach. Why? Because I’ve tried it, and my success rate so far is 100%. It just doesn’t fail.

When I was interviewing founders for my book, Startups Open Sourced, I had a few names on there that I just shouldn’t have been able to get access to. It’s one thing to reach out to my immediate network and get meetings, but there were people who I didn’t have any connections in common with and it was a crapshoot at best to think I could get them to respond to one of my e-mails, let alone agree to give me one to two hours of their time for an in-depth interview.

Day One Capital has launched what it claims to be the first institutional angel fund in Hungary.

The new fund aims to tackle an oh-so-familiar problem faced by much of Europe: the lack of “seed money and management mentoring for innovative early-stage tech startups”, says Day One Capital investment manager Aurel Pasztor. The fund hopes to raise €2-4m and is targeting companies in the IT, telecommunications, energy, biotech and finance sectors with investments between €200-400k.

The EU's leadership has called for a common corporate tax policy throughout Europe.

As of now however, there is a variation of more than 40 percent in how European countries tax corporation's profit, according to the Doing Business Project from the World Bank Group.

We've ranked the 10 countries that take the most of their businesses profits on average and detailed any potential changes these countries might make.

Matt Stepp of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation has a good post up now over at CommentVisions on speeding up the largely under-scaled, poorly structured world energy innovation system--a hobby-horse of ours here at the Metro Program.

Matt raises all the right themes: the need to pile onto STEM education; the need to build new physical infrastructure, from grid upgrades to EV charging stations; the imperative of increasing global RD&D investment by 200 to 500 percent from present levels, something we’ve been talking about for years.

But what I like best (predictably!) is Matt’s last point. Matt says that above all “we need to rapidly develop a strong public-private energy innovation system” that draws together the varied elements of the innovation system—businesses, financiers, universities, governments, trade associations, and so on—and that one way of doing that is by “promoting more public-private partnerships, collaborations, and clusters.”

Intelligent Communities are those which have – whether through crisis or foresight – come to understand the enormous challenges of the Broadband Economy, and have taken conscious steps to create an economy capable of prospering in it.  They are not necessarily big cities or famous technology hubs.  They are located in developing nations as well as industrialized ones, suburbs as well as cities, the hinterland as well as the coast.

The good news is that, while the Broadband Economy presents an epic challenge to communities, it also hands them a powerful new competitive tool.  Beginning in the 1990s, carriers deployed the local networks that most of us think of as "broadband" – DSL, cable, satellite and wireless – within neighborhoods, towns and cities.  At the same time, the costs of computer software and hardware – especially data storage – plummeted in obedience to Gordon Moore's famous law that the storage capacity of microchips doubles every 18 months.  Through local broadband, individuals, small businesses, institutions and local governments have gained access to worldwide information resources and a broad range of tools to connect both globally and locally.

With your help and a ground swell of support S.1082, "The Small Business Additional Temporary Extension Act of 2011" has passed overwhelmingly, thereby extending SBIR/STTR/CPP "as is" though September 30, 2011. The President will quickly sign this bill and there will be no lapse in the SBIR programs.

Repeat: SBIR/STTR/CPP are now extended through the end of the fiscal year, September 30, 2011.

Preliminary vote count: The bill was passed 387 / 33 Republicans 224 / 11 Democrats 163 / 22

It’s a scenario that’s all too familiar: You’re working to win business with a great new prospective client, and your sales prospecting courtship is off to a great start. But you’ve just started the whole discussion around price, and it’s starting to feel like the conversation is heading south. You know your prices are higher than your competitors’, but you’re not having much luck justifying it to your prospective client.

It’s no surprise that pricing is such a big decision driver in all realms of business. In fact, it may be the most important of marketing’s four P’s (the others being Product, Promotion and Place). But rather than hiding behind your pricing, here are five ways to turn pricing into a positive lever to help you win business:

As you probably learned in college, the less you sleep, the more you eat. Both coffee and pizza are necessary to pull an all-nighter. Now there's research to support this theory. At the American Academy of Sleep Medicine conference in Minneapolis this week, 5,000 researchers from around the world gathered to talk about the importance of sleep. They looked at 1,000 recent studies, including one by Harvard Medical School that addresses the connection between sleep and weight.

Yesterday I wrote about the best way to approach a VC as part of the 50 Questions Series I am co-authoring with Nicholas Lovell, so when this morning I saw a post on Business Insider titled Five VCs explain what they REALLY think about your pitches I tapped straight through to read it.

Once inside I found some refreshing honesty and some good content which I think makes for a good follow on from my post yesterday.  Some of the points re-affirm what I wrote yesterday, whilst others delve deeper into the things that should be said to maximise the chances of getting a meeting.

Entrepreneurship Is about Solving Problems

The field of entrepreneurship is exploding. Corporations and individuals, governments and schools, are all coming to recognize the powerful reality: entrepreneurship is about solving problems. For far too long the majority of us have never considered ourselves entrepreneurs, but the truth is that you are. If you face a problem and you have to come up with a solution, you are an entrepreneur, and you are starting to do what entrepreneurs do—find solutions to problems.

Entrepreneurship Education Has to Change

At the same time that entrepreneurship is exploding, the entire field is shifting to a new paradigm of how to be an entrepreneur. The new paradigm turns the old wisdom about how to be an entrepreneur onto its head and offers some concrete ideas about how to do this. This past weekend I spoke at the National Governor’s Association about how we need to change entrepreneurship education. In a future post, I will explain more about why entrepreneurship has to change. This weekend I focused on how transforming entrepreneurship education can accelerate innovation and our long-term well-being as a global society.

What’s the secret to success in entrepreneurship? Passion? Persistence? Doing what you like? Maybe it’s having a great business plan? I’ve written here that empathy might be the most important. But that’s a generalization too. What do you think?

Here’s the problem with that: there are no general rules. Scratch under the surface of entrepreneurship and you’ll find lots of people willing to put forth one characteristic or another. You can find examples for anything.

Successful entrepreneurs are usually hard-driving, and highly focused on some specific goals, like being the dominant player in a given domain, or the low-priced provider of their product. Yet other entrepreneurs will talk for hours about all their ideas, and how they intend to change the world, but I don’t hear any specific goals or milestones.

Many people are very hesitant to set specific goals, due to lack of self-confidence or whatever. The result is that they don’t ever get anywhere, because they never really knew where they wanted to go. If you find yourself in this category, try the following simple steps highlighted by Brian Tracy in “No Excuses: The Power of Self-Discipline”:

Decide exactly what you want. If you want to increase your income, decide on a specific amount of money, rather than just “make more money.” Without precise goals, you can’t measure progress, and you miss the real satisfaction of knowing when to declare success.

Without a good strategy, buying a patent license can go terribly wrong. Inventors Digest has some advice to help you avoid common problems.

#1 – Believing a term sheet will protect your interests

A term sheet a brief document outlining the terms and conditions of a business agreement. But it’s just the start.

A formal, written licensing agreement is the best way to remove any ambiguity. Most term sheets expressly state they are not binding.