Introduction Look outside. Can you see any ice? What about in the middle of summer? Believe it or not, about 10 percent of the planet's land is actually covered in ice—year round! The ice in these places, such as Antarctica or on very high mountain ranges, is usually in big pieces called glaciers or ice sheets. It can stay there if the temperature stays cool enough and enough snow falls to replace whatever ice melts off when the temperature gets above freezing.

All of that ice is made from an awful lot of water. And when that water melts, much of it ends up in the oceans. How might that affect us? We can get a fast-paced peek at this process that is going on right now with just a couple of ice cubes and some clay.

While the search for survivors of the nightmarish Joplin, Mo., tornado is still far from over, AccuWeather.com meteorologists are forecasting that another round of deadly storms is about to occur today.

As of Tuesday afternoon, the death toll had already raised to 118, ranking the event among the top 10 deadliest U.S. tornadoes of all time. So why has the weather been so active?

According to AccuWeather.com Senior Meteorologist Henry Margusity, one of the theories is the strong La Nina that occurred. La Nina is the colder-than-normal waters in the southern Pacific. That area of colder water has caused a shift in the jet stream that has resulted in a wild and extreme weather pattern across the United States since the winter; however, recent trends have shown the La Nina has weakened, but the residual effects on the jet stream are still causing extreme weather in the form of tornadoes. It will take another month or so for the weather pattern to finally shift to one that is not as extreme.

Created as the successor to two long-standing and accomplished tech-based economic development organizations — the Washington Technology Center (WTC) and the Spokane Intercollegiate Research and Technology Institute (SIRTI) — Innovate Washington will serve as the state's primary agency responding to tech transfer needs and strengthening university-industry partnerships. Innovate Washington also will coordinate the state's clean energy initiatives.

Although both organizations have similar missions, WTC focuses on statewide efforts while SIRTI's mission is centered on growing the innovation-based economy in the Eastern Washington region. By combining the two through a public-private partnership model, the services will be expanded to include entrepreneurial support, access to capital, and sector/cluster initiatives and coordination for the entire state.

Satish Chandran looked at Fargo, N.D., three years ago and saw opportunity. The potential was so enticing, in fact, that he left pharma giant Pfizer in 2010 to build it.

Today, as the director of the North Dakota Center for Biopharmaceutical Research and Production (CBRP), Satish is offering the same kind of opportunity to new and established biopharmaceutical companies around the world. At the center of the offer is the combination of his scientific, strategic and entrepreneurial expertise.

Indonesia is the best place for entrepreneurs to start a business, a BBC survey has suggested.

The US, Canada, India and Australia are seen as among the next best countries at supporting new businesses.

At the other extreme, Colombia, Egypt, Turkey, Italy and Russia are among the least entrepreneur-friendly.

The survey for the BBC's Extreme World series found wide variations in perceptions of the support different cultures offer to start-ups.

Most early stage tech companies don’t think they have room for a chief operating officer.

There are several reasons behind that, of course. Sometimes, the CEO feels he/she needs to “be close to the business” and all aspects of the operation. Others feel strategy and execution shouldn’t be separated, while some feel early stage companies are too small to have a COO. The saddest of instances is when the CEO believes recruiting a COO would be an admission of failure.

While I’m sympathetic to those arguments, I do believe the role can be highly beneficial — and even necessary in certain situations – and shouldn’t be dismissed offhand due to a company’s size or the CEO’s ego getting in the way.

Two new reports released last week provide some of the most compelling evidence yet for the importance of federal investments in science and technology innovation.

Amid the bitter and protracted negotiations over this fiscal year’s federal budget, U.S. investments in science and innovation were largely spared from the deepest cuts some federal programs faced. But they may not be safe for long as Congress considers making further spending cuts in the fiscal year 2012 budget beginning in October against the backdrop of debate this summer over raising the national debt ceiling.

That’s why it is critically important that members of Congress on both sides of the aisle distinguish between federal “spending” and “investments.” What many fiscally conservative lawmakers omit in their zeal to slash spending is that many federal programs actually have positive rates of return, meaning they bring in more revenue—to the government, economy, or both—than they cost the taxpayer. To put it another way, some federal investments are profitable to the public balance sheet and save the taxpayers money in the long run.

This post is a summary of a 19 page white paper available here.

New market dynamics are emerging as social technology and the use of it proliferates. Making sense of the dynamics and the strategic implications is everyone’s goal. The goal is not an end rather a never-ending pursuit to learn, share and improve.

Learning and sharing is how people and organization can gain clarity of purpose on how to continuously improve. The real value in all things social is the sharing of knowledge with clarity for others to use. Imagine if an audience was focused on sharing of knowledge with clarity. What would be the outcomes? The answer: never-ending improvement and innovation.

Thanks to Jay Baer we received tons of positive feedback and questions about our earlier post titled “5X6 Social Media Revenue Matrix“. Subsequently we thought it would be helpful to discuss the method behind using the matrix.

Lets use a common story to try to make use of the matrix simple.

Brand X wants to either begin to use “all things social” or improve how they currently use it. So either before using social or attempting to improve how your using it needs to be thought out. A logical “map” for “thinking” about relevant and relative issues that create the most value would seem appropriate. That being said lets illustrate “thinking about the issues” and doing so thoroughly.

Lily McCauley could never find the remote in her home. Sick of looking, she created a way to track it and entered it into the Bendigo Inventor Awards, reports Bendigo Advertiser.

“I got sick of looking for the remote in the ironing basket or under the couch. When I want to watch TV I just want to flick the remote, I don’t want to have to look for the remote.”

Seen from a distance, this video is just three inhumanly rich guys sitting in comfy chairs and chatting for an hour about philanthropy, luck and comfort zones. But then you move in and focus on the players. And … wow.

• Warren Buffett. Eighty years old. CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. One of the planet’s most successful investors. A man who has pledged to give away 99% of his fortune to philanthropic causes.
• Jay-Z. Twenty-eight years old. One of the most successful hip hop artists and entrepreneurs in the United States. Former CEO of Def Jam Records. Founder of the Roc Nation recording kingdom.
• Steve Forbes. Forty-eight. Our moderator. Former U.S. presidential candidate. Editor-in-chief of the magazine that publishes an annual list of inhumanly rich people.

Did you know, in Australia, it takes an average 51.8 days to get paid, according to Dunn & Bradstreet?

Frustration with tardy debtors was the obvious impetus behind this nifty invention from Belgium outfit ikki; an invoice with a voice-chip that begins to make weeping noises 20 seconds after the envelope is opened. (How? The chip reacts to light.)

However, what’s truly inventive about the ‘crying invoice’ is its other purpose. Why create a ‘crying invoice’?

The ‘crying invoice’ may well solve a real problem (with a smile) but the main reason for this product’s creation is the marketing buzz it’s likely to create.

You’re probably familiar with marketing doyen Seth Godin, who talks about this brand building tactic in his book Free Prize Inside!.

Barcoding seems to be the conservation concept of the day, and that goes for sparing trees from illegal logging. The latest country to use the technology is Liberia, and at least one expert thinks that barcoding trees to protect timber production could make the country a "poster child for a new green economy in Africa."

The rainforests of Liberia, like rainforests most everywhere, are under threat from illegal logging. However, implementing a new technology involving barcodes could save the day. Fred Pearce of Yale e360 reports on Liberia's new technique. He notes that Liberia's President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and the European Union have signed a deal to strengthen the country's timber industry by requiring every harvestable tree and every log to have a barcode that tracks it from its original location to its final destination.

North Carolina’s Research Triangle region saw $1.5 billion in capital investments and more than 6,600 new jobs announced in 2010, according to data compiled by an economic development group.

The Research Triangle Regional Partnership, or RTRP, is comprised of economic development agencies across the 13-county Research Triangle region radiating from Research Triangle Park. The group said that most of the new investments came specifically in life sciences and technology clusters.

Steve Jobs may claim that the humanities are important for colleges, but Apple's not hiring philosophers to build iPhones. A new report from Georgetown University confirms much of what we already knew about the financial payoff of college majors: Hard-scientists swim in a Scrooge McDuck-size vault of gold, while literature majors panhandle with multi-syllabic signs. The report further confirms many of the unfortunate stereotypes of poor minorities and female caregivers that progressive Americans would sooner forget.

Science rules, social drools

Engineers are the king of the cash hill, raking in a median salary of $75K, while Psychology and Social Worker graduates beg for the trickle-down table scraps, amounting to $42K. The brightest light in the non-hard sciences is the Social Sciences, with economists earning $70K, using their savvy knowledge of money to rake in more than their compatriots in both finance and architecture.

Earlier this week, the X Prize Foundation announced the 10 finalists for its Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge. Over the course of the summer, these 10 machines will be put into a large tank in New Jersey and challenged to remove 2,500 barrels of oil a minute from the water. The winner will take home $1 million and will most likely be used the next time there is a massive oil spill. In the slides ahead, take a look at the machines that will be competing for the title of best oil sucker.

Philadelphia-based media giant Comcast Corp., which this year took control of NBCUniversal, has combined two existing capital funds into a new entity called Comcast Ventures, which will manage about $750 million in investments.

The new fund, which unites former NBC parent General Electric Co.'s Peacock Equity Fund with Comcast Interactive Capital, intends to invest in "early to late-stage businesses that represent the next generation of entertainment, communications and digital technology," Comcast said.

The Wallace H. Coulter Foundation recently awarded Drexel University $10 million, which the University matched in order to endow the Coulter Translational Research Partnership program to support its development of biomedical innovations, as announced April 26.

According to Drexel’s press release, the now $20 million joint funding will “bring life saving solutions to clinical practice by moving promising biomedical discoveries to commercialization.”

Banu Onaral, H.H. Sun professor and director of the School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems, stressed the impact this endowment has on the University as a whole.

Medicine and technology are converging at a faster pace than most people realize, says New Jersey Institute of Technology Professor Atam Dhawan, chair of the the IEEE emerging technology committee.

Here are the five “hot spots” of convergence identified by Professor Dhawan:

Point of care health care technologies — connecting patients with healthcare professionals via computers. This includes nursing engineering, health monitoring, e-health, and health care information management for disaster situations.

Optical imaging technologies — diagnosing and staging cancer, cardiovascular diseases, and other fibrotic diseases. This includes discovery and exploration of naturally existing molecular targets of diseases and the differences associated with the molecular targets between normal and diseased states, as well as diagnosis and treatment.

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