Erika DeBenedictis' research to help spacecraft quickly and more easily travel to other planets has earned her a top student science award from Intel.

The 18-year-old from Albuquerque, N.M., took home the $100,000 first prize from Intel's 2010 Science Talent Search, an annual contest that challenges students to envision solutions to the scientific problems of today and tomorrow.

DeBenedictis' goal was to design a software navigation system that could help spacecraft more easily journey throughout the solar system. Her research discovered that gravity and the movement of the planets could create low-energy orbits to propel ships faster and with less fuel required.

Sponsored by Intel and run by the Society for Science and the Public, the talent search also awarded prizes to other enterprising students.

What are Steve Jobs' favorite tech sites?

Well, he has Engadget, Gizmodo, the New York Times tech section, and the Wall Street Journal bookmarked in Safari on his iPad, according to a source who saw him demo it.

Our source was in one of the meetings with Steve when he visited Manhattan on his media tour with the iPad in February.

Steve has other sites bookmarked, but these are the only ones that stuck in our source's mind.

XI’AN, China — For years, many of China’s best and brightest left for the United States, where high-tech industry was more cutting-edge. But Mark R. Pinto is moving in the opposite direction.

Mr. Pinto is the first chief technology officer of a major American tech company to move to China. The company, Applied Materials, is one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent firms. It supplied equipment used to perfect the first computer chips. Today, it is the world’s biggest supplier of the equipment used to make semiconductors, solar panels and flat-panel displays.

In addition to moving Mr. Pinto and his family to Beijing in January, Applied Materials, whose headquarters are in Santa Clara, Calif., has just built its newest and largest research labs here. Last week, it even held its annual shareholders’ meeting in Xi’an.

With traditional employment looking so bleak a common question is this: "Are you seeing more students interested in entrepreneurship given the depths of this recession?"

This is a good question because historically we have seen a small upswing in student interest in entrepreneurship when the economy and job market soften. But this has become a much deeper recession and a more worrisome long-term economic climate. How are students reacting this time?

As technology transfer managers from around the country prepare today to debate the role of academic researchers in commercializing their own inventions, two experts – one from each side of the aisle – have come together to propose an Academic Inventors’ Bill of Rights.

The authors of the initial draft are Alan Bentley, Director of Commercialization for Cleveland Clinic Innovations, and Dr. Renee Kaswan, founder of IPAdvocate.org (www.IPAdvocate.org), former research professor at the University of Georgia and inventor of the breakthrough product for dry eye, Restasis^®.

Bentley and Kaswan are unveiling their Academic Inventors’ Bill of Rights in a poster presentation at the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM) Annual Meeting, which kicks off today in New Orleans.

Both believe that adopting a standard of minimal legal protections for the intellectual property of students and faculty will benefit faculty, students, society at large and universities in the long run.

“Most technology commercialization professionals understand the importance of building strong partnerships with our faculty innovators,” said Bentley. “The productivity of our industry has been called into question of late, partly because of isolated system failures in working with faculty. The creation of a standardized Inventors’ Bill of Rights that all academic institutions can adopt would be a powerful message to our faculty that commercialization is indeed a partnership.”

In the wake of the financial meltdown, a new set of financial regulations proposed by Senator Christopher Dodd aimed at plugging the "too big to fail" loopholes could have some negative side effects for the angel investment community. According to a report from the Seattle-based site TechFlash, Dodd's bill would require that angel investments be approved by the SEC, a process that could take as many as 120 days to complete.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. The enormous reform bill (some 1300+ pages) also gives the SEC the ability to delegate regulatory authority to state governments on investments it deems too small in size or scope. Angel investors themselves could be place under the regulatory microscope as well; the bill wants to raise the income level it takes to become an accredited investor, perhaps even doubling the requirement.

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- After some lean times, venture capital is trickling back into Canada from the U.S., and that pace could quicken thanks to a new piece of tax reform proposed in Canada's annual budget.

Over the last two years, U.S. venture capital in Canadian companies has plunged by more than half, to $475.7 million in 2009 from $954 million in 2007, according to data from Dow Jones VentureSource.

While this decline tracked a broader trend in venture capital over the same period, experts say the problem for Canadian firms was exacerbated by tax regulations that punish foreign investors who later want to sell their shares in those companies. For years, U.S. venture firms that wanted to invest in start-ups had to deal with a piece of Canadian tax law called section 116. When foreign investors wanted to sell their shares in a corporation, they had to pay a 25% tax on their gains or fill out cumbersome paperwork to get an exemption. It could often take weeks or months before a firm could get ahold of its funds, say lawyers and venture capitalists.

In a recent conversation here at ReadWriteStart we were talking about what readers want most. Beyond stories about where the latest funding opportunities are found, and beyond wanting to know what startups are doing that works, we know that sometimes our startup readers just want some simple practical advice.

Towards that end we've posted many a list. And now it's time for a review. Here are six of our best lists in abbreviated form. From how not to kill your startup, to public speaking, to funders to follow, we at ReadWriteStart want to help. If you have ideas for future lists, please post 'em as comments below.

You can learn a lot of things in the classroom.

A lot of the knowledge you’ll glean comes in the form of facts (or “laws”) on how and why certain things work. A few lessons involve behaviors, such as team work. On very rare occasions, one learns a life lesson.

But there are some things you’ll never learn in the classroom. Hopefully, this will fill some of the gaps:

Ethical Challenges Occur More Frequently Than You Expect – Some engineering programs and a large number of business programs offer courses on ethics, but while these courses might expose the student to certain predicaments, they seldom help the student develop the muscle memory necessary to respond to ethical dilemmas.

NBIA President & CEO David Monkman testified Wednesday, March, 17, before the U.S. House of Representatives Small Business Committee. During the hearing, “Business Incubators and Their Role in Job Creation,” Monkman advocated for the need for greater awareness and support for business incubation in the United States – especially as Congress examines ways to create jobs and turn around the struggling economy. To read his full written testimony

10. Prioritize
Your goal is to produce innovative products and services that provide value to people. Money is only a way of keeping score.

9. Perspiration, Not Inspiration
Innovation isn’t a flash of lightning out of nowhere. It comes from creating the right environment and involves a lot of people. At least put up lightning rods.

8. Forget Perfection
You don’t know what a perfect product looks like and neither do your customers. It doesn’t need to be perfect. It does need to be good enough to get people excited.

7. Challenge From Within
Your competitors surely won’t hesitate to compete with your products and services. If you obsolete your own product, at least you keep the business.

6. Limiting Labels
You define your products, not the other way around. You close off exploration when you say, “We’re a training company,” or “We’re a book company.” Apple Computer is now just Apple.

As Spring finally shows signs of taking hold in the northern hemisphere, there are lots of great events coming up. There’s one that I’ve personally been working very hard on – the Small Business Summit on March 16th. I’ve got a few free tickets for readers of this column, so if you’ll be in the NYC area next Tuesday click here quick to register before they’re gone.

This list of events, conferences and webinars for growing small businesses and entrepreneurs is brought to you twice a month as a community service by Small Business Trends and Smallbiztechnology.com.

Traditional business cards and CDs-as-business-cards are dangerous because:

1. They assume old-style communication: I have a message for you.

This is a transactional view of communication. If you simply put your card in someone's hand as a way of marketing, chances are it will end in the trash can when your back is turned.

To ensure your card becomes a treasured artifact and entered into someone's Rolodex you must generate value on the spot, interacting with the other person and creating something they can use. This is what I call generative communication. When you want to hand someone your business card, ask first, "Have I generated value for this person?" If you can't answer that question in the affirmative, why should they take your card other than politeness?

EU finance ministers are fighting against the European Commission's target of spending 3% of GDP on research and development (R&D), demanding a new "outcome-oriented" measure of success.

The 3% figure is one of five headline goals of the 'Europe 2020' growth strategy and has been firmly backed by EU Innovation Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn (EurActiv 09/03/10).

Meeting in Brussels yesterday (16 March), finance ministers called for "urgent consideration" of wider indicators to measure R&D and innovation, putting the European Council on a collision course with the EU executive, which has put its political weight behind the target.

Including spending as an indicator has proven controversial and has exposed differences between ministries of finance and research across Europe. With public budgets under pressure, finance ministers are reluctant to commit to additional spending on R&D.

The government is planning to exempt investors from long-term capital gains taxes, but for now the rules would only apply to shares of companies not traded on exchanges, in hopes of stimulating private equity and venture capital investment.

A special focus was put on boosting innovation during a meeting chaired by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin last week on tax policy for the coming three years.

Putin agreed with a proposal to exempt the sale of not publicly traded shares from the 20 percent tax on capital gains, a move intended to increase long-term investment in innovative companies and entice investors to conduct their deals in Russia's legal jurisdiction, two officials with knowledge of the meeting told Vedomosti.

Putin's press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, declined to comment on the matter.

Under an Economic Development Ministry proposal that was forwarded to the Finance Ministry before the meeting, the tax break would apply to stakes of at least 10 percent held for at least five years. A copy of the proposal was obtained by Vedomosti.

The founders of the United States of America were all well acquainted with the experimental nature of science, and they applied the same methods to their new political enterprise. “They always described the formation of the country itself as an experiment,” says Timothy Ferris, “And what isn’t widely understood is that the way that democracies work is by constant experiment.” Each election, each passage of a new law is, after all, a procedure designed to test a hypothesis about how to make constant improvements to a government.

The Christian Science Monitor called Ferris “the best popular science writer in the English language today,” and his new book is The Science of Liberty. In it, he tells the story of the intimate connections between the scientific advances that expanded the frontiers of human knowledge and the democratic experiments that expanded the frontiers of human liberty. He recently joined Science Progress editor-in-chief Jonathan Moreno for a podcast interview to discuss how science rescued generations of humanity from subsistence living and brought freedom to nations around the world.

In the opening pages, Ferris lays down his bold claim: “The democratic revolution was sparked—caused is perhaps not too strong a word—by the scientific revolution, and that science continues to empower democratic freedom today.” Dissatisfied with existing histories of the Enlightenment, he set out to ascertain more specifically what exactly was new about the period bookended by the English Revolution of 1688 and the French Revolution of 1789. It wasn’t simply the embrace of reason, Ferris said, because after all, individuals can reason their way into all sorts of conclusions that don’t have anything to do with the nature of reality.

Most EU Member States until 2008 were steadily improving their innovation performance. The economic crisis may, however, be hampering this progress, according to the 2009 European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS) published today. Early indications show that the worst hit are Member States with lower levels of innovation performance, potentially reversing the convergence process witnessed over recent years. Meanwhile, the latest statistics show that the EU is having difficulty in catching up with the US in innovation performance, although it maintains a clear lead over the emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China, despite rapid improvements in China.

"This scoreboard provides invaluable evidence on trends in innovation performance. The overall picture is positive, there are however some worrying signs and we will have to take this very seriously in developing the measures to accomplish what we just laid out in our Europe 2020 strategy. Increasing investment in research and innovation is the key to moving from crisis to sustainable prosperity. That is why the Commission is maintaining the 3% of GDP target for R&D investment in Europe and proposing realistic national targets with robust monitoring.” emphasised Vice-President Antonio Tajani, Commissioner for Entrepreneurship and Industry, and Research Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, who is leading a cross-cutting approach to innovation in the new Commission.

The EIS 2009 includes 29 innovation-related indicators with publicly available data from 2007/2008 and trend analyses for the EU27 Member States, as well as for Croatia, Serbia, Turkey, Iceland, Norway and Switzerland. The 29 indicators are grouped around three categories: enablers (human resources, finance and support), firm activities (firm investments, linkages & entrepreneurship, throughputs) and outputs (innovators, economic effects). It does not capture yet the full effects of the recent economic and financial crises.

U.S. life sciences companies secured $1.9 billion in venture capital financing in the fourth quarter, according to a new report from online venture capital database VentureDeal.

The $1.9 billion represents almost no change compared with the third quarter and continues a stable trend of financing for companies in the biotechnology, pharmaceutical and medical-devices fields.

Biotechnology received the most money — $871 million among 69 companies. Medical devices followed, with 78 companies raising $572 million during the quarter. Forty-five pharmaceutical companies raised $460 million.

If you think about how you use software today versus how you did just 10 years ago, my bet is you now use a lot more web-based applications.

A piece of software that runs in your web browser and which stores your data (such as emails or photos) on the Internet is commonly referred to as Software As A Service (SaaS) or cloud-based computing – two buzz words which companies like SalesForce.com and Google use as much as they can to communicate the idea that there’s a paradigm shift taking place in the way software is built and used.

The basic idea is that a few years ago most of the software programs you used (such as Microsoft Office, Outlook, Photoshop and MSN/Yahoo/AOL Messenger) were Windows (or Mac) based applications that you had to install and upgrade. They took up space on your hard drive and couldn’t be used when you were on another computer unless you installed them again.