Immigration reform has stalled because of ugly Republican politics and an insistence by the Democrats that it be all or nothing. This has taken a toll on the country’s economic growth and global competitiveness. Witness the rise of Chinese companies such as Alibaba and Xiaomi — which now have their eyes on U.S. markets — and of their counterparts in India. Entrepreneurs worldwide are building the same technologies as Silicon Valley is. America has lost its monopoly on innovation.

As the planet heats up so do the world's waters, and that means more coral bleaching. But now a new study reveals that some corals can bounce back from such near death experiences.   The heat death of a reef reveals itself as whitening, dubbed coral bleaching, which results when corals expel the tiny plants that provide food and are responsible for the rainbow of reef colors. In 2014, coral bleaching happened in the northern Mariana Islands, the Marshall Islands, the Hawaiian Islands and even the Florida Keys. Severe bleaching has now happened two years in a row off Guam and overheated waters have now appeared off the Pacific island nations of Kiribati and Nauru and are also pooling near the Solomon Islands.

Image: REEF RELIEF: This coral reef in the Seychelles has largely recovered from bleaching in 1998 thanks to the complexity of its shape and the depth of the water. Courtesy of Nick Graham

When it comes to generational stereotypes, Millennials are known for being tech savvy. So it may come as a surprise that, in one recent survey, far more young people said they preferred to learn from coaches and mentors than from e-learning options. If you think about it, though, "This makes perfect sense," says Amanda Mitchell, founder of Our Corporate Life, a company that advises businesses on people issues. "The stereotypical Millennial grew up with highly involved parents who scheduled a heavy load of extracurricular activities in an effort to create a well-rounded child. Millennial lives were focused on experiential learning."

Biotech was one of the top sectors in the country to receive venture capital investment, according to a new report from PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Two of 2014’s top venture capital investments were in the life sciences space: $446 million into Cambridge-based Moderna Therapeutics and $320 million into the Patrick Soon-Shiong-backed Nanthealth in SoCal (a startup that, interesting, has been recently accused by whistleblower as fraudulent).

Many of us make New Year’s resolutions or promises to ourselves that this year will be different than last year. That this is our year. We’ve finally figure it all out! Well…kind of…

We start off the year with the best of intentions, but by February we stop following our new dreams and goals and instead fall back into our old patterns, behaviors and thinking. 45% of Americans make New Year’s resolutions, but 25% give up on them after only the first week and almost 60% abandon them after six months! In fact, the average person makes the same New Year’s resolution ten separate times without success. 

Image: http://under30ceo.com

Without a doubt, if I asked a group of people which cities in America they thought were the best for starting up they would hit one of the following: New York, San Francisco, Chicago, or Boston. You wouldn’t be wrong for selecting one, or all, of those cities.

However, you would be missing out on some areas that have only recently come to join the ranks of the top startup cities in America. Sure, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston will be on top for a long time to come, but let’s not forget about all of the smaller places that have been inspired by their startup greatness.

Mattermark Blog recently published a list of 2014 most active investors in the tech industry. A total of 701 Internet technology startups received a cumulative $5.1 Billion in Series A funding.  Khosla Ventures has moved into the #1 spot for most active Series A investor, with a total of 20 deals completed in 2014. Here is a complete list:

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/52522100@N07/5037468752

Investors are clamoring to get into private companies through any means they can, which has led to a boom in the secondary market for private shares. SecondMarket Inc., which facilitates repurchases of shares in private companies, said more than $1.4 billion in such transactions took place on its platform last year. That is four times the number in 2013. The company declined to name specific deals. It is also a record for New York-based SecondMarket, which has been in the business since 2009 and facilitated pre-IPO trading of shares in Facebook Inc.FB +1.46%, among other companies.

As managing partner of Blumberg Capital; David Blumberg is a respected investor, with two decades of experience investing in early-stage tech startups. I recently interviewed him on the top trends impacting venture capital in the current market. His uncanny insights into upcoming trends could be of great benefit to investors and entrepreneurs alike

WELLESLEY, Mass., Jan. 15, 2015 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Babson College has received the Global Consortium for Entrepreneurship (GCEC) Award, designed to showcase and celebrate the very best of university entrepreneurship, for Outstanding Contributions to Venture Acceleration.

This award is designed to honor a center that creatively supports the process of accelerating startups through competitions, incubators or accelerators.

When it comes to determining the size of giant squid and other large sea animals, humans have a tendency to exaggerate, a new study suggests.

A team of researchers compared scientific and popular media reports of body sizes for 25 species of marine creatures, including whales, sharks, squids, and other giant ocean dwellers, and found that most of the animals were smaller than what was reported.

Image: A diver is dwarfed by a giant jellyfish. Credit: Yomiuri Shimbun

We see all kinds of office politics – the good, the bad, and the ugly – in family-owned businesses. Families can be intensely political organizations, and non-family executives must know how to play politics both in the business itself and in the dangerous borderland between the business and the family. After reviewing the work that our firm has done with more than 200 business families around the world, we’ve identified some winning political moves that non-family executives can make:

The worst number in business is one. One of just about anything is a bad thing.

In my home office, where I work under deadline pressure as an advertising copywriter, I do not have one Mac. I have three. Why? So when Mac No. 1 freezes up, crashes or requires an exorcism, I can move what I’m working on and urgently need to print out before the day’s FedEx deadline to Mac No. 2. And in case Mac No. 2 has indigestion or leprosy that day, I have Mac No. 3. I keep them in different rooms to prevent contagion. My Mac is my employee. If Mac were a living, breathing human employee who, say, printed what I wrote in booklets on a printing press, I’d want at least two of those Macs and two printing presses. Never one.

LAS VEGAS -- Following every New Year’s since 1998, new gadgets and technologies have taken center stage in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). This year is no different.

In my experience as a digital media professor and a startup founder who has attended the past 10 CES events, I usually discover a handful of new devices and services that make running a startup a little easier, faster or more efficient. Here’s my roundup of this year’s must have tech for entrepreneurs unveiled at CES:

The money spigots for U.S. startups opened last year to their widest since the peak of the dot-com boom in 2000.

Venture capitalists pumped $48.3 billion into U.S. startups in 2014, according to data today from the National Venture Capital Association and PricewaterhouseCoopers, the most since investors piled $105 billion into closely held companies in 2000. The 2014 total was up 61 percent from $30 billion in 2013 and was more than double the $20.4 billion invested in 2009.

After the Governor’s Task Force on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) Education released its final report, Governor Maggie Hassan issued the following statement:

“Modernizing how we educate our students in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and math is critical to helping them develop the skills needed for good jobs in the innovation economy, and I thank the members of the task force for their important work.

WATERLOO, ONTARIO--(Marketwired - Jan. 15, 2015) - Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario) Entrepreneurs in the Waterloo Region will benefit from up to $8 million announced today by FedDev Ontario Minister Gary Goodyear, along with Kitchener−Waterloo MP Peter Braid. The Harper Government is providing the Waterloo Accelerator Centre with up to $8 million to expand its AC JumpStart Program.

Trust us, you're not getting hired.

You may think you're the perfect candidate to land that cushy corporate job, but this on-point video from Fast Company proves that any job interviewer is going to see right through that long speech about how you're a detail oriented, perfectionist team player.

Nobody wants a cliché for an employee.

2014 was a good year for airline safety, though that may be hard to believe considering the two Malaysia Airlines tragedies and recent AirAsia crash.

According to aviation-news website Flightglobal, there were 19 fatal accidents in 2014, down from 26 in 2013. However, overall deaths increased, with 671 last year, compared to 281 in 2013.

Image: FLICKR, THEEN MOY

A team of scientists, in a groundbreaking analysis of data from hundreds of sources, has concluded that humans are on the verge of causing unprecedented damage to the oceans and the animals living in them.

“We may be sitting on a precipice of a major extinction event,” said Douglas J. McCauley, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an author of the new research, which was published on Thursday in the journal Science.

Image: Carl Zimmer