Earlier this month, the Unicode Consortium--a nonprofit made up of member companies including Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and more--announced a new version of the Unicode Standard that would bring more than 250 new emoji to people's devices in the near future. Included in the list of new emoji are a golfer, a racing motorcycle, a beach with an umbrella, and a derelict house building. Why were these emoji chosen, and not others?

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What world-changing scientific discoveries might we see by 2025? Will we have more energy technologies that move us away from fossil fuels? Will there be cures for cancer and other diseases? How will we get around and communicate?

To make some predictions, the Thomson Reuters IP & Science unit looked at two sorts of data: current scientific journal literature and patent applications. Counting citations and other measures of buzz, they identified 10 hot fields, then made specific forecasts for each.

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According to a recent study, women who seek higher wages and fairer treatment should work for companies headed by male bosses who have daughters.

Maya Sen, a professor at the University of Rochester and Adam Glynn, professor at Harvard University conducted the study, which showed that Supreme Court judges with at least one daughter were more likely to vote in favor of women’s rights than judges who had no children at all or who had only sons.

GSK and Save the Children have announced the second annual $1 million Healthcare Innovation Award, which was established to identify and reward innovations in healthcare that have proven successful in reducing child deaths in developing countries.

Organizations from across the developing world can nominate examples of innovative healthcare approaches they have discovered or implemented. These approaches must have resulted in tangible improvements to under-5 child survival rates, be sustainable and have the potential to be scaled-up and replicated. Special attention will be given to work that aims to increase the quality of, or access to, healthcare for newborns.

I woke up to a bunch of VC related things in my twitter stream this morning. I had a nice digital sabbath yesterday so I was a little surprised by how much there was. I tried cranking out a #tweetstorm of them using Little Pork Chop but I found the tweetstream experience to be very unsatisfying and very inauthentic feeling. The links are good, so here they are if you want to get in the headspace for what I really want to talk about.

Over the past decade or so, something big has been happening in public schools throughout the United States: Instruction in cursive writing has all but disappeared, cut from curricula as schools bring more technology (and keyboarding) into the classroom. The new Common Core Standards for education omit training in cursive handwriting altogether. Even in the few schools where cursive is still taught, the subject is often covered in one year and writing in cursive is not required thereafter. Many young people entering college cannot write or read cursive. Indeed, many cannot even sign their name in traditional cursive.

Image: Courtesy of Valerie Hotchkiss  

Good habits formed at youth make all the difference. – Aristotle

Our 20s is the most important and fun decade of our lives, where we begin to experience the world as young adults.  It’s also the time when we develop good (or bad) habits that will positively (or negatively) impact our future. This is the time where we are tasked with the challenge of figuring out what direction we want to take in life and what type of foundation we need to build in order to get there.

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By now almost everybody knows that Marc Andreessen has taken Twitter by storm. By Tweetstorm, that is. Marc seems to single handedly have changed all conventions in Tweeting by dropping 7-10 rapid Tweets in a related stream-of-consciousness labeling each Tweet with a number and a slash before it.

Americans are leading industrialized nations around the globe when it comes to starting businesses, with nearly 13% of the U.S. working-age population–or approximately 25 million Americans–launching or running a new venture in 2013. The U.S. had the highest entrepreneurship rate reported among 25 countries in North America, Europe, and Asia, according to the recently released Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2013 United States Report prepared by Babson and Baruch Colleges. Researchers surveyed nearly 5,700 working-age adults.

Image: http://www.forbes.com/ 

Nearly 30 years ago, city officials in Littleton, Colo., put a novel theory to test: Could a small group of local businesses, with assistance from the city, boost Littleton out of its downward spiral?

The Denver suburb was reeling in 1987 after its then-major employer, missile manufacturer Martin Marietta (today Lockheed Martin) left town, laying off about 7,800 people over an 18-month period. The company also left about 1 million square feet of industrial and office space. That year, the city council directed its economic team to figure out how to not just fill the hole but to make sure Littleton was never that vulnerable again.

TECH-ENTREPRENEUR Piers Linney knows both sides of the terrifying business pitch, from persuading family and friends to invest in his own start-up business, to grilling wannabe tycoons on the BBC’s Dragons’ Den.

Image: BBC 

Before I started my first business, Planet Explorers Publishing, I didn't understand exactly how hard entrepreneurs work each day or how much worry they often shoulder.

Running a business has lots of ups and downs, so it's important to have a robust set of strategies to keep an even keel. Grab a cup of calming tea and read this list of approaches (culled directly from small-business owners by email or online post) on becoming — and staying — happy:

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Can you install a false memory in the brain? Researchers at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory have shown it’s possible in lab animals. First they locate where in the brain the memory is formed; then they use optogenetics to manipulate the memory neurons. One day such techniques could be used to help people with debilitating traumatic memories.

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After I quit my job in 2011 (March), I had little idea about what to do next. I thought I will experiment a bit and see whats in store for me.

Prem Sagar I knew I was done with working for someone and wanted to see if I had any capability in building a business – any business, size or industry didn’t matter much.

Image: Prem Sagar 

In today’s hectic digital lifestyle, everyone has a personal brand that defines who we are, what we do professionally, our personal lives, and the message that we project online. Whether you like it or not, personal branding plays a huge role in today’s online market. We are now forced to think about our own network of friends and how we communicate and engage with them. In reality, it basically comes down to providing value and meeting needs.

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Afraid of falling within the majority who fail within the first year of starting a new company? Credit Donkey has shared an infographic to help demonstrate what really causes many of those companies to fail.

Infographic after the jump.

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I just read that according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 75 percent of employees steal from their workplace, and many do so repeatedly. Instant flashback to the day my neighbor showed up on my doorstep, lamenting that his kid didn’t get a job because he had flunked the ‘honesty test’ given to him by HR. This is the same person who knocked on my door to confess to having done small thing that I hadn’t even noticed was awry. In short: the most honest kid I have ever known. So much for honesty tests.

I was once president of a sheet metal manufacturing company. It was the kind of business where “theft” meant someone had highjacked your truck and fenced the contents, so I’m sensitive about the various levels of what I prefer to call ‘misdirection of corporate assets.’

Dr. Dan Ariely, behavioral economist and author of bestseller Predictably Irrational, has done dozens of studies on just how far people are willing to go in the direction of dishonesty while still maintaining a self-image as a ‘good’ person. So we have some reassurance from a distinguished researcher that it’s forgivable to take a pen home from work, but not a box of them. But I found it a bit disturbing to realize that I’ve often been overly tolerant of bad behavior.

After years of revving their engines, many companies are gaining momentum with their digital initiatives. Executives say their CEOs are more involved in digital efforts than ever before and that their enterprises are now investing enough to meet their overall digital goals. Yet McKinsey’s latest survey on digitization1 also finds that many respondents say their companies must address key organizational issues before digital can have a truly transformative impact on their business.

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In 2012, my last company sold to Oracle and I decided to start angel investing informally. Several of my early bets worked out reasonably well, so this year, I decided to double down on my little angel investing experiment. A few months ago, I successfully raised a small AngelList Syndicate to do so. Since then, several other angel investors thinking about doing the same thing have asked me for tips.

Image: http://venturebeat.com/ - Geir Freysson 

Recently, my 6-year-old son convinced my wife and me to let him set up a lemonade stand during our garage sale. We both enjoyed teaching our son about the risks, costs and payoffs of entrepreneurship. He learned about marketing (creating a sign and pricing the goods), investing (the cost of cookies and lemonade), selling (cutting prices and closing potential customers), making change and determining profit. It was a worthwhile and exhilarating exercise for him, with a result of $34 in revenue offset by $16 in costs.