In Villalba, Puerto Rico, a small town on a remote mountainside in the path of Hurricane Maria, it took months for power and water to come back to some homes after the storm slammed into the island. The infrastructure is still fragile, and access to tap water still sometimes disappears for days at a time.

Now, architects plan to build a community of resilient homes in the town that can better weather future storms. The houses can work off the grid, without any municipal services, for one to three months, depending on the number of occupants, says Jonathan Marvel, founder of Marvel Architects, a firm based in both New York and Puerto Rico that designed the new houses.

Being passionate is human nature, particularly when you’re running your own business. But when that excitement takes the reins -- something that routinely happens, for instance, when billionaire Elon Musk hops on Twitter -- problems can result. In the past two months alone, Musk’s musings have led to his removal as chairman of Tesla Inc. and a lawsuit for slander.

When you first have the inkling of a great idea, you’ve likely done little in the way of research. Is anybody else working to solve this same problem? Who might find this idea appealing, and why? Do you have the right skills to bring this idea to fruition?

Driven by breakthrough research and innovation, biohealth and life science are high-risk, high-expense fields. The right location is critical to your success, but that doesn’t mean you need to pay Boston’s and San Francisco’s high rents for lab and office space. Maryland, a booming bio hub itself, is not only cost-efficient, but offers many advantages you may not find elsewhere. Before narrowing your shortlist for your new biotech business or expansion of existing biotech business, consider these six factors that contribute to Maryland’s innovation ecosystem.

Silicon Valley gets a lot of shine. We get it, the Valley has star power and volume. But, corporations are spread out across the country, and may not need to build up frequent flier mileage to find innovative startups.

At our corporate innovation strategy group Your Ideas Are Terrible, we’ve seen example after example to make the case for adding a new tactic to our startup scouting portfolio — looking in your own backyard to acquire, invest and pilot with local startups.

Image: https://hypepotamus.com

The most relaxing part of the holiday season is the time spent sunk into the sofa watching Christmas movies, hopefully accompanied by a pile of cookies. It’s peak coziness, as the best Christmas movies often involve quests for romance or identity, a hefty amount of snow and plot lines that wrap up neatly as the holiday nears.

From numerous retellings of A Christmas Carol to the ever-relatable Griswold family bungling up the holiday, some of the best Christmas movies provide comfort during one of the most hectic times of the year. Reliving Emma Thompson breaking down to Joni Mitchell in Love Actually, or ordering a solo cheese pizza to honor Kevin McCallister in Home Alone only enhances the holiday.

In a previous article we talked about the difference between the public and private markets, but in this article we’ll focus specifically on two major subsets of the private markets: venture capital (VC) and private equity (PE). 

Because the private markets control over a quarter of the US economy by amount of capital and 98 percent by number of companies, anyone in any business capacity, from sales to operations, should understand what it is and how it works. 

About 23% of people living in Sub-Saharan Africa don’t have access to toilets while 31% with toilets use one’s that aren’t connected to a formal sanitation system. This means that more than half the people in sub-Saharan Africa live without proper sanitation – that’s about 570 million people.

One of the problems is that existing toilets aren’t a good fit for parts of sub-Saharan Africa because many areas lack water and there are often no proper plumbing or facilities to treat wastewater.

Image: REUTERS/THOMAS PETER Looking under the lid 

(Natural News) Many of us are under the mistaken impression that getting cancer is very much a case of bad luck, that there is very little we can do to prevent this deadly disease. The truth is, however, that the vast majority of cancers can be avoided through simple lifestyle changes like maintaining a healthy weight, not smoking, drinking alcohol in moderation, exercising regularly and eating an organic, nutrient-dense diet.

Image: https://www.naturalnews.com

The 2017 holiday season has been complicated by data breaches that have plagued consumers all year long, such as the massive Equifax hack. As a result, consumers must worry about fraud and the misuse of our financial information during a time of increased financial transactions, tight budgets and heightened stresses. 

Image: StockSnapSTOCKSNAP

Sometimes, to become successful and get closer to the person you can become, you don’t need to add more things — you need to give some of them up.

There are certain things that are universal, which will make you successful if you give up on them, even though each one of us could have a different definition of success.

You can give up on some of them as soon as today, while it might take a bit longer to give up on others.

Researchers at the University of Michigan have created the world’s smallest computer, again, after their previous micro-computers, called Micromotes, that were just 2 by 2 by 4mm in size, that were powered by solar cell batteries, were bested by IBM who built an even smaller micro-computer called a Crypto Anchor in March that measured just an incredible 1 by 1mm in size, and was smaller than a grain of salt.

Image: https://www.fanaticalfuturist.com

Tulsa is joining the parade of places that are providing economic development incentives to people who are willing to relocate there. I previously mentioned Vermont’s program and also that of a Cincinnati suburb.

I’ve been pretty critical of these. They have the whiff of desperation about them even though these places should be positioned to attract people. Tulsa in fact is growing right in line with the US average population growth rate.

Image: http://www.newgeography.com

It isn’t pretty—nothing at all like the gallery of pictures that are sure to come. But just moments after landing—plus the eight minutes and seven seconds it takes for a radio signal to travel from Mars to Earth—the InSight spacecraft beamed home its first image from the Martian surface. InSight’s own Twitter feed explained the poor quality of the image: “My lens cover isn’t off yet, but I had to show you a first look at my new home.”

Image: http://time.com

University of Michigan expenditures on research reached a record high for the third year in a row in fiscal year 2018, and the school remained No. 1 in research volume across all public universities for the eighth year in a row, according to the National Science Foundation.

The report stated the volume of research at the University increased by 4.4 percent from fiscal year 2017 — from July 1, 2017 to June 30, 2018, the volume of research at the University totaled $1.55 billion.

There is a global arms race for artificial intelligence-related intellectual property. The United States and China are amassing thousands of patent filings related to AI and machine learning. Not coincidentally, these nations are the ones determining whether AI and its many applications can be the subject matter of patent protection.

At the same time, Canada has been heavily investing in innovation. The federal government is planning $950-million in supercluster investments, featuring partnerships with major multinationals that are behind the increase in AI patent holdings, such as Microsoft and Uber.

To help their organizations capitalize on artificial intelligence and analytics, CAOs must do more than demonstrate their technical chops. They need to lead like a Catalyst.

The role of the chief analytics officer (CAO) is being thrust into the spotlight as artificial intelligence (AI) technology continues to improve—and prove its value. AI and other advanced analytics will unlock $9.5 trillion to $15.4 trillion annually, with recent AI advances such as deep learning alone making up nearly 40 percent of the total.

Image: https://www.mckinsey.com/

Companies that want to keep their creative spark may want to keep their founders at the helm.

That is the conclusion of a recent study looking at the level of innovation at companies that replaced their founder, compared with businesses where the founder stuck around.

He Jiankui, a researcher in Shenzhen, China, claims he utilized CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing to alter the DNA of embryos for seven couples.

CRISPR-Cas9 is a procedure that allows researchers to easily identify specific gene sequences, clip them out and replace them. The type of research He Jiankui is describing isn’t allowed in the U.S., and there is still quite a bit of uncertainty regarding the safety and permanence of CRISPR gene editing.

Starting a new business isn’t easy and it, of course, has its share of ups and downs.

Some months are outstanding (financially), while others aren’t.

Some months you’re in “pitch mode” to land new business and others you’re delegating work to be performed, hiring new team members, firing ones who aren’t working out and doing all the “things” that nobody on social media will ever know, hear or see.

Washington, D.C.—Today, the Greater Washington Partnership unveiled the Blueprint For Regional Mobility, the first ever CEO-driven comprehensive strategy that binds the Capital Region and better connects residents in Baltimore, Washington and Richmond to opportunity.

This unified vision for the future of the region's transportation system comes on the heels of Amazon's commitment earlier this month to bring 25,000 jobs to the region. Executing on the seven solutions and 20 actions laid out in the Blueprint will fundamentally transform the way we move around the region, reversing our current disjointed system's trajectory of worsening congestion and limiting access to essential destinations for many families in our region.