The Northern Hemisphere is sweating through another unusually hot summer. Japan has declared its record temperatures a natural disaster. Europe is baking under prolonged heat, with destructive wildfires in Greece and, unusually, the Arctic. And drought-fuelled wildfires are spreading in the western United States.

For Friederike Otto, a climate modeller at the University of Oxford, UK, the past week has been a frenzy, as journalists clamoured for her views on climate change’s role in the summer heat.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — From testing space shuttle tiles to making electricity from sunlight, the world’s first multimegawatt solar tower has contributed to energy research, space exploration, defense testing and solar energy commercialization since it was commissioned at Sandia National Laboratories in July 1978.

Image: Photo courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories

Entrepreneurship means wearing a lot of hats. At times, you might find yourself playing accountant, hiring manager, marketer and CEO all at the same time. Not only that, but in addition to the time commitment, starting a business can also require lots of money. However, as an entrepreneur, these are the types of sacrifices you have to make in order to follow your dreams.

Is Tesla taking merch too far?

Elon Musk has a knack for selling weird branded merchandise that has nothing to do with what his companies actually do — remember The Boring Company's flamethrowers? Or the $400 leather jackets made from the same automotive grade leather that adorns Tesla interiors? 

Image: TESLA

In my years of working with entrepreneurs, I have heard many times the promise that their new idea will create the next Amazon or Apple, but I rarely hear the more important promise that the founder will practice all the good habits of winning entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs. You see, I’m convinced that the entrepreneur makes the company, not the other way around.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

JumpStart made good money on its original nonprofit investment fund — enough to sustain the organization's efforts to invest in local tech startups for the foreseeable future while also paying for new programs designed to help entrepreneurs.

So far, JumpStart has more than doubled the $27 million put into the first version of its Evergreen Fund, CEO Ray Leach said. Through that fund, the nonprofit invested in 76 startups over nearly a decade, starting in 2004.

Image: Ray Leach is CEO at JumpStart Inc.

On Tuesday, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report giving a full-throated endorsement to a new particle accelerator project called the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). The sign off is a significant step toward getting the project off the ground and taking particle physics to the next level.

Image: Brookhaven National Laboratory, which could host the new beam. (Brookhaven National Laboratory) 

For the first time, scientists have found a large, watery lake beneath an ice cap on Mars. Because water is essential to life, the discovery offers an exciting new place to search for life-forms beyond Earth.

Italian scientists working on the European Space Agency’s Mars Express mission announced on Wednesday that a 12-mile-wide underground liquid pool — not just the momentary damp spots seen in the past — had been detected by radar measurements near the Martian south pole.

Investment in venture-backed companies in the United States reached $57 billion in almost 4,000 deals in the first half of 2018. Yet, only a fraction of those dollars found their way to funds and companies based in rural America.

This capital deficit is starving innovative and valuable growth opportunities across rural communities. Many people think immediately of agriculture when focused on rural communities, yet it only makes up 6 percent of today’s rural economy.

While surveying whales and dolphins off the Hawaiian Islands, scientists spotted a creature they've never seen before: a peculiar hybrid between a dolphin and a small whale. 

In 2017, before future naval officers trained on submarines in the waters around Kauai — a place called the Pacific Missile Range Facility — the U.S. Navy hired marine researchers from the Cascadia Research Collective to study the native animals in these seas. After encountering a large pod of melon-headed whales, the researchers tagged two of them, to see where they might go. 

Image: https://mashable.com - Kimberly A Wood/Cascadia Research

As companies such as Amazon invest millions in artificial intelligence (AI) research and development, some people in Wilmington are looking at the potential of the Port City to become an AI hub.   Julian Keith, chairman of the University of North Carolina Wilmington psychology department, is one of the individuals behind an ongoing series of AI meetings at the UNCW Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE). Keith had been discussing AI for several years over coffee with Mike Orr, who was involved in the early days of IBM Watson, the supercomputer forerunner of today’s AI systems. Curry Guinn, chairman of the UNCW computer science department, joined Keith and Orr in organizing the meetings at the CIE.

This week, heavy hitters in the entrepreneurial universe, including Elon Musk, Ivanka Trump and crypto investors, made major waves. Were you paying attention? See how plugged in you were to this week's newsflashes.

Whenever I talk to someone about entrepreneurship, the three Fs come to mind: freedom, flexibility, and financial potential. The benefits of being your own boss far outweigh the regular 9-to-5. The idea of not being penned to a desk and having to answer to a superior, the flexibility of being able to work anywhere you want when you want, and having a form of control over your earning potential can’t be beaten.

Let’s face it. Despite some noteworthy gains in recent years, Ohio continues to play a losing game of catch-up with most other states in the region and the nation when it comes to advancing its economic livelihood – particularly its forward-thinking innovation economy.

That’s the blunt but realistic premise behind an expansive and newly released report issued by the Research Foundation of the Ohio Chamber of Commerce and drafted by TEConomy Partners LLC, a Columbus firm specializing in research and analysis for innovation-based economic development.

I’ve talked about how Midwest startups with coastal connections attract capital and why investors outside the Midwest want in. In fact, a recent analysis of PitchBook data shows that Chicago startups alone received $1.7 billion in venture capital funding last year through deals with at least one non-Illinois investor.

Image: Valor counts SpaceX as one of its top portfolio companiesSPACEX

Have you ever asked yourself if you are in the right job? How about if, and when you should quit a job? You need to know when it’s simply time to double-down or move on from a position.

The first thing you need to do is a self-assessment. You need to ask yourself the right questions. You need to determine if the problem is the job itself, or you. Make the effort to take a serious look at if it’s you or the job. This assessment will focus your energy on fixing the right thing. Either the job or your approach and attitude about it.

As an occasional angel investor, I always ask for a business pitch to get me in the mood. I’m still amazed at how many technical entrepreneurs don’t have a business pitch, and offer me their product pitch or product spec instead. I’m a technologist, so I always love to learn about the product, but every investor needs to make sure you have a business, as well as a product.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

Every entrepreneur believes in their heart that their startup is more innovative and creative than their competitors. Yet none knows exactly where creativity comes from within, or how to pick and motivate the most creative people for the team. Most believe and follow one or more of the popular myths on business creativity, even though none of them have much scientific evidence.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

Julie Brusaw and her husband Scott launched an Indiegogo campaign in 2014 with a goal of $1,000,000. They ended up raising more than $2.2 million for Solar Roadways, a company that makes solar panels that can be walked and driven on.

Often, a make-or-break element of a successful crowdfunding campaign is the work you do before you launch. The strength of your idea could very well make it go viral, but for the majority of fund seekers, they've done months and some cases even years of planning before they go to Kickstarter or Indiegogo.

Leap. Quit your job. Leave it all behind. Follow your dream. I am tired of reading posts about entrepreneurship written by people who have no idea what they are doing. The notion of walking away from your current career or school is utter nonsense unless you have a venture that can raise capital or sustain itself long enough to hit some inflection point.