For people who typically hoard Halloween candy past Thanksgiving, here’s some surprising advice: Some dentists actually condone eating your Halloween candy at one time, rather than rationing it out over weeks.

That doesn’t mean eating lots of candy is good for you, of course—but it might be better for your teeth. After you eat sweets, bacteria feed on the sugars and starches left on your teeth and form plaque. Eventually, the acid in plaque begins to wear away at the enamel coating your teeth, forming tiny holes—also known as cavities—that grow larger and larger over time. “Cavities are a matter of having something to feed the bacteria—the sugar from the candy—and also the duration of time it’s in contact with your teeth,” says Anna Berik, a dentist in Boston.

A surge in Amazon stock following the company's third-quarter earnings report, has increased CEO Jeff Bezos' net worth by $6.4 billion, to $90.6 billion, officially making him the world's richest person.

Bezos displaced Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, whose net worth is $88.5 billion according to Bloomberg data, and the new distinction could fuel his interest in furthering human progress through for-profit companies — efforts that could shift how the world's wealthiest think about philanthropy.

The U.S. House this week passed H.R. 2763, which would amend the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs in several significant ways. Most notably, the bill would extend by five years the “assistance for administrative… costs,” which is used for outreach initiatives and some business and market assistance initiatives across agencies. The bill would extend or implement other activities within SBIR/STTR, nearly all of which would improve the programs’ ability to support commercialization in parallel with technological development.

Life insurance and financial planning giant Northwestern Mutual announced today that it is creating a $5 million early stage venture capital fund to invest in startups in its hometown of Milwaukee. Called the Cream City Venture Capital Fund, it will grant selected early stage startups between $100,000 and $250,000.

The announcement comes on the heels of a $50 million fund Northwestern Mutual launched earlier this year to invest in fintech startups, called Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures, as well as Northwestern Mutual’s 2015 acquisition of LearnVest.

It was late summer, and the gray towers of the Salk Institute, in San Diego, shaded seamlessly into ocean fog. The austere, marble-paved central courtyard was silent and deserted. The south lawn, a peaceful retreat often used for Tai Chi and yoga classes, was likewise devoid of life, but through vents built into its concrete border one could detect a slight ammoniac whiff from more than two thousand cages of laboratory rodents below. In a teak-lined office overlooking the ocean, the biologist Ron Evans introduced me to two specimens: Couch Potato Mouse and Lance Armstrong Mouse.

Bitcoin has been around since 2009, but it really wasn’t until recently that it finally hit the mainstream consciousness of investors and the general public.  As of this writing 1 bitcoin is now worth over $5,600 USD.  And its meteoric rise doesn’t look to be abating any time soon.  Its potential to reshape how we understand and use money is real.  But the big question is why are banks and governments so steadfastly against it?

Mark Cuban was first introduced to Packback when the company’s founders, Kasey Gandham and Mike Shannon, pitched investors on ABC’s Shark Tank in March 2014. At the time, Packback was an e-textbook rental operation. Cuban liked what he saw and gave the company $250,000 in funding in exchange for 20% equity.

Image: https://www.fastcompany.com

Academics and corporate innovators both spend their workdays pursuing breakthroughs that may never materialise. Venturing into unknown territory carries fairly high potential rewards, but also a fairly high risk of failure.

When working on a research project, it can be difficult to decide when to cut your losses. Optimism tells us that just beyond our grasp hovers the solution that will make it all work; pessimism, on the other hand, tells us that the end we have in sight may well be a dead end.  We are always aware that every day spent chasing a mirage wastes valuable time and resources. Absent a glaring signpost of failure, how does one know when it makes strategic sense to abandon an idea?

Startups think about disruption all the time, but late night sprints at T-Rex – a coworking space in St Louis, Missouri – have seen the startup founders themselves getting their work disrupted. By a ghost.

A total of six people have personally experienced and can testify to the haunting of the Lammert Building, where the T-Rex coworking space is housed.

Image: The T-Rex technology startup incubator has a coworking space on the 5th floor of the Lammert Building that may be haunted. - http://eqstl.com

A new platform targeting mass-affluent individual and institutional investors from China launched today.

MarketX provides Chinese investors with access to alternative American investments ranging from pre-IPO shares in hot tech startups, theme-driven portfolios, real estate investments and high-yield income products.

The company is targeted the Chinese middle class, which McKinsey & Co. projects to be 76 per cent of urban populations by 2022, after being just four per cent in 2000. More than four in five want to globally diversify and hold ten per cent of their wealth outside China.

Image: Cathryn Chen - http://www.banklesstimes.com

Every year in October, research firm Gartner publishes its top 10 strategic technology trends for the following year. This year, it says the top trends tie into the ‘intelligent digital mesh’ as the foundation for future digital business and ecosystems.

The first three strategic technology trends explore how artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are seeping into virtually everything and represent a major battleground for technology providers over the next five years. The next four trends focus on blending the digital and physical worlds to create an immersive, digitally enhanced environment. The last three refer to exploiting connections between an expanding set of people and businesses, as well as devices, content and services to deliver digital business outcomes.

Image: http://www.thenextsiliconvalley.com

Richard Branson, perhaps the world's preeminent entrepreneur -- having dabbled in everything from a record company to an airline, from banking and health care to telecommunications, and now space and earthbound supersonic travel -- prepared to divulge the six words that he said have been his personal mantra for business for five productive decades.

As the crowd of nearly 5,000 at the Theater at Madison Square Garden for the Synergy Global Forum on Saturday leaned forward with baited breath, the tall and lean bearded Brit, dressed all in white, definitively voiced his motivating motto…

Entrepreneurs are a rare breed.

They are the ones who question the status quo and come up with solutions for problems that trouble the world as a whole. Problems, sometimes which we don’t even realize to be a problem.

But, not everybody is built to be an entrepreneur. While entrepreneurship education certainly does exist at the university level, some still question its effectiveness. It is something that grows out of a gut feeling and also out of passion.

Netflix is a place where people win. They exceed expectations. They conquer the odds. That’s how they’ve moved as fast as the market from DVDs to streaming, capturing an audience of close to 100M paying subscribers. And it’s also why extremely high-caliber talent goes to work there. Much of this is the product of Netflix’s hard-driving culture, as described and defined in its infamous Culture Doc, which continues to make industry rounds to this day (Sheryl Sandberg once called it “the most important document to ever come out of Silicon Valley.”)

Canada finds itself in a unique position at a distinct time in history. We are suddenly and auspiciously the nation with the greatest immediate capacity to make a positive difference and help solve some of the world's biggest challenges.

We may be the smallest G7 country, but we are positioned to punch well above our weight. Meanwhile, the United States and Britain are in the midst of political turmoil. France and Germany are engrossed in domestic challenges and European Union reform. Italy and Japan are lodged in a financial quagmire. We are the ones left standing, a kind of custodian of hope in a world adrift, stubbornly insisting on the values that have come to represent the "Canadian way": peace, order, and good government, diversity and equality, and the value of scientific research and technology.

Despite the "overnight" success stories you read about in glossy business magazines, the overwhelming majority of successful businesses take years, if not decades, to build. It's never easy. Entrepreneurs often ride a roller coaster of highs and lows that feel even more intense because they're running the show. Steve jobs once said, "I'm convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance."

Some people just seem to bounce back from whatever life throws at them. Whether it’s illness, loss, or tragedy, they do the tough work of picking themselves up, dusting themselves off, and carrying on—even when it seems impossible.

If you’ve ever thought, “I could never do that” when looking at one of these apparent “superheroes,” don’t be so sure. It’s actually possible to build resilience to make yourself better able to bounce back from even the most difficult times.

Startups and investors the world over have finally shaken off the dreaded funding winter, if the venture capital deals announced in the third quarter of 2017 are anything to go by.

Globally, 2,362 venture capital deals were revealed in Q3 2017 with an aggregate deal value of US$49 billion, according to alternative assets intelligence firm Prequin. A lion’s share of that money went into Asian tech companies.

Image: https://www.techinasia.com

It's surprising to me how many organizations still don't "get" millennials. Many of them seem to think that appealing to millennials is complicated, like learning a new language or getting a degree in cross-cultural studies.

As a millennial myself, I can tell you that it's not that complicated. You just have to think a little bit about the stage of life that millennials are in. Most of us are in our 20s to mid-30s. We aren't looking for entry-level work anymore, though we often feel like we are playing catch-up in our career due to a slow start after the Great Recession. Many of us have had one (or even two) major career shifts since college.

Google Maps is great for just getting around. But don’t be fooled: The app is much more than a glorified Garmin. Maps has all sorts of powerful features and time-saving shortcuts that aren’t obvious, but are just waiting to be discovered. So grab your compass and get ready: It’s time to explore some of its most useful off-the-beaten-path options.