The new microfluidic chip fabricated by Fluidigm, a startup based in South San Francisco, represents a decade of successive inventions. This small square of spongy polymer–the same type used in contact lenses and window caulking–holds a complex network of microscopic channels, pumps, and valves. Minute volumes of liquid from, say, a blood sample can flow through the maze of channels to be segregated by the valves and pumps into nearly 10,000 tiny chambers. In each chamber, nanoliters (billionths of a liter) of the liquid can be analyzed.

Image: https://www.technologyreview.com

An unexpected state is experiencing a tech boom. And yours just might be next. That state is Montana. The tech industry in the state is growing seven times as fast as the state economy as a whole. And tech jobs there pay about twice the median wage.

It’s time to take the drudgery and dread out of work at your business. You don’t like it, millennials won’t put up with it, and current productivity levels at work continue to decline. Only 32 percent of American workers are even engaged at work today. Most workers are still rushing to retirement, where they hope to escape to more stimulating activities with a real sense of accomplishment.

With titanium 3D printers, electrostatic charge tables, and a giant slide, Playground Global lives up to it’s a name. Here we take you on a tour of Android operating system inventor Andy Rubin’s hardware startup incubator that’s backed by a $300 million fund. Check out how the whimsical space lets scrappy hackers compete with Facebook and Google to recruit top talent. If techies are all Peter Pans, this is the Lost Boys’ clubhouse.

Maria Puckett was working at an auto body shop when a friend told her about an interesting option in her hometown of Spartanburg, S.C. The German car maker BMW was looking for apprentices. Maria, an energetic 25-year-old with a passion for technical work, applied for the job. She was hired and after two years is almost done with her apprenticeship. Her professional future looks bright, and she has no college debt.

If your dream has long been to start and manage your own business, there is no time like the present to get started. The cost of entry is at an all-time low, working from home through an Internet website seen globally, turning a hobby or an invention into an online business. But don’t be misled into thinking that long-term business success is assured and low risk.

A common goal of tech startups is a Silicon Valley mantra: Change the world.

Apple, Google, and Facebook have done so—possibly more than any other upstart companies in recent U.S. history. These now-mature businesses are grappling with how their world-changing ventures have broadly affected the economy and communications. And in the prevailing populist mood, the American public may be more inclined to hold these mega-firms responsible for less than desirable outcomes—fairly or not.

Entrepreneurs create 2 out of every 3 new jobs, according to the Small Business Administration. But instead of retiring, baby boomers are starting about twice as many new businesses as millennials. We ask the Kauffman Foundation’s Victor Hwang about the state of start-ups.

Image: http://video.cnbc.com

Some people seem to have all the luck. They’re in the right place at the right time. They’re top of mind and chosen for the best assignments. And they just happen to make connections that end up advancing their career.

While luck seems like a random concept, it’s actually something that can be learned and increased, says Stephen Simpson, author of Get Lucky Now: The Proven 7 Secrets of Successful People. “If you open yourself up to the concept of luck, it often seems to find you,” he says. “A closed mind is one of the worse mind-sets to have.”

Think about the workplace 10 years ago: The first iPhone wouldn’t be released until July 2007. There probably wasn’t “an app for that.” Open floor plans hadn’t yet become a privacy-busting phenomenon. And people weren’t obsessed with “the cloud.”

Certainly, smart devices, cloud-based platforms, and the way we work have been transformed over the past decade. We’re changing jobs more often—now, more often because we want to. And the breakneck speed of technology is once again transforming the way we will work.

No sales, no business! It's as simple as that, and even though we know that rule, many of us just find it too difficult to pick up the phone and dial. 

Why? because nobody really likes rejection, and certainly not constant, repeated rejection. Which is what can happen on a bad sales day: It can take up to eight attempts before you even get to speak to a prospect, and that can cause you to give up.

How can you create persuasive presentations that help you connect with your target audience? Here’s a five-step model I call the TEMPTaction model. It’s created based on an understanding of persuasion, great public-speaking delivery and communication principles. Let’s take a deeper look.

The first “T” in TEMPTaction stands for touch. This doesn’t mean you need to physically reach out and touch your customers -- it means you need to metaphorically touch them with your communication. People make decisions based on emotion. If there’s no emotional connection, they’re not likely to act. If they don’t see your reasoning or a need to act, people won’t decide.

Entrepreneurship is frequently portrayed as exciting, amusing or even lavish (especially after a company has become successful), but the truth is, there’s a dark side to entrepreneurship that isn’t frequently publicized.

Most entrepreneurs in the public eye are ones who have become very successful, while the majority of business owners endure a silent struggle -- whether they’re making a consistent profit or not.

Joel Glassman has been running the international studies program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis for more than 25 years. His office is crammed with photos and souvenirs from trips to distant countries such as Oman and Indonesia. In March, Glassman made his first visit to India. He didn’t like what he heard. All the people there could talk about, at least to a visiting American, was the February shooting in Olathe, Kan., of two Indians by a white man who allegedly had yelled, “Get out of my country!”

Image: The University of Illinois has one of the nation’s largest populations of foreign students, with more than 5,000 from China alone. (Photos by David Kidd)

Bonnie St. John overcame poverty and losing a limb to become the first African American to win a medal in skiing at the Winter Paralympics. Educated at Harvard and Oxford, the Rhodes Scholar talks about developing resilience in her new book co-authored with Allen P. Haines, Micro-Resilience: Minor Shifts for Major Boosts in Focus, Drive, and Energy. She says resilience does not result only after major efforts, like rebuilding after a hurricane, but also in the practice of tiny moments of resilience — small adjustments in daily routines, thought patterns, nutrition, activity and others.

It’s National Small Business Week so we used the C2ER State Business Incentives Database to identify state economic development programs designed for small businesses. Here are 43 programs we found:

Alaska Small Business Development Loan Program - The Small Business Economic Development (SBED) Loan Program provides financing for the start-up and expansion of businesses that will create significant long-term employment.

California Small Business Loan Guarantee Program - The Small Business Loan Guarantee Program (SBLGP) provides repayment guarantees to lenders that provide financing to small businesses that experience capital access barriers.

It’s hard to overstate the significance — and complexity — of the H-1B visa system in the U.S. It is the country’s largest guest worker visa program, and an important channel for high-skilled immigration. It allows companies to hire foreign workers for specialized jobs that can be challenging to fill. It has benefited the tech industry enormously, and other sectors, including health care, science, and finance, have also used it to fill gaps in their workforces.

WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) today announced an agreement to feature Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)-funded early-stage biomedical companies in an Innovation Zone at the 2017 BIO International Convention. The Innovation Zone companies, focused on drug discovery, diagnostics and other therapeutic platform technologies, will have dedicated exhibit space and participate in BIO’s One-on-One Partnering™ system. Select companies will make 15-minute company presentations in the BIO Business Forum.

When Crayola announced in March that it was retiring the color Dandelion in its 24-crayon pack for a new shade of blue, we invited readers to select their preferred shade for the mystery addition. Now, ahead of the color magnate's promised release of more details about the new blue crayon sometime this month, we're sharing the results. If TIME readers have their way, the new shade, whenever it is finally unpeeled, will be "electric blue." That was the hands-down winner in the survey, followed by a dark blue known as "zaffre," which Merriam-Webster defines as "an impure cobalt oxide [used] as a blue ceramic color."

Image: http://time.com

A groundswell of concern is building on Wall Street that the U.S. stock market is in dangerously high territory. This week, the Nasdaq Composite hit a new high as the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 remained in record territory — and they are up 28%, 18% and 16% respectively from a year ago. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 is trading at 25 times trailing 12-month earnings compared with a historical average of 16. The value of the stock market is nearly 150% higher than the nation’s GDP, a level last seen around the dot-com bust in 2000, according to the World Bank. And a BofA Merrill Lynch survey showed that 81% of fund managers think U.S. stocks are overvalued.