What is a super-Earth? Exactly what it sounds like: It’s a planet that’s similar to Earth but larger. And astronomers are realizing that super-Earths may be one of the most common planets in our galaxy. The following is a transcript of the video.

Astronomers have found dozens of potentially habitable planets outside of our solar system. That’s dozens of chances to discover the first alien life!Or plenty of places we could park our first interstellar colonies!

“5 Questions With…” is a weekly BioBuzz series where we reach out to interesting people in the BioHealth Capital Region to share a little about themselves, their work, and maybe something completely unrelated. This edition features 5 Questions with Brian Darmody, CEO, Association of University Research Parks (AURP).

Brian Darmody is CEO of AURP, a global nonprofit representing research parks and innovation districts sponsored by universities, federal labs, communities, hospitals, and other institutions in the US and 12 other countries.

Two thousand twenty was a year no one expected. Facing a global pandemic, tensions around the world, uncertainty, and increasing regulations, entrepreneurs dealt with new challenges many of us had never seen before. Determined and undeterred many business owners pressed on utilizing technology and the power of connection to keep their companies running in light of tremendous upheaval. Entrepreneurs Brian Condenanza and Bav Majithia have seen their fair share of challenges and contend that we can learn four powerful lessons from this year. 

Image credit: Brian Condenanza and Bav Majithia 

Thanks to advances in medicine, life expectancy has increased rapidly. This positive change is, however, presenting society with many challenges, and the health crisis has brought many of these into sharp focus. One of the main challenges presented by our rapidly aging society is the growth of dementia, with 50 million people across the world currently living with the illness, a figure set to triple by 2050. 

Image: Alon Braun

Just as entrepreneurs found new ways to pivot throughout 2020, investors faced new pressures while managing their portfolios and deciding the next best steps. An unpredictable economy required us to step up and fund innovation so we could move ahead into next year with new vaccines, the next generation of the digital workplace and the prominent social justice issues of our time.

Fever monitoring has developed something of a bad reputation under COVID-19. While having a fever is one of COVID-19’s telltale symptoms, temperature checks capture only a moment in time. Unless someone is stricken with fever, they tell us very little about a person’s state of health. But a new report suggests that body temperature can play a far more useful role in understanding health—we’re just using it wrong.

Image: Oura

WASHINGTON, Dec. 17, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, the Council on Competitiveness, through its National Commission on Innovation and Competitiveness Frontiers, issued a call to action and roadmap for America to increase its innovation capacity tenfold (10X). This goal is set in the firm belief that the nation's long-term growth in productivity and inclusive prosperity requires placing greater attention on innovation to confer a competitive advantage.

This holiday season, the most special thing to see in the sky won’t be flying reindeer pulling a sleigh, but rather a rare celestial rendezvous—a cosmic gift of sorts, many lifetimes in the making. On December 21, Jupiter and Saturn will meet in a “great conjunction,” the closest they could be seen in the sky together for nearly 800 years.

Image: Saturn (top) and Jupiter (below) appear close together after sunset as seen from Shenandoah National Park on Dec. 13, 2020. The planetary pair will reach the pinnacle of their “great conjunction” on Dec. 21, coming within a tenth of a degree of each other in Earth’s sky. Credit: Bill Ingalls NASA 

Medtech startups must play by a different set of standards than others in the tech world. 

There’s no speeding up product development (if you exclude the extraordinary case of the Covid-19 vaccine, that is). Any tech that’s developed must be rigorously tested, and released only when the product or process has been perfected. 

After all, when you’re working in medtech, you’re working with very high stakes, to preserve people’s health and save lives. 

Image: Dr. Patricia Lawson founded Morphogenesis with her husband back in 1995. PROVIDED

The COVID-19 pandemic caused entrepreneurs all over the world to scramble. Businesses that operated in a traditional office environment were forced to come up with a strategy to work from home; in fact 42 percent of the U.S. workforce is now working from home full-time. Those that depended on service customers in person, in some capacity, needed to figure out a way to deliver or serve digitally. And of course, many entrepreneurs had to completely rethink their budgets in response to the economic impact of the pandemic.

Founders make fewer mistakes and pivot in the right direction when they learn to challenge their own assumptions and experiment continuously.

Even in the best of times, starting a business is like running a marathon with the odds stacked against you. In a global recession, you also have to endure the headwinds of reduced consumer spending and more selective investors. If legs of steel were essential before, they are absolutely critical now. You may also need a new strategy.

As Founders, when we give away equity determines how much we’re going to lose.

That’s because the equity game, and our job of holding on to it for dear life, is really about vulnerability. The more vulnerable we are, the more we give away. The stronger our position is, the more we retain. It’s really that simple, and yet, especially if this is our first startup, it’s hard to realize when we’re giving up too much too early.

Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins University researchers developed an online calculator that estimates the individual and community-level risk of dying of COVID-19, which could help officials prioritize groups for vaccination. 

Public health researchers used information from existing large studies to estimate the risk of COVID-19 mortality for individuals based on age, gender, sociodemographic factors and medical history.  An algorithm then estimates the risk for individuals in the general population who are currently uninfected as well as factors associated with risk of future infection and complications after infection. 

When the Covid-19 pandemic began to take hold in the U.S. in March and expand across the country, the financial markets had their greatest period of volatility in more than a decade.

Despite the turmoil, the U.S. venture capital ecosystem proved its resilience and performed surprisingly well in 2020.

Looking forward to 2021, we see another strong year for venture capital and a great awakening for venture debt, a type of debt financing provided to venture-backed companies by specialized banks or non-bank lenders that is less dilutive than equity financing and often complementary to venture capital.

Under which timeframe of COVID-19 vaccine availability would you be most likely to get vaccinated?²˒ ³ (n = 2,466)

With less than a month left in the year, 2020 is neck-and-neck with 2016 for the title of hottest year in recorded history. It is virtually certain to be at least the second-hottest year.

Wherever it ultimately places in the record books, 2020’s feverish heat came without the major El Niño event that boosted global temperatures to a new high four years ago—and thus this year provides an important marker of the power of the long-term warming trend driven by human activities that emit greenhouse gases. “Until we stop doing that, we’re going to see this over and over again,” says Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which keeps the agency’s temperature records.

Faced with the stage we are living through, great opportunities to undertake arise and observing the way in which companies of different sizes are being launched, scholars of the entrepreneurship process are being pressured to look for ways that reduce the launch time.

Normally it is taught in universities and methodologies are practiced in consulting entities with a step-by-step process of what to do to launch an enterprise .

CARY –  According to Statisca, ventures in North America raised $17.2 billion last year through crowdfunding campaigns. That’s a 17.4% increase over the previous year. Even with only 22.4% of crowdfunding campaigns being successful (i.e. raising their minimum amount to close), they are still projected to raise over $300 billion by 2030 according to Business Wire.

That kind of exponential growth rate makes some wonder if crowdfunding will eventually replace the need for angel groups and early stage venture capitalists. Will innovation in the US be fueled virtually by micro investors rather than traditional venture funds?

As we head into the second wave of Covid-19, you and your team may be feeling foggy, cranky, and fatigued. The adrenaline of the first wave is over and, while good news about a vaccine is on the horizon, getting through the winter may be the toughest leadership challenge of all. What should you do when assurances that “we’re all in it together” are met with skepticism and annoyance, and when you’d rather snuggle up in bed instead of strategize for the future? Leaders should focus on three areas: understanding the difference between urgency and importance, and focus on the latter; be compassionate while also driving your employees to action by channeling their feelings of defiance, anger, and frustration.

Welcome to COVID Questions, TIME’s new advice column. We’re trying to make living through the pandemic a little easier, with expert-backed answers to your toughest coronavirus-related dilemmas. While we can’t and don’t offer medical advice—those questions should go to your doctor—we hope this column will help you sort through this stressful and confusing time. Got a question? Write to us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Image: https://time.com - From video