A few years ago, an unimaginable thing happened in my life. I wanted to help someone I cared about, someone who was sick with an illness he was hiding. I went to his house, intent on a rescue operation that would end, I thought, with a trip to the emergency room. Instead, it ended with a trip to the morgue. What I found when I arrived was my ex-husband, dead on his bathroom floor. The hidden illness? An intravenous drug addiction.

Image: https://www-nytimes-com.cdn.ampproject.org

Canadian venture-capital investment has skidded during the coronavirus pandemic, but some of the biggest VC deals getting done involve companies that could help the fight against COVID-19, audit firm KPMG says.

VC investment in Canada for the not-yet-complete second quarter stood at US$796.6 million as of Wednesday afternoon, down 12 per cent compared to the first quarter and by 33 per cent from the second quarter of 2019, KPMG told the Post.

Image: https://business.financialpost.com - From Video

Despite the many things we don’t know about COVID-19, one thing has been repeated so often and so loudly it seems almost indisputable: elderly people are more likely than young people to get sick and die from COVID-19.

More recent data, however, show a more complex picture. Older people do seem more likely to die from COVID-19—but they aren’t necessarily more likely to get infected.

The Covid-19 crisis and its fallout — including recession, layoffs, and uneven economic pain — as well as recent protests over police brutality and demands for racial justice have presented many of us with challenges that we’ve not encountered before. The high-stakes and unfamiliar nature of these situations have left many people feeling fearful of missteps. No one can reduce mistakes to zero, but you can learn to harness your drive to prevent them and channel it into better decision making. Use these tips to become a more effective worrier.

“The only way to win is to learn faster than everyone else,” said Eric Ries, author of The Lean Start-Up. And yet, most people — regardless how brilliant or talented they are — don’t extract as much learning out of their experience as they could. 

If you were mining for gold, you wouldn’t just extract 5% of the gold and leave the rest behind, would you? So why do people do the equivalent when it comes to learning from their experience?

Since its launch in 1998, Illumina and its genetic analysis toolkits and services have become an essential component of the new biological manufacturing and therapeutic development industries that have emerged in the last 25 years.

And for the past six years the company has attempted to encourage the development of the industry through an incubator program that launches new startups in the field into the market.

Tulsa Innovation Labs has received a $50 million commitment from the George Kaiser Family Foundation to help develop the city of Tulsa as a technology hub. The funds will go towards assisting the new organization to support local talent, startups and academic innovation.

The Commission has today proposed an EU budget of €166.7 billion for 2021, to be complemented by €211 billion in grants and approximately €133 billion in loans under Next Generation EU, the temporary recovery instrument aimed at mobilising investments and kick-starting the European economy. Together, the annual budget and Next Generation EU will mobilise significant investments in 2021 to address the immediate economic and social damage caused by the coronavirus pandemic, kick-start a sustainable recovery and protect and create jobs. The budget is also fully in line with the commitment to invest in the future in order to achieve a greener, more digital and resilient Europe.

If you’ve been balancing your laptop on a precarious stack of cookbooks, or lamented VPN speed from your kitchen table, you’re not alone. Ever since restrictions were put in place to slow the spread of Covid-19, companies have been scrambling to enable colleagues to work from home.

As we adapt to the much-cited ‘new normal’, some experts are predicting that remote work might be here to stay. This is leaving many nervously eyeing up our makeshift home desk set-ups, and wondering how on earth we can handle the backache. 

Since the onset of global health crisis, the world has watched as leaders have been praised — or criticized — for their handling of the disaster. An example from the former category is New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, whose response was both decisive and compassionate.

For most millennials, struggling to find high-paying work after graduation is the new normal. 

Some post-grads, however, can rake in serious cash if they choose certain entry-level jobs.

Entry-level engineers, in particular, and other high-skilled work can earn up to $95,000 right out of college, according to Glassdoor's annual report on the highest-paying jobs. Glassdoor identified these jobs using annual base salaries as reported by people 25 or younger from January 2018 to December 2018. 

The panic in Canada over the lack of masks and ventilators for COVID-19 has mostly eased, but it would be foolish to let the memory and lessons of those scary first few weeks fade too quickly. The scramble for medical equipment was actually a critical moment for the Canadian economy, because it revealed something alarming, something we should all be focused on.

We don’t know if we can produce what we need in a crisis.

The U.S. is facing a path diverged.

During the third month of the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans are rightfully wondering not only how long this health and economic crisis will last, but what the other side of this tragedy will look like.

When it comes to supporting the economy and the American business owner, how much of what we’ve implemented during the crisis will remain? What support strategies will disappear?

US president Donald Trump this week suspended new work visas and barred hundreds of thousands of foreigners from seeking employment in the US in an effort to limit the entry of immigrants into the country.

The news prompted a swift reaction from European startup founders, investors and chief executives who had a simple message to all those affected: come to Europe instead.

Back in 2000, after the Human Genome Project’s leaders announced that a working draft of the human genome had been completed, GEN kicked off its coverage of the event by quoting from a New Yorker cartoon. “Whatever will we think about,” one cartoon figure asked another, “now that the genome project is almost complete?” Now, 20 years later, the quote seems more apposite than ever. With exquisite slyness, it suggests that we need to be careful about the word “complete.” It even leaves us thinking that what we call complete is really a beginning.

After two months of lockdown, have we become like the hikikomori – the Japanese youngsters who choose to live in isolation, shunning the outside world? Natacha Vellut, a psychosociologist at the CERMES3 laboratory and co-author of a book on the subject, offers her analysis.

Who are the hikikomori? Natacha Vellut: The hikikomori are young Japanese men and women under 30, who spend periods of at least six months without leaving home. They stop going to school or work, they cut all social ties…

Image: https://scienceblog.com

In 2012, there were fewer than 1,400 maternal-fetal medicine specialists in the United States, and 98% resided in metropolitan areas.

This left pregnant patients in rural areas without the ability to access care, especially if travel was not an option. 

Today, telehealth can be used to fill that gap – but providers still may face challenges in ensuring patients get the services they need.

The tyranny of automation is less scary than the automation of tyranny.

Seen from one angle, “The Fourth Industrial Revolution” is a marvel of enlightened scientific objectivity. It promises to replace obsolete habits and mind-sets with frictionless, data-driven solutions. Unshackled from analogue-era limitations, organisations and employees alike should be freer than ever to follow pathways to their own flourishing.

As many states are giving the green light to reopen, employers are developing plans to bring employees back to work safely, giving careful thought to schedules, seating configurations, visitor policies, elevator usage, food delivery, and much more.

While workforce reentry certainly includes logistical and operational planning, it is not just physical well-being that employers must take into account. Equally important is how organizations will respond to employees’ emotional and psychological health —a topic that, regrettably, is discussed far less frequently.

As a frequent advisor to new entrepreneurs and startups, I often hear your frustration with being treated differently from other startups by investors, on expectations for valuation, traction, and market size. Of course, it could be your level of experience, or the quality of your team, but the difference is often more related to the lifecycle stage of the market you are trying to enter.