RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – Santo Costa, an attorney and pharmaceutical executive with more than 40 years of senior operating management and board advisory experience in the life sciences, has been elected chairman of the North Carolina Biotechnology Center’s Board of Directors.

“In this time of global stress, I welcome this opportunity to contribute in this way to North Carolina’s growing life sciences leadership,” Costa said. “I’m honored by the opportunity to lead this unique economic development organization that has excelled for more than 35 years in building a truly enviable life sciences ecosystem.”

To begin with, it was just anecdotal reports. Ear, nose and throat specialists from around the world were sharing their experiences on online message boards – they were all seeing a spike in patients experiencing anosmia, a loss of smell. The link with coronavirus was brought to public attention by specialists in the UK in late March, and since then health organisations have gradually added anosmia to the list of symptoms for Covid-19. According to a recent study, about two-thirds of people with Covid-19 experience a sudden loss in smell or taste.

The ancient supervolcano under the national park was much more explosive in its early history and could be slowing down, a new study suggests

Roughly 8.7 million years ago, in areas that would become southern Idaho and northern Nevada, the grasslands began to break open, unleashing curtains of lava and clouds of gas and ash that rolled across the North American landscape. Within hours, if not minutes, the land would have been pummeled by black volcanic glass that rained from above, killing animals such as rhinoceroses, camels, and horses that roamed the region, and destroying plants. Soon the ground would cave in altogether. The event was the largest explosion ever from the supervolcano in Yellowstone National Park.

Innovation is an important aspect to universities and research institutions, but what really matters is the impact of the innovation on the economy and society. That’s the idea behind new rankings released today in a report by the George W. Bush Institute.

Image: Cullum Clark, director of the Bush Institute-SMU Economic Growth Initiative and co-author of the report, said universities are becoming more important drivers of innovation in the broader world. BUSH INSTITUTE-SMU ECONOMIC GROWTH INITIATIVE

It seems like every entrepreneur I meet these days is quick to proclaim themselves a visionary, expecting that will give more credibility to their startup idea, and improve their odds with investors. In reality, I’m one of the majority of investors who believe that startup success is more about the execution than the idea. Thus, unless the visionary highlights a cofounder who can take the vision and execute, I assume the worst.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

The Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MassTech) — the state agency responsible for strengthening the commonwealth’s position as a leading hub for innovation and entrepreneurship — recently released the 2019 edition of its annual report, The Index of the Massachusetts Innovation Economy, which includes an updated list of the 10 leading technology states  and a detailed special analysis on entrepreneurial ecosystems. As a globally recognized center of science- and technology-based innovation, communities across the U.S. can learn from Massachusetts’ successes as well as from the challenges the state faces in further strengthening its entrepreneurship ecosystem.

Back in 2008, I was happily running a thriving ad-tech business — until the day the economy tanked. I woke up that morning to find my inbox overflowing with about 50% of my customers writing to cancel their services. Pretty soon, I was having to lay off dozens of smart, hard-working employees and move our office, along with a handful of survivors, into a barn. I had to give up my family home, too, and move with my wife into a moldy studio apartment. Unable to pay my remaining employees and also myself, I spent my weekends refinishing furniture and selling it at yard sales to make ends meet. 

Criminals are getting busy — and creative — with an onslaught of new frauds preying on people's fears and anxieties about the coronavirus pandemic.

The big picture: Desperate people are finding their unemployment checks and stimulus payments stolen. They're also being bombarded with offers for fake cures, fake work-at-home offers and messages asking for personal financial information.

Image: Illustration: Eniola Odetunde/Axios

A comprehensive way to build talent and fill jobs in our rapidly changing digital economy.  For further insights, read “A strategist’s guide to upskilling.”

Image: https://www.strategy-business.com

We live in an age of essentials. People are only buying goods they deem to be essential. For months, only businesses deemed essential were permitted to operate. Only essential employees were allowed to leave their homes to do their jobs.

When Covid-19 started to threaten global health services, nations began locking down and managed to get work, local government and education online very quickly – within two weeks or so. This was possible thanks to the digital revolution that we have experienced, especially over the past ten years.

The funding model that made Silicon Valley a global hub excels at creating a certain kind of innovation—but the pandemic has exposed its broader failures.

I felt bad asking Zack Gray to repeat his story. He was used to it, he said. It’s the founding tale of his startup, Ophelia; he’d already told part of it in his commencement speech at Wharton, and to potential investors.

Here’s a surprising fact: The death rate from Covid-19 has been 100 to 1,000 times higher in the U.S. and Europe than in parts of Asia and Africa. At the time of writing, Vietnam, with 95 million people and 1/20th of America’s per-capita income, has had zero Covid-19 deaths, even though it borders China and is economically intertwined with it. Death rates per million people in Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand, and African countries including Ethiopia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Uganda are in the single digits; in Europe and the U.S., they are in the triple digits.

(Reuters) - The Trump administration aims to narrow its financial support to about seven experimental coronavirus vaccines from the 14 it has been working with so far, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said on Tuesday.

Pandora founder Tim Westergren maxed out 11 credit cards to keep his music-streaming service alive.

Jeff Bezos quit a lucrative hedge fund gig to start Amazon out of his garage. He and the company neared financial ruin before the online bookstore finally took off.

The greater the risk, the greater the reward, right?

Recognizing the need for a more diverse venture capital industry, the Kauffman Fellows program is looking to take steps to train its most diverse class of would-be investors and is adding to its board to foreground diversity and inclusion going forward, the nonprofit said today.

Challenges such as globalization, climate change, income inequality, and the growing power of technology titans have shaken public confidence in large corporations. In an annual Gallup poll, more than one in three of those surveyed express little or no confidence in big business—seven percentage points worse than two decades ago.1 Politicians and commentators push for more regulation and fundamental changes in corporate governance. Some have gone so far as to argue that “capitalism is destroying the earth.”2

Finally, there is some much-needed COVID-19 good news. A large trial has found that dexamethasone, a cheap and widely available steroid, decreased the risk of death in COVID-19 patients. Dexamethasone is on the shelf, available, and cheap. These preliminary results, which have not been peer-reviewed, suggest the drug should become standard care in COVID-19 severe patients.

The large “Randomized Evaluation of COVid-19 thERapY” (RECOVERY) Trial announced the results on Tuesday. They stated that dexamethasone reduced deaths by one-third in ventilated patients and by 20% in patients receiving oxygen. There was no benefit among those patients who did not require respiratory support.

Image: https://www.genengnews.com

Is the Big Apple losing its allure?

With a long history of attracting young professionals, New York City has long been known as a "must move to" hot spot.

But in a June 2020 SmartAsset report tracking the top cities millennials were settling in, New York didn't even make the top 25.

And this is based on US Census net migration data from 2018 — before the pandemic. SmartAsset ranked the list by subtracting the number of people ages 25 to 39 who moved out of each city from the number of people in the same age range who moved into the same city in 2017.

There are a handful of jobs that pay a doctor's salary or more to people without college degrees.

• It's no surprise that doctors make a lot of money. 
• Depending on the type of medicine they practiced, doctors made an average of $85,000 to $261,730 a year in 2019, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 
• We found nine jobs that, if everything goes right, can earn people a doctor's salary without requiring a college degree.