Across the country, university campuses are in limbo.

The California State University system has committed to online classes in Fall 2020. Northeastern University is reopening as normal. UT Austin is taking a hybrid approach: in-person classes until Thanksgiving break, then online classes during flu season.

With nearly four billion people in some kind of lockdown, we now live in a completely different social environment than four months ago. And our daily choices – staying home, wearing masks, limiting our shopping, etc. – all affect the spread of the novel coronavirus. Our behaviour will determine that of the virus.

The COVID-19 world is marked by a high degree of uncertainty and existential fear, a dearth of social interaction, the convergence of professional and personal space, a lack of physical activity and an obsessive focus on hygiene and social distancing. For professionals, it amounts to a toxic combination that elevates stress levels and increases the risk of burn-out. Virtually no one – and no organisation – is immune.

The past few months have had a catastrophic impact on the global economy and recovery will require serious collaboration between private and public sectors. It’s hard to believe, but even though many countries have been shut down for months, we are still in the COVID-19 response phase. However, I do believe the innovation economy –– where we’ve seen so much growth from startups across the world –– will serve as the supply chain to the new economy, post-COVID-19.

(TNS) — The COVID-19 pandemic has turned kitchen tables and spare rooms into impromptu offices. The sudden shift has left employers with a host of questions about managing employees remotely.

In some ways, Alisa Spector Angelo had a leg up on the problem. She’s been an advocate of flexible work arrangements, both as a boss — she’s president of Compass Business Solutions Inc. — and as a human resources professional.

Her Cranberry-based consulting firm, which serves as an outsourced HR department for other companies, already had employees working primarily from their home offices. Since March, she’s been doling out that expertise to organizations that find themselves suddenly thrust into a virtual work environment.

The national accelerator is targeting markets outside Silicon Valley, including Kansas City. Pax Momentum co-founder Matt Hanson shares why the metro area is attractive, the startups it’s targeting and why it’s going ahead amid a pandemic.

Image: Matthew Hanson is co-founder of national startup accelerator Pax Momentum. - PAX MOMENTUM

Minneapolis and urban centers across America are burning, most directly in response to the brutal killing of a black man by a white Minnesota police officer. But the rage ignited by the death of George Floyd is symptomatic of a profound sense of alienation that has been building for years among millions of poor, working class urbanites. The already diminished prospects facing such people have only been worsened by the unforeseen onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic and the policies devised to combat it.

Image: http://www.newgeography.com

The military has long recognized that machine guns are force multipliers for rifles, but businesses have been slow to capitalize on this concept. Sometimes all the planning in the world isn’t enough for business survival, when things change as fast as they do today. Every business, especially startups, needs all guns blazing quickly on every opportunity or insight into the market.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

COVID-19 has accelerated many long-brewing developments in the business world, such as the ascent into respectability of working from home. Private equity (PE) has not been immune to this trend. By chilling the deal-making process for the time being, the pandemic has brought greater focus to PE's involvement in active ownership of portfolio companies, and an emphasis on operational improvements and other forms of long-term value creation. For the moment, PE firms have no choice but to concentrate on keeping their investees afloat, no easy task given the churning waters ahead.

As Edward Lorenz postulated in his 1963 paper on Chaos Theory, “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil cause a tornado in Texas? Substitute a bat in a Wuhan wet market for the butterfly and the spread of the coronavirus for the weather, and you have the same effect showing how fragile and uncertain our world is. In his efforts to model such phenomena, Lorenz realized that the imprecision inherent in human measurement could become magnified into wildly incorrect forecasts. Things are not much different in the business world.

As the Covid-19 pandemic spreads across the globe, millions of people have found themselves working remotely for the foreseeable future. Working from home comes with many unique challenges — blurred boundaries, increased child care responsibilities, feelings of isolation — all of which can contribute to stress and burnout.

While there are many daily habits you can do to reduce stress, such as meditation and setting work boundaries, sometimes these are not enough. In some cases, a vacation is needed — even just a few days off work — to really recharge and combat burnout.

There wasn’t a communications blackout in Washington, DC, on Sunday, but #dcblackout trended on Twitter anyway, thanks to some extremely distressing tweets telling people that, mysteriously, no messages were getting out from the nation’s capital. The tweets, Reddit posts, and Facebook messages about the “blackout” got thousands of shares, fueled by pleas to spread the information widely and ominous warnings about what would happen next to protesters.

Amid a wrenching series of crises that have riven the nation, particularly over matters of race and law enforcement, corporate leaders throughout Maryland have voiced support for the social justice movement that has become more urgent and grown after the death of George Floyd.

Over the last few days, corporate CEO’s, university leaders and others have acknowledged the pain that Americans of all stripes are experiencing, and have pledged to be part of the solution.

Entrepreneurship is a tough ride and challenges you all the time to keep improving elements that impact your business. This starts with you (the entrepreneur) and spreads through the customers, products, team and culture et al that you build. The last three months have hit businesses severely and the coming two quarters, at least, offer at best a slow recovery curve for them.

Image: https://entrackr.com

Pfizer Inc. (NYSE: PFE) today announced the establishment of the Pfizer Breakthrough Growth Initiative, through which Pfizer will invest up to $500 million in biotechnology companies to help provide funding and access to Pfizer’s scientific expertise to ensure continuity of the biotechnology companies’ most promising clinical development programs.

“There has never been a more important moment to pursue new collaborations in our industry," said John Young, Pfizer's Chief Business Officer. “The Pfizer Breakthrough Growth Initiative seeks to do just this by injecting crucial capital into biotechnology companies that share our commitment to delivering transformative therapies for patients.”

Doctors make a lot of money across the board, but other professions can also pay well.

Medical doctors of various specializations are the highest-paying job in 39 US states. We decided to take a look at the highest-paying job in each state and DC outside of the medical field.

Using salary and employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment Statistics program, we found the jobs for which the BLS reported at least 1,000 employees in the state with the highest average salary in 2019, the most recent year for which data is available, excluding several professions for medical doctors and dentists.

Image: https://www.businessinsider.com

SARS-CoV-2 is known to infect cells of the respiratory tract. A deeper understanding of which cells support the infection, and to what extent, could lead to insights into disease progression and severity. Scientists at the UNC School of Medicine sought to understand which cells in the airway the virus infects, and how it gets into the lungs in the patients who develop pneumonia. To this end, they have characterized some of the ways in which SARS-CoV-2 infects the nasal cavity and infects and replicates progressively less well in cells lower down the respiratory tract—including the lungs.

Image: SARS-CoV-2 (red) infected ciliated cells in the COVID-19 patient's bronchi. (Takanori Asakura, PhD, UNC School of Medicine)

Always good to see a new relational perspective. #perspective #thinking #reflection #designthinking #innovationculture

Image: https://www.linkedin.com - From Video

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on April 7, 2020. As updates are discovered and advancements are announced regarding the work below, details will be published for accuracy.

As the U.S. continues to find its way through a tough fight against this global pandemic, a number of BioHealth Capital Region (BHCR) biotech companies are making significant contributions to stem the COVID-19 pandemic. With people across the U.S. and the world making sacrifices to flatten the curve — along with nurses, doctors and first responders who stand heroically at the front lines — life science companies in our region are doing everything in their power to make COVID-19 vaccine progress with celerity, safety and efficacy top-of-mind.

The COVID-19 pandemic is intensifying U.S. concerns about China’s technological strength. Unfortunately, much of the resulting policy debate has centered on ways to limit China’s capacities — when what we need most is a systematic approach to strengthening our own. In any race, success comes from training harder and running faster — not from hoping that your challenger will trip. To guarantee our nation’s future economic health and national security, we need a comprehensive, forward-looking national strategy to keep the U.S. at the forefront of science and technology.