In the 1940s, the military launched an audacious effort to unlock some of science’s greatest secrets as part of a push to develop nuclear weapons. Thousands of scientists -- drawn by a combination of patriotism and the desire to work with some of the greatest minds in their field -- banded together to join the cause.

Eventually that effort, known as the Manhattan Project, developed the atomic weapons that played a critical role in ending World War II. But the knowledge developed through the project, as well as the network of laboratories established to conduct the research, remains part of the project’s legacy today.

Fred Leeb says it’s time for the government to consider a Manhattan Project for America's failing cities.

There's no doubt technology entrepreneurship is becoming its own kind of celebrity. Here is a quick rundown of its appearances on the national stage:

The story of the founding of Facebook receiving a feature-length Hollywood portrayal in The Social Network; Hollywood celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, Justin Timberlake, MC Hammer, Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber investing in technology startups and making their presence known in Silicon Valley; the rise of initiatives like the White House-endorsed Startup America Partnership, due to the starring role technology startups in job growth; Bloomberg creating an American Idol-esque TV show based on the the New York City session of TechStars; Bravo creating a full-blown reality TV show called "Silicon Valley"; and a surge of new technology companies offering their stocks on the public markets, from Facebook to Zynga, Groupon, Pandora and LinkedIn.

Naming can be one of the most difficult challenges in the early stages of a startup. But while many people have written about the topic, few have actually codified the process to help entrepreneurs succeed in the endeavor. This guide breaks down naming into individual steps with detailed, practical suggestions that can be applied to almost any industry. It’s based largely on my personal experience naming several tech products as well as the themes I’ve noticed in great startup names. You’ll find numerous examples to bring each concept to life and inspire your creative side — something you’ll need to get to the finish line.

Welcome to the DIGITAL 100: The World's Most Valuable Private Tech Companies! In the past two months, we have evaluated hundreds of private tech companies and ranked the top 100 by value. Our rankings are based on several metrics, including revenue, users, market opportunities, growth rates, and the perception of investors and tech gurus. A lot has changed since we published last year's list. Since then, three of the top private tech companies—Facebook, Zynga, and Groupon—have gone public. And all of their stocks have crashed.

Tires that maintain their own air pressure. A brain-to-computer interface. Cameras that can see around corners. This year's Breakthrough Award-winning innovators are the brains and sweat behind some of the world's biggest ideas. (And check out all our Breakthrough coverage here.)

Europe needs to look again at the structural frailties that are blunting its innovation performance, and make a fresh effort to update and improve things.

This was Máire Geoghegan-Quinn’s message to the Lisbon Council as she reached the mid-point of her term in office. Reprising progress to date, the Research and Innovation Commissioner told delegates, “The longer I am in the job, the more I realise how profound the changes have to be, if we are to win the innovation race.”

You may have heard that Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web Foundation recently quantified the web by developing an index used to rank 61 countries in categories like web readiness, web use and social, political and economic impact. And, because, well, this is the web after all, there is an infographic to explain it all.

The data-heavy project is the first of its kind to attempt to measure the web by integrating information on everything from a country’s communication infrastructure and the policies regulating internet access to the skill levels which allow full use of the technology. Sweden beat the US for first place overall in the global rank, but it didn’t dominate all the categories. Iceland places first in web readiness (determined by evaluating communications infrastructure and regulation in the country), the US ranks the highest in web use and the web has had the greatest social, economic and political impact in Sweden.

Is it true that workers over 50 have a harder time getting hired than younger employees? Not according to the results of a new survey from Adecco Staffing US. In the poll, hiring managers in a wide range of industries nationwide say they are three times more likely to hire a worker age 50 and up (60 percent) than a Millennial employee (20 percent).

A perfect working team is more than a set of great CVs; it also encompasses competent jerks and loveable fools.

While most people are adamant that “competency” is preferable to “likeability” in a colleague, research suggests employees can be more energised and effective when working with people whom they “like”.

The study “Competent Jerks, Loveable Fools and the Formation of Social Networks” found that given a tradeoff between likeability and competence people gravitate towards those whose company they enjoy and organisations which foster positive feelings among employees achieve remarkable results.

Some of the U.S. government’s most research-intensive agencies want your help to come up with better ways to analyze their expansive data sets. NASA, along with the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, launched a competition on TopCoder called the Big Data Challenge series. Essentially, it’s a competition to crowdsource a solution to the very big problem of fragmented and incompatible federal data.

The first contest in the series involves answering a question, albeit a difficult one. From the contest page:

“How can we make heterogeneous (dissimilar and incompatible) data sets homogeneous (uniformly accessible, compatible, able to be grouped and/or matched) so usable information can be extracted? How can information then be converted into real knowledge that can inform critical decisions and solve societal challenges?”

Peter lake lies deep in a maple forest near the wisconsin-michigan border. One day in July 2008 a group of scientists and graduate students led by ecologist Stephen Carpenter of the University of Wisconsin–Madison arrived at the lake with some fish. One by one, they dropped 12 largemouth bass into the water. Then they headed for home, leaving behind sensors that could measure water clarity every five minutes, 24 hours a day.

In the October 2012 issue, we publish our Global Science Scorecard, a ranking of nations on how well they do science—not only on the quality and quantity of basic research but also on their ability to project that research into the real world, where it can affect people’s lives.

The United States comes out on top, by a wide margin, followed by Germany, China, Japan, the U.K., France, Canada, South Korea, Italy and Spain. (More about our methods below.)

UCSF and its affiliates have been successful in the transformation of San Francisco as a leading center of innovation in health care and biosciences, according to a new report released Wednesday.

The combined economic impact of hospitals, biomedical research and health sciences education generates $16.7 billion and more than 100,000 jobs per year — almost one in five jobs in the City and County of San Francisco, according to the report by economist Philip King, PhD, an assistant professor at San Francisco State University.

Robert Atkinson is an expert in technology policy. He also is the president and founder of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based technology policy think tank. Atkinson has been appointed by the last three presidential administrations to committees for the nation’s infrastructure, economy and innovation. He is the author of Innovation Economics: The Race for Global Advantage.

Government Technology spoke with Atkinson recently about IT innovation and why the U.S. lags behind its international counterparts.

Vivek Wadhwa is an Indian-American academic and entrepreneur whose new book, The Immigrant Exodus: Why America is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent, comes out today. He spoke to Quartz about his critique of American immigration policy. An edited version of the conversation follows.

You're an immigrant yourself; how did you end up in the US?

I came here (from Australia) in 1980. From the beginning of the process, it was 18 months. It was easy as anything. I defined myself as an American, I started giving back to this country from the minute I became a resident. If I had come today, it would take me a decade or longer to get a green card, I would be sitting here biting my finger nails for the best part of my life. The U.S. is going to lose its competitiveness. We're going to have Silicon Valleys in other countries and wonder, how did we let this happen? What were we thinking? What were we smoking, in 2012, when we let this happen? How can we be so stupid?

In the heat of presidential elections, a conscientious electorate hopes that the nation’s most pressing issues bubble to the surface, helping to inform the decision of who is most fit to lead the country for the next 4 years. This time around, jobs, the economy, health care, and foreign policy are taking center stage in the national discussion surrounding the presidential candidates. But with all that is at stake in this election, America’s scientific research cuts across all of these sectors, and the candidates, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, have voiced different visions for the future of the scientific enterprise.

It behooves scientists of all stripes—especially biomedical researchers, whose funding often comes from federal science agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—and members of the public who value scientific research to consider the candidates’ stances on matters of science policy. Their differing views on the benefits of scientific information and the federal government’s role in supporting research could hugely affect how the scientific community interacts with the public and with policymakers, and how US researchers earn their keep.

About a year ago the U.S. Postal Service ran an ad campaign warning about the dangers of email and proposed paper-mail as a safer and more reliable alternative. When I saw this ad, I thought that I had accidentally switched to a comedy station. But it wasn't a joke. This was a serious (and misguided) attempt by the U.S. Postal Service to stay in business.

Fast forward to last week, when Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe revealed the mail agency will default on its second payment of $5 billion to the US Treasury. Still the agency drags on with its year-old push to end Saturday delivery, the most powerful innovation they can muster — which to be implemented would still take 2 years.

PEORIA, Ariz. -- Alberto Osio said he has a way to help older people see better. His San Diego-based company, Yolia Health, is developing a combination of contact lenses and eye drops that modifies the shape of corneas to produce clearer vision.

But the 5-year-old company has been struggling to get seed funding, network with researchers and obtain Food and Drug Administration approval -- challenges that can put a bioscience startup out of business.

Those challenges led Osio and Yolia Health to Peoria, where the West Valley city and two partners have created a bioscience incubator offering up initial funding, mentoring, free office space and access to laboratories.

Yolia Health was one of five companies taking part in BioInspire when the incubator launched in September.

It's official: I'm co-founding an accelerator for mom entrepreneurs.

The idea's not far-fetched from what I currently do: I help mom entrepreneurs build their businesses by organizing monthly meetups around the world where mom entrepreneurs learn, connect and get down to business. 

But why start an accelerator? And what is an accelerator?

For starters, until I began working four weeks ago at Chicago's renowned co-working space and incubator, 1871, I had no idea what an accelerator really was. I knew entrepreneurs apply to get into them. I knew they were competitive, and I knew they brought small companies big money. But why were they important, other than to give startups a new horn to toot?

On September 13th, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke announced a third round of quantitative easing (QE3), which came in the form of an open-ended commitment by the Fed to purchase $40 billion of mortgage debt per month until the job market improves. Public equities surged but we at CircleUp, an equity-based crowdfunding platform focused on consumer and retail companies, were equally excited. Why? Because we believe the Fed’s accommodative monetary policy significantly distorts both returns and risk in the public markets, the two opposing forces that any investor must consider when constructing her portfolio, and provides a great opportunity for investors to allocate a portion of their portfolio to private market assets like crowdfunding.

When the Fed pours money into the system with the purchase of mortgage-backed securities, combined with guidance from the Federal Open Market Committee that the federal funds rate will remain near zero at least through mid-2015, it depresses yields on debt instruments. In turn, investors pour money into public equities in search of returns they can no longer access in the debt markets. The value of a company should be based on the value of its future free cash flows discounted at its cost of capital. However, since the Fed is holding down interest rates and thus companies’ cost of capital, the discount rate to calculate the value of a company is artificially lower resulting in higher company values than might be implied by a company’s fundamentals.