If you were on the internet in the 1990s, chances are that you paid a company called America Online, better known as AOL, for the privilege. The man who was largely responsible for introducing America to the internet was Steve Case, who cofounded AOL in Vienna, Virginia, and served as its CEO until 2001, when it merged with Time Warner.

Internet traffic is controlled by the "logic of the sun" in Solar Protocol, a solar-powered network whose creators argue for digital design within planetary limits.

Solar Protocol involves a series of solar-powered servers, set up in locations across the world's time zones and serving its hosted websites from whichever spot is enjoying the most sunlight.

Image: https://www.dezeen.com

Seeding America's Future Innovations. Connect directly with over $4 billion in early stage funding. Learn how to compete for funding, while networking with global industry scouts, investors, and key federal leadership representing the nation's largest seed fund.

"SBIR and STTR represent the best of government-industry partnerships—harnessing the creativity and ingenuity of American entrepreneurs to solve our nation's most pressing public health and national security challenges" Sen Ben Cardin

Floating at the side of a river that winds through densely populated neighborhoods in Panama City, a 52-foot-long robotic “trash wheel” sucks up plastic from the water and pulls it up a conveyor belt to be recycled. (The design, which runs on hydropower and uses solar power as a backup, is a tweaked version on the aptly-named Mr. Trash Wheel, which first debuted in Baltimore in 2014.) A camera system will soon use artificial intelligence to identify the garbage—from plastic bottles to toys—to gather data that can help design new strategies to eliminate plastic waste before it reaches the environment.

Image: Chemolex

NASA's ambitious, expensive and intricate moon rocket, Artemis I, has had a rough run. NASA had to scrub the first launch attempt due to a troublesome engine issue. On attempt two, a pesky hydrogen leak kept the rocket grounded until repairs could be made. After testing on Sept. 21 cleared Artemis for a third attempt, NASA scientists circled Sept. 27 for launch. But that, too, was nixed as a tropical storm bore down on the Florida coast.

Image: The Artemis I mission has been delayed twice. NASA

Regent has released video of its remarkable Seaglider prototype in flight testing. The first machine to combine the efficiency advantages of ground effect and hydrofoiling in a single design, it promises revolutionary speed and range in coastal areas.

Wing-in-ground effect (WIG) aircraft such as the Soviet-era Ekranoplan have shown promise in the past, but they're yet to take off, so to speak, as a mainstream form of transport. These low-flying birds ride on a cushion of air between their wings and the surface, which gives them a significant lift and efficiency boost over regular planes flying higher in the air – as long as they stay within their own wingspan of the surface beneath. This extreme altitude restriction means that while ground-effect aircraft could fly over land, it's too dangerous for regular operations, and they typically stay over water.

Image: Regent

In our current economic environment, you would have to be hiding in a cave not to see, hear and feel valuations sliding downwards across the eco-system.  It started in January 2022 when large-cap, mid-cap and then smaller-cap public companies started to fall in price.  Past a certain point, we began to see private equity and venture capital investors applying these lessons to late stage private companies.  In the time since February, we have seen the slide come all the way through the business food chain until it reached the startup.

Doubling the University of Maryland BioPark's lab space, the two-phase 4MLK development project will represent more than $320 million in total capital investment

BALTIMORE, Sept. 22, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) and Wexford Science & Technology, LLC, announced today that 4MLK, the newest development project in the University of Maryland BioPark, is slated to move forward, with groundbreaking this fall (2022) and delivering in summer 2024. The 8-story, 250,000-square-foot building, Phase I of a two-phase project representing a $320 million total capital investment, will provide critical wet laboratory space in downtown Baltimore for researchers and companies, flexible lab and office/support space for start-ups, and Class A office space, along with areas for convening and a conference center.

Think of great business leaders, and Henry Ford, Madame C.J. Walker, Andrew Carnegie, Estée Lauder and Steve Jobs may come to mind. Regardless of when they rose to prominence, all were not only effective leaders but visionaries and disruptors whose innovative ideas took their companies to new levels and defined their respective industries. When considering the accomplishments of luminaries who exemplify effective leadership, what I find interesting is that beyond the obvious (intelligence, discipline, work ethic), certain characteristics span culture, industries, and even time.

On July 25, 2000,  a Concorde supersonic jet operated by Air France flying from New York to Paris crashed shortly after takeoff. The accident, caused by a piece of debris on the runway, killed all 109 people on board and four on the ground. It dented the reputation of supersonic air travel and accelerated the retirement of the Concorde, which was already facing infeasibly high operating costs and repeated complaints about its noise. Three years later, in October 2003, the Concorde completed its final flight from New York to London in 3.5 hours and then disappeared from public sight, ending 27 years of commercial operation.

Image: An artist’s rendering of Boom Supersonic’s Overture jet. Boom Supersonic

With climate change looming and a summer full of heat waves and droughts, communities all over the world lack access to clean water. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), two billion people worldwide lack access to clean water.

Startups and researchers around the world are working on technology that could use solar to turn saltwater into freshwater for communities. Removing salt from seawater is nothing new, but plants that take the salt out are still mostly powered by fossil fuels.

Investors are spending 24% less time looking at pitch decks in 2022, compared to 2021. On average, you have just under three minutes to convince them to take a meeting with you. In fact, for decks that fail to raise funding, investors give up in just 2 minutes and 13 seconds. That’s not a lot of time to make a first impression, so you’ve got to make it count.

It’s pretty rare that I get to talk to someone who is as big of a pitch deck nerd as I am, but when I was finally able to nerd out with the research lead at DocSend, how could I not? We go deep into what the data tells us about what makes a pitch deck successful, and indicators for what works less well.

Image: https://techcrunch.com

By now, you may have heard that the Colorado River is drying up.

The river’s flow is down by about 20 percent, compared to the 1900s, and the two largest reservoirs it feeds are less than a third full. The water in Lake Mead, the nation’s biggest reservoir, has dropped more than 150 feet in the last two decades, leaving little water for the more than 40 million people who depend on the river.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=Colorado+River&title=Special:MediaSearch&go=Go&type=image

When it comes to space, there's a problem with our human drive to go all the places and see all the things. A big problem. It's, well, space. It's way too big. Even travelling at the maximum speed the Universe allows, it would take us years to reach our nearest neighbouring star.

In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Raju Narisetti chats with AOL cofounder and Revolution CEO Steve Case about his new book, The Rise of the Rest: How Entrepreneurs in Surprising Places are Building the New American Dream (Simon & Schuster, September 2022). In pursuit of a more inclusive innovation economy, Case has run investment firm Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Road Trip tours for nearly a decade, visiting and investing in start-ups across the country, excluding the major venture capital hubs of Silicon Valley, New York City, and Boston. For years, these three cities have dominated the competition for seed funding and talent, but Case says pandemic- and technology-borne disruptions now pose an equalizing opportunity for noncoastal entrepreneurs. An edited version of the conversation follows.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Steve_Case_(6244482532).jpg

The Small Business Innovation Research program is a big step further away from ending.

The Senate passed a three-year authorization of SBIR and the Small Business Technology Transfer Research program by unanimous consent on Sept. 20.

Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), chairman of Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, introduced and the full body passed the SBIR and STTR Extension Act of 2022 on Wednesday after several months of delay because of concerns from Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) about companies abusing the program.

GM announced Thursday that its venture capital division, GM ventures, will invest in Lithion Recycling to support a sustainable circular battery ecosystem. The new partnership will focus on researching and developing a viable EV battery recycling method to further reduce emissions and the usage of critical minerals.

Global supply chains are still recovering from the pandemic, and as the demand for electric vehicles continue to soar, automakers are rushing to lock up deals to ensure they will have adequate supply to achieve their targets.

When James Chau Nguyen's grandmother was diagnosed with cancer in March 2020, the tumor in her brain was already too big to remove. Nguyen, then just a sophomore in high school in California, took the news particularly hard. Just eight months prior, Nguyen and his mother immigrated to the U.S., leaving them unable to travel back to Vietnam to see her during the pandemic.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=eric+schmidt&title=Special:MediaSearch&go=Go&type=image

Last month, an Air Force drone took off on a first-of-a-kind test flight with a new kind of fuel: one made with captured CO2 and renewable energy. It looks and acts like standard jet fuel, but when it burns, it’s carbon neutral.

Air Company, the New York-based startup that created the fuel, is now developing its first commercial production facility for it, and is beginning to take orders from airlines including Jet Blue and Virgin Atlantic.

Image: Air Company

An AI-based home screening test to detect oral and throat cancers from saliva samples is now available in the United States with the hope of transforming oral and throat cancer detection.

Based on a technology approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a "breakthrough device," the saliva test can detect early symptoms of oral and throat cancer with more than 90 percent accuracy.

Image: An AI-based home screening test to detect oral and throat cancers from saliva samples is now available in the United States. (CREDIT: Creative Commons)