Larry Hogan has got another of his ideas, and this one cracks him up. “I’m gonna call Pence!” says Hogan, startling his chief of staff, Matthew Clark, who sits across a large, round faux-wood table. Hogan, the Republican governor of Maryland, is meeting with his coronavirus command team, a skeleton crew of state officials still reporting to the capitol in Annapolis. The conference rooms are all too narrow, so they are gathered in a cavernous event room, seated in alternate chairs to maintain social distancing. Hogan, a ruddy 63-year-old with jug-handle ears, has in front of him a dispenser of hand sanitizer, a can of Diet Coke and a starfish-shaped conference-call speaker.

Image: Pandemic lockdowns have brought life to a halt in towns like Salisbury, Md., pictured here on April 11, emptying normally teeming public spaces like the parking lot of the Wicomico High School and stadium, right. Peter van Agtmael—Magnum Photos for TIME 

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic several months ago, scientists have been puzzling over the different ways the disease manifests itself. They range from cases with no symptoms at all to severe ones that involve acute respiratory distress syndrome, which can be fatal. What accounts for this variability? Might the answer lie in our genes?

A hallmark of America’s strength and resilience has been our ability to seize opportunity amid our greatest crises.

After the Civil War, we adopted constitutional amendments to end slavery and enshrine the concept of equal protection under the law. In the Great Depression, we established the Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — A report covering an 11-year period of technology commercialization activities lists Purdue University as third in the U.S. for startup creation. Purdue also is in the top 20 for patents issued compared with legal expenditures and for the most invention disclosure forms when compared with published research.

Image: https://www.purdue.edu/

According to new research by Plexal and Beauhurst, investment since lockdown began grew 34 per cent to reach £663m. However, the drop in the number of deals, down 39 per cent, indicates investor confidence has been dented somewhat.  

How do you get a message from liberal-leaning scientists into a flaming-red White House in the middle of the pandemic?

Having a good enough idea to found a biotech is one thing, but being able to make a success of a company in the long run is something else entirely. Here are five tips to help you on your way to becoming a successful biotech entrepreneur. 

Are you working in a biotech but considering becoming an entrepreneur? Do you have an idea, but lack the skills to turn it into a business?

If countries invest in information and communications technology (ICT), could that that improve their ability to protect public health during a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic? How have Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea leveraged their IT infrastructure and capabilities to deal with the crisis? What could other governments learn from their experience? Is it possible to develop a framework for the public administration of health that can be amplified by ICT-related capabilities? Ravi Aron addresses these questions and more in this opinion piece. A professor at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School who studies information technology strategy, healthcare strategy and healthcare information systems, Aron has several research projects underway in some ASEAN countries.

The IEC was formed as an informal coalition of industry leaders advocating on behalf of startup ventures at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, and is looking at how Canada's established companies should work with innovators to navigate a post-COVID-19 world. Going forward, the new council will produce white papers and host events to help shape a new industrial innovation policy for the country.

Jiyoon Han (MBA 2021) is getting a taste of what it’s like to be a case protagonist—learning how to pivot while measuring unforeseen challenges against new opportunities. When news broke in March about how COVID-19 would affect the Harvard Business School (HBS) campus community, Han decided to return home to Queens, NY, to both complete her first-year MBA studies online, and launch an e-commerce site to help her parents’ small business, Bean&Bean Coffee Roasters, stay afloat.

As businesses and schools are shuttered, economic uncertainty encroaches, and a pandemic rages worldwide, there is plenty of anxiety to go around. We’re watching our healthcare system be pushed to its limits, but the grief and trauma we’re seeing presages a second wave of need: Before long, our mental healthcare system is going to be stretched to the breaking point as well. As physical distancing continues, we need to make sure that we help alleviate the isolation, loneliness, depression, anxiety, and other mental health impacts that will result, driving a potentially system-overwhelming curve of their own. And now is the time to head off this second crisis.

Every big company now manages a proliferation of sites, apps, and technology systems for interacting with buyers and managing everything in the business, from customers and clients to inventory and products. These systems are spitting out data continuously. But even after multiple generations of investments and billions of dollars of digital transformations, organizations struggle to use that data to improve customer service, reduce costs, and speed the core processes that pro vide competitive advantage.

The global COVID-19 pandemic has presented executives with the most challenging times in their careers. The social impact of their decisions is under the spotlight as they try to balance the needs of all key stakeholders—customers, partners, suppliers, and society in general.

The good news is that executives’ most important investors, long-term shareholders, believe that doing the right thing for all stakeholders in the near term will benefit investors in the longer term.

In 1994, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was working in a lucrative career on Wall Street. But since he was young, he dreamed of being an entrepreneur. After graduating from Princeton University, Bezos worked for a technology startup. When the company failed, he went to work in the banking industry. With the advent of the internet, Bezos saw his entrepreneurial opportunity: Books! The rest is history. In reflecting back on that moment in time, Bezos said in the biography The Everything Store, "I knew when I was 80 that I would never, for example, think about why I walked away from my 1994 Wall Street bonus right in the middle of the year at the worst possible time. I knew that I might sincerely regret not having participated in this thing called the internet that I thought was going to be a revolutionizing event." 

I recently watched a client of mine get bombarded with questions during a virtual town hall. He and his team had gathered their company to address questions about the pandemic, remote work, and stakeholder implications. Prior to the call, I had prepared my client to remain calm and not let other people’s anxieties trigger his own. But some of the questions still caught him off guard.

The tiny fossil is unassuming, as dinosaur remains go. It is not as big as an Apatosaurus femur or as impressive as a Tyrannosaurus jaw. The object is a just a scant shard of cartilage from the skull of a baby hadrosaur called Hypacrosaurus that perished more than 70 million years ago. But it may contain something never before seen from the depths of the Mesozoic era: degraded remnants of dinosaur DNA.

8x8, Inc. (NYSE: EGHT), a leading integrated cloud communications platform provider, today announced Level39, Europe's largest incubator of tech companies, has deployed the 8x8 X Series platform to improve communications and enable remote working in response to the UK COVID-19 lockdown.

In a typical semester, Clarissa Sorensen-Unruh’s chemistry students take a comprehensive, 40-question, multiple-choice final exam. The chemistry department at Central New Mexico Community College, where she is a full-time faculty member, gives a common test in many of its courses to signal to health-profession schools that its online courses are worthy prerequisites for their programs.

Image: Katherine Streeter for The Chronicle

Albert Camus’ novel The Plague starts with rats dying, followed by a tsunami of human deaths. The town’s leaders are reluctant to acknowledge the epidemic at first but are soon forced to take the situation seriously. With martial law imposed, no one is allowed to enter or leave the city. Being unable to communicate with or see loved ones weighs heavily on everyone – for some, more than the threat of death itself. Law and order quickly break down. As the plague continues to ravage the town, funerals turn into rush jobs, with no ceremony or emotion. The first “serum”, a kind of vaccine, turns out to be a failure. Eventually, a better version allows the quarantine to be lifted.  

If you want to make a great first impression on a startup investor or an advisor like me, don’t try to convince me or show me how busy you are. For some reason, too many aspiring entrepreneurs I know seem to focus on “actions” rather than “results.” Based on my experience, survival and success are both about doing the right things, and not about doing everything.