Martin Luther King Jr. Day is coming up on Monday, and America is getting ready to celebrate his mission of resistance to injustice and the creation of an America that is truly inclusive, welcoming, and fair to all who live here.

One of the ways America shows its diverse culture is in the sheer number of languages spoken by the country's people. This map shows which languages other than English and Spanish are the most common in each state and Washington, DC.

Image: https://www.businessinsider.com

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A generational quarterback got his team to the Super Bowl for the first time in multiple generations.

Patrick Mahomes, the brilliant third-year quarterback, threw for three touchdowns and ran for another as the Kansas City Chiefs beat the Tennessee Titans, 35-24, in the AFC championship game Sunday at blustery Arrowhead Stadium.

Global venture capital funds clocked their best-ever returns last year — and they did it while taking only moderate levels of risk, according to eFront’s latest quarterly private equity performance overview.

During the past two quarters, the multiple on invested capital — total value to paid-in, or TVPI — for active venture capital funds approached 1.6x, reported eFront, the software and research firm for alternative investments owned by BlackRock. TVPI is a standard measure of the value a fund creates for investors.

In a recent article in Harvard Business Review, “Real Innovation Requires More Than an R&D Budget,” Dr. Gina O’Connor makes the case for having three capabilities for any innovation initiative: Discovery, Incubation, and Acceleration (DIA), in which R&D is only a portion of Discovery. In my experience with multiple companies, Discovery was allowed as long as Senior Management didn’t know about it, Incubation had a zero-dollar budget, and Acceleration only happened by chance. But since a few ideas made it out of the so-called “innovation pipeline”, there was the appearance that innovation was working. And I admit, the few ideas that made it into products were pretty good. Ours was a haphazard process at best, however.

Mercom Capital has released its annual report on funding and mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity for the Digital Health / Healthcare Information Technology (IT) sector for 2019. According to the report, global venture capital (VC) funding in digital health, including private equity and corporate venture capital (VC), declined in 2019 with $8.9 billion raised in 615 deals, a six per cent drop compared to $9.5 billion in 698 deals in 2018. Total corporate funding for digital health companies – including VC, debt and public market financing – reached $10.1 billion in 2019.

Image: https://www.expresshealthcare.in

Global temperatures will continue to rise over the next decade and will reach a critical milestone in the 2030s, two of the U.S. government’s leading climate scientists said yesterday.

Climate change that made the 2010s the hottest decade in recorded history will persist unabated in the 2020s, and by 2035 will reach a critical level of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the scientists said.

Taking a deeper dive into R&D expenditures at U.S. institutions of higher education, this week’s edition of Useful Stats examines the fields in which this R&D was performed at the metropolitan level in 2018. Expanding on a previous SSTI report showing that R&D activity at universities and colleges is clustered heavily on the coasts, this analysis uses the NSF’s Higher Education R&D (HERD) data on the research expenditures at individual institutions to determine how this funding is distributed among the various fields of study, with life sciences outpacing all other fields.

Jeff Bezos, founder of the world's largest online retailing company Amazon, made a surprise visit to Amazon India’s event for small and medium businesses (SMBs) called Sambhav on January 15. The American Internet and aerospace entrepreneur in a fireside chat with Amazon India head Amit Agarwal talked about US-India relations, Amazon facilitation plans for SMBs, climate change and his aerospace manufacturing company Blue Origin, among other things.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology is seeking public feedback on its plan to revamp the Interagency Edison (iEdison) System, an online portal where companies that receive federal government funding report their inventions.

The project is part of NIST’s increased focus on federal technology transfer as part of the Lab-to-Market Cross-Agency Priority Goal under the President’s Management Agenda. Every year the federal government invests more than $100 billion in research and development, and in return grantees report the inventions that come out of this funding to the government through iEdison. The portal is run by the National Institutes of Health and used by 35 agencies, but will transition to NIST control during update process.

Image: The current iEdison. (Screenshot)

For all the technological claims shoe companies have made over the years—Buy these shoes to run faster! Jump higher!—Nike may have actually succeeded too drastically. Elite runners may be banned from wearing Nike’s Vaporfly 4% shoes in races later this year.

The Nike Vaporfly 4% uses a combination of advanced foams and a carbon fiber plate to rebound as much as 4% of the energy from one running stride into the next. According to a test administered by the New York Times, a runner wearing a publicly available version of the Vaporfly 4% ran 4% to 5% faster than a runner wearing a typical running shoe. Kenyan runner Eliud Kipchoge wore the Vaporfly 4% when he broke the two-hour marathon for the first time last October. Then Brigid Kosgei wore the same version to crush the women’s marathon record the very next day.

Image: Photo: Nike

HALIFAX, N.S. — EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the fifth story in a five-part series. In Part 5, we examine Atlantic Canada's future in technology and innovation.

It can’t be done here.  

For decades, that’s what sceptics would say as they quietly doubted plans to create a tech sector in Atlantic Canada.   

Leave the innovation to Silicon Valley, Waterloo and big cities, some said. Stick to tourism, services and natural resources like fisheries, forestry and agriculture.  

But the homegrown success of tech firms like Fredericton’s Radian6, Halifax’s GoInstant, St. John’s Verafin and Charlottetown’s BioVectra has changed the conversation. 

The BioHealth Capital Region (BHCR) experienced significant change in 2019 that has set the table for an intriguing 2020.

How 2020 plays out across the region is unknown.

However, if you’ve followed BioBuzz throughout the past year, it is abundantly clear that workforce development strategy, investment, and support will be a critical issue for the next decade in the BHCR. In addition to change and growth across more traditional life science sectors, the ascension of personalized medicine within the region, which includes a host of new and growing regenerative medicine, cell therapy, and gene therapy companies, has transformed the region’s workforce needs.

Image: https://biobuzz.io

Last week Barcelona-based startup NovaMeat made foodie headlines by releasing the latest iteration of its 3D-printed steak, a plant-based fillet that seeks to mimic an actual cut of meat. Notably, this time around it actually looks quite a lot like real steak — a vast improvement on the previous iteration, which looked closer to a chunky slice of brown ham with some flakes of salt on top. 

Image: Top: NovaMeat’s latest 3D-printed steak. Bottom: First version of NovaMeat’s 3D-printed steak. - https://sifted.eu

The U.S. share of global science and technology activity has shrunk in some areas even as absolute activity has continued to grow, as China and other Asian countries have invested in science and engineering education and increased their research spending.

That’s one of the main takeaways of the "State of U.S. Science and Engineering" 2020 report, published by the National Science Board Wednesday. The report has historically been published every other year, but starting with this year's edition, the NSB is transitioning its format from a single report published every two years to a series of shorter reports issued more frequently.

Study after study reminds us that as challenging as it can be, sticking with healthy habits—eating right, exercising regularly, not smoking, maintaining a healthy weight, and controlling how much alcohol you drink—can help us to live longer. But tacking on extra years isn’t so appealing if some or most of them are riddled with heart disease, diabetes or cancer.

In a 2018 study, an international group of researchers led by scientists at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that adopting five healthy habits could extend life expectancy by 14 years for women and by 12 years for men:

So you could use a little cash injection for your small business, but you’re not sure you can get a traditional small business loan. Short of winning the lottery (or draining your personal savings), what options do you have for funding? Crowdfunding may be for you.

If you’re not familiar with the concept, crowdfunding essentially allows you to fund your business through a variety of people who want to be a part of what you’re doing. Depending on the type of crowdfunding you choose, you may need to repay a loan or provide some sort of incentive to those who invest in your campaign. 

No one ever really feels like a "grown-up." But if you're approaching 40, well, you are one.

And it's high time you refined some crucial life skills, from staying healthy to saving money.

Below, we've listed 20 skills you should master before you enter your 40s.

"You can observe a lot just by watching."

Yogi Berra was the best all-around catcher in baseball. He lived this advice that he was given as a young player.

"You got only one guy to concentrate on; he throws the ball."

It's the same for entrepreneurs, whether they are catching or hitting: the path to success is to singularly focus on their customers' problems and then develop products that those customers want.

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – Alexandria Real Estate, which operates the Alexandria LaunchLabs accelerator in RTP, is offering a $100,000 prize to an agtech startup.

“The agricultural sector represents perhaps the most critical, untapped source of opportunities to improve nutrition and advance human health at its most fundamental level,” said Joel Marcus, the executive chairman and founder of Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. and Alexandria Venture Investments.

The European Commission published today the latest report on protection and enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) in third countries. While developments have taken place since the publication of the previous report, concerns persist and a number of areas for improvement and action remain to be addressed. Intellectual property rights infringements worldwide cost European firms billions of euros in lost revenue and put thousands of jobs at risk. Today's report identifies three groups of countries on which the EU will focus its action.