Americans have a lot of opinions on where they think their rudest residents hail from.

Stereotypes — or sports rivalries — often color these assumptions.

In October and November, Insider conducted a survey of more than 2,000 American adults, asking them to choose the five rudest cities in the US from a list of the 50 biggest cities.

New York City may no longer reign supreme when it comes to the top cities millennials are settling in, but it's still a boomtown for the generation.

Other big metro areas like San Francisco and Washington, DC, are also millennial hotspots, but so, too, are more up-and-coming cities like Raleigh, North Carolina, and Louisville, Kentucky, both of which are more popular than DC and New York.

Missouri is leaving millions of dollars on the table that could fuel early-stage startups, which create nearly 80 percent of net new jobs in the state.

A new report from MOSourceLink, a program of the UMKC Innovation Center, reveals Missouri is lacking in alternative loans, access to resources, early-stage capital and locally activated venture capital. The good news: It’s clear what needs to be done to fill the gaps in the early-stage financing for startups.

For all its clear advantages, one big drawback to the digital age is our exposure to ubiquitous distractions — from our endless need to check stuff on Google, to the perpetual stream of WhatsApp messages, to our impulsive additions to our Amazon baskets. Although it’s too soon to know just what long-term impact living in the digital bubble will have on our brains, recent psychological research suggests that heightened social media usage is linked to deficits in concentration, empathy, and social skills, as well as increases in narcissism and life dissatisfaction.

The number of unicorns that went public in 2019 hit a record level but the herd waiting for their run on Wall Street continues to grow.

That's one of the observations made in the eighth annual Tech IPO Pipeline report from venture analytics firm CB Insights this week.

It counts 281 U.S. tech companies as possible IPO candidates next year, if market conditions are right, with California home to the lion's share — 174.

Between the countless parties, last-minute deadlines and weather conditions that make you want to stay indoors if not hibernate entirely, the holiday season can be pretty hectic — and no matter how much time you’ve spent preparing for this time of year, finding the perfect gift for everyone on your list is a challenge. Lucky for you, then, TIME’s editors are on the case, and have put together a list of the gifts they’re giving (or are hoping to receive) this year.

Image: https://time.com

Venture capital money is pouring into startups in the agriculture sector. AgFunder founder Rob Leclerc explains why.

It’s not quite in Silicon Valley’s usual stratosphere, but it is noteworthy nonetheless: In 2018, investment in agricultural technology (agtech) startups totaled almost $7 billion. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the $55.3 billion invested in new financial technology companies, but still a 44 percent increase over the previous year, and a huge jump from the $1.5 billion invested just five years before.

Image: https://www.corteva.com

Maine is at an economic crossroads.

For generations, our forests, farmlands and waters have created economic opportunity all over this state.

Furs, fisheries, timber and land made fortunes for many until the late 1800s, and then large-scale production of lumber, granite, ice and lime, fishing and shipbuilding drove success in our coastal communities and resulted in a network of railroads. Textiles and paper products drove the work of mills across the state and put food on the table for thousands.

There’s a lot to be excited about at CES, and it’s not just the cool gadgets - there’s also plenty changing around the way those gadgets get to market. We’re seeing a major shift in innovation in how it is carried out, how it is accessed, how it’s delivered, and even how we consume it. That really excites me. Bringing access, democracy, and even a little disruption to innovation is a passion of mine and has driven much of what we’ve done in our own startup.

In business, as in life, good leaders hope for the best and plan for the worst. There’s a reason that experts refer to the regular expansion and contraction of the economy as the business cycle. Even producers of the most recession-proof products—toiletries, beer, funeral services—need to consider how rising and falling consumer sentiment will affect their bottom line.

In recent years, Apple has become a more cautious company. Maybe even a more boring one. It’s evolved from producing world-changing tech products to selling cloud-based services that run on more than a billion Apple devices active in the wild.

This year, Apple proved masterful at staying out of the way of powerful external forces such as the techlash and the trade war. Serious self-inflicted wounds akin to the “antennagate” and Apple Maps V.1 of yesteryear were minimal.

Arielle Eckstut: So there is no definitive history of the colors of Christmas. It's not like one day red and green were declared the colors. There's a long history, and a kind of convoluted one, behind it.

I'm Arielle Eckstut, and I am the co-author of "The Secret Language of Color."

What's most interesting about the red and green color combination of Christmas is that it's a combination of the beauty of nature and the crassness of commerce that come together to solidify the image of these two colors in our collective mind.

Image: https://www.businessinsider.com - from video

Babson College was this year ranked No. 2 for entrepreneurship by The Princeton Review and Entrepreneur magazine. This comes just two months after U.S. News & World Report named Babson No. 1 for entrepreneurship for the 23rd consecutive time.

Before you scan, hopefully share, and chalk this up to just another good Babson College ranking, let us tell you a bit about what happens here, and why we believe this is the best place for entrepreneurial leaders.

The term open innovation is often misunderstood. Many companies and businesses think about the concept exclusively as leveraging others’ technology to drive their own innovation. Or, that their organisation should work with consumers to better understand what product or enhancement to make next.

It’s hard to find a CEO today who doesn’t tout the importance of innovation, yet many seem stumped by how to achieve it. A widely cited McKinsey survey from 2008 found that 84% of executives believed that innovation was critical to their business’s growth, but only 6% were satisfied with their company’s current innovation performance. A more recent study by KPMG and Innovation Leader asked executives to rate how advanced their companies’ innovation efforts were on a five-point scale.

More than 5700 years ago, a girl spat out a wad of chewing gum at what is now an archaeological site in Denmark. Today, researchers report in Nature Communications that they have sequenced a full genome from that gum, the first time they have extracted so much information from anything other than ancient bones or teeth.  Although no human remains have been found at the site of Syltholm, archaeologists found a wad of gum from birch pitch. The DNA in the gum was so well preserved that researchers were able to offer a glimpse of the girl who had chewed it and a snapshot of her life.

Image: TOM BJÖRKLUND

TRENTON, N.J. (December 18, 2019) - The New Jersey Commission on Science, Innovation and Technology (CSIT) today announced that it has named Judith A. Sheft as its Executive Director. Sheft, who has an extensive background in fostering opportunities for early-stage New Jersey companies and for the next generation of New Jersey entrepreneurs, will officially take the helm of the CSIT beginning January 13, 2020.

In August 2018, Governor Murphy signed legislation re-establishing the former New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology as the CSIT. Comprised of representatives from the public and private sectors, as well as academia, the Commission is tasked with leading the way in promoting the state as a home for academic and technological research, development, and commercialization.

If you’re thinking about building your own company, some people say you should have an MBA, while others think it is not necessary. Many aspiring entrepreneurs believe that a unique idea alone can help them create a highly successful business, while others feel they need to attend business school to build their dream business.

Keeping track of vaccinations remains a major challenge in the developing world, and even in many developed countries, paperwork gets lost, and parents forget whether their child is up to date. Now a group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers has developed a novel way to address this problem: embedding the record directly into the skin.

Image: Researchers use microneedles to inject quantum dots with medical information into pig skin. Credit: Tom Buehler MIT 

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Unicorns like Uber, Lyft and Slack may have had disappointing IPOs, but U.S. venture capital firms gave birth to a record number of unicorns in 2019.

So far this year 66 venture capital-backed unicorns were minted in the United States versus 58 in 2018, according to market data firm CB Insights.