Eat less saturated fat: that has been the take-home message from the U.S. government for the past 30 years. But while Americans have dutifully reduced the percentage of daily calories from saturated fat since 1970, the obesity rate during that time has more than doubled, diabetes has tripled, and heart disease is still the country’s biggest killer. Now a spate of new research, including a meta-analysis of nearly two dozen studies, suggests a reason why: investigators may have picked the wrong culprit. Processed carbohydrates, which many Americans eat today in place of fat, may increase the risk of obesity, diabetes and heart disease more than fat does—a finding that has serious implications for new dietary guidelines expected this year.

In March the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published a meta-analysis—which combines data from several studies—that compared the reported daily food intake of nearly 350,000 people against their risk of developing cardiovascular disease over a period of five to 23 years. The analysis, overseen by Ronald M. Krauss, director of atherosclerosis research at the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute, found no association between the amount of saturated fat consumed and the risk of heart disease.

Facebook is projected to do over a billion dollars in revenue this year, more than some small countries, and its 400 million strong userbase is larger than the population of most big ones. So why shouldn’t the social network have its own private currency? In the future, we may pay for some goods not with dollars, yen or euros, but with Facebook Credits.

Credits wasn’t the biggest news last week for Facebook, which announced an aggressive initiative to make itself the consumer web’s connective tissue that CEO Mark Zuckerberg called “the most transformative thing we have ever done.”

Creating a new virtual economy is a pretty big deal too, but Credits, which allow people to buy units of a virtual currency that can then be spent on various applications across Facebook, remained in the background. That’s because the program is still in private beta — independent payment companies control most of the $1 billion virtual goods market.

In the emerging Internet of Things, everyday objects are becoming networked. Recently we looked at smart clothing, today we explore the world of smart cars. From Formula One to cheap family cars, all kinds of vehicles are utilizing sensors and advanced technology nowadays. While some of the features we discuss below aren't connected to the Internet, yet, all of them are using sensors. And so we can easily imagine the day when most cars are connected to the network.

We begin our post looking at the state of the art in car sensor technology: Formula One manufacturer McLaren's 300 live, simultaneous data streams. We end with a look at family car Alhambra's more humble sensor technology. In between we have the latest from Chrysler, General Motors and Ford.

A few years ago North Dakota erected some clever signs at its border with Montana. One sign advised anyone headed west to remember what happened to a certain long haired cavalry commander who left North Dakota in 1876 and ended up in a sorry state on the banks of the Little Big Horn in Montana.

With all due respect to North Dakota, given a choice, does Montana sound like a lot more interesting place - to visit, to live, to work?

George Custer didn’t live to contemplate what I think of, and many others think of, as the allure of Montana. It has always fascinated me that the land of the Big Sky has a certain “brand” that states like Idaho, Wyoming and Colorado - not to mention North Dakota - never seem able to match. Maybe its because Montana has been building the brand since that fateful day in June of 1876 when the tourist from North Dakota misjudged his welcoming committee.

"Space matters." That's the mantra at the Stanford d.school, where students and staffers have spent six years figuring out how to tweak an environment to make it a more fertile breeding ground for ideas. Now they're going to find out if those ideas work.

The boxes were unpacked in late March, in time for the start of the university's third quarter. But the official ribbon-cutting on the 40K square foot new building (which houses both the d.school and all other design programs at Stanford) isn't until May 7. Fast Company got a sneak preview, and we'll be giving you a guided tour (along with photos, videos and critiques of the space from the students themselves) in the days ahead. We'll go behind the scenes to show how every nook, cranny, and fungible wall system has been smartly designed to maximize collaboration.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- To motivate the well-off to funnel more of their cash into small businesses, should the federal government offer investors new tax breaks?

President Obama thinks so. He's thrown his support behind a proposal to eliminate capital gains taxes on investments made in 2010 and 2011 in qualifying small businesses. The House of Representatives has already passed the legislation; the Senate has yet to take it up.

"We should eliminate all capital gains taxes on small business investment so these folks can get the capital they need to grow and create jobs," Obama said at a February town hall meeting in Nashua, N.H. "That's particularly critical right now, because bank lending standards have tightened since the financial crisis and many small businesses are still struggling to get loans."

NEW YORK, April 26 /PRNewswire/ -- Award-winning B2B social networking site Internet Evolution has published its first list of the 100 most innovative, influential people who determine the ways we use and experience everything in the Web 2.0 world.

Working with nominations from readers and message board moderators, Internet Evolution then whittled the list down to 10 people in each of 10 categories: social networking; enterprise and cloud computing; news/media; greentech; wireless and gadgets; e-commerce; search; security; digital entertainment... and most over-rated.

The full report can be accessed here:

http://www.internetevolution.com/document.asp?doc_id=190304

"Our categories really cover the breadth of the Web 2.0 experience for business users and consumers," says Terry Sweeney, Editor in Chief of Internet Evolution. "There are some familiar names – Mark Zuckerberg, Rupert Murdoch, and Craig Newmark – but also some less familiar ones like Randi Levin, CTO for the City of Los Angeles, or Guido Bartels of IBM, who's also the chairman of the GridWise Alliance."

Dropbox is a "hard drive in the clouds," says the hot Silicon Valley startup's very humble founder and CEO, an MIT grad named Drew Houston.

Drew came up with the idea upon having forgotten his USB drive on a trip from New York to Boston. Like a typical MIT student, he sat with his laptop at that magical train station and began writing the first code to solve this problem for himself (as he had forgotten his USB port) and then learned he could solve this problem not only for himself, but, for the world!

Seed funding from Y Combinator soon followed with more funding from Sequoia and Accel. And then Drew said it was “off to the races”. They have raised a total of 7.2 million, won a Crunchy Award in ’09 for best Internet application and were recently nominated for a Webby.

IBM is ramping up its investment in Africa dramatically, with plans to open offices in six new markets, extending its presence across the continent to eight countries.

It is establishing three regional hubs — one in Kenya to serve the East African market, another in Nigeria, which will serve West Africa, and the third in Angola, to serve the Southern African Development Community countries.

The expansion, which is being spearheaded by IBM sub-Saharan Africa GM Oliver Fortuin (pictured) and his colleague, long-time IBMer Gary Carroll, forms part of a renewed focus on emerging markets by the US-headquartered technology and services company.

IBM has spent US$120m in expanding in the region in the past two years, with more investment to come, Fortuin says.

The markets where IBM is setting up or expanding its presence are Kenya, Nigeria, Angola, Senegal, Ghana and Tanzania. Senegal will serve as the base from which to serve French-speaking African markets; Angola will be used as a springboard into Portuguese Africa.

Take a quick look at this picture:

New research suggests that the ease with which you are able to flip between the picture of a rabbit and a duck is related to whether you are a creative thinker.

In the first of two studies, I asked over 600 people to rate how easy they found it to flip between the two animals and then they were asked to rate their creativity. 79% of people who said that they were creative reported being able to easily flip between the two animals, compared to just 3% of those who struggled to see the two animals. A second study examined people’s actual creative thinking. A hundred people were asked to rate how easily they found it to flip between the two animals, and were then given a standard creativity test in which they had to come up with as many unusual uses as possible for a brick and a paperclip. Those who could easily see both the rabbit and duck produced double the number of ideas compared to those who said they found such flipping problematic.

Cash is king. Cash flow* keeps you king.  Kings own their business; creditors need not apply. Kings choose their journeys and who can join them. It’s good to be king.

With that in mind, here are some principles that can serve to either keep you king or help you be a king in your business, king of cash flow.

Education.

Start with yourself. Are positive cash flows meaningful to you as the organization’s leader? Why? Do you measure it? Would you be able to answer, if asked, how much cash-flow do you generate each month? How long would it take for you to find that answer?

Can you explain what it may mean to everyone in your organization? (survival, ownership, control, freedom, growth, new equipment, new hires, no layoffs, incentives, R&D…)

Are you not sure you want feedback from others? Read on.

Hardly a day goes by when I [Vivek Wadhwa] don’t have a rookie entrepreneur ask for advice on raising money from VCs. They usually have a fancy-looking business plan with detailed spreadsheets showing how their company will be worth billions by capturing just 1% of a market. All they need is some financing, and they’ll take the world by storm. My advice is always the same: ditch the business plan, and buy a lottery ticket. Your odds are better, and you’ll suffer less stress.

Most of the young entrepreneurs I meet have grown up reading stories about how, during the dot-com days, all you needed was a PowerPoint and a geeky smile to get a venture capitalist to throw millions your way. True, some really dumb companies were funded during those days, but nearly all of these companies (and their investors) went down in flames. It was just the few, random, successes that reaped the fortunes. Investors have grown much wiser since then (and will probably stay this way until the next bubble).

Zhou Libo's show at the cavernous Shanghai International Gymnastics Center has been sold out for days, and after I finally get a ticket, I understand why. Sporting a tuxedo and a white bow tie, Zhou, 43, a stand-up comedian, delivers rapid-fire jokes, mostly about life in Shanghai. The theme is "I'm crazy about money," and Zhou riffs on soaring property prices, how much it costs to raise kids, even how much the U.S. owes China. The audience of some 3,700 roars its approval. People are clapping, slapping their thighs, stomping the floor. I manage a smile, but even though I am a Mandarin speaker, I don't really get the humor, and many of my Chinese friends would be almost as lost. While Zhou sets up his jokes in Mandarin, the punch lines are nearly always in the local Shanghai dialect. This much I do get, however: the performance is an unabashed celebration of all things Shanghai and Shanghainese.

For China's most dynamic, most cosmopolitan and sassiest city, this is a time to celebrate. After decades of hibernation following the founding of Mao Zedong's People's Republic in 1949, Shanghai is returning to its roost as a global center of commerce and culture. This year Shanghai, as host of Expo 2010, is squarely in the international spotlight. The fair opens May 1, and organizers expect more than 70 million visitors over six months.

Regular, petroleum-based plastic doesn't biodegrade. But this year's crop of Earth Day — inspired ads shows plant-based plastics doing just that: an empty SunChips bag fading into the soil, a Paper Mate pen dissolving underground. Although the visuals suggest that these items simply disintegrate (Goodbye, landfill!), the reality is more complicated. Take the SunChips bag. It needs to go in a compost bin; the packaging is clear about that. Likewise, Paper Mate notes that the pen's outer casing will break down if buried in a backyard but that its innards should go in the garbage. Forget to separate them, and the outer part won't biodegrade in a landfill.

Bioplastics could be really good for the environment — the manufacturing process produces fewer greenhouse-gas emissions than that for petroleum-based plastics, and these biomaterials don't contain an allegedly hormone-disrupting chemical, bisphenol A (BPA), that some regular plastics do. But is society green enough to use bioplastics? Many of us still don't recycle all our bottles and cans, and now companies are expecting us to start composting?

On occasion I get the hard word from the high school brass that my desk is a mess – it is never as bad as the math teacher who loves trains a little too much, but messy nonetheless. This picture places me in good company.

Social innovation: it’s not about the idea or the “aha” moment. It’s about creating a critical mass of stakeholder champions. Surprised? So was I, but UC Davis Center for Entrepreneurship chair Andy Hargadon and Rockefeller President Judith Rodin presented compelling arguments and multiple examples to make the case at the Council on Foundation’s Annual Conference in Denver.

According to the discussion during the conference session, “Social Innovation: What it is and what it means for Philanthropy,” it turns out that after 4000-plus mousetrap patents, the most effective and bestselling mousetrap is one of the first traps designed, thereby destroying the adage that if you build a better mousetrap people will beat a path to your door!

According to Rodin and Hargadon, who’ve studied and spearheaded plenty of successful innovations, success requires a network of stakeholdershardwired to contribute, spread and continuously improve philanthropy’s work. It can be an old idea thought about in a new way, but it must engage. As Rodin said, “If you want impactful answers, ask everyone.”

BQF Innovation

Businessweek has collaborated with Boston Consulting Group to publish their 2010 list of the 50 most innovative companies in the world based on a survey of corporate executives.  Here is the full list.  It is an interactive table.  And here is a slide show commentary on the top 25.

There has been considerable movement in the list from previous years although Apple retains a firm grip on the top spot. China with 4 entries, India with 2 and South Korea with 3 have all increased their showing. Britain has 4 entrants – Virgin, BSkyB, Vodafone and HSBC. Germany has 3 companies in the list and France has none. Here is the list.

If you use LinkedIn correctly, it can be a marketing godsend.

You can form relationships with hundreds of potential customers and solidify your brand -- without spending an arm and a leg.

Do it, wrong, however, and you won’t just embarrass yourself. You might actually hurt your company’s reputation, and your own.

How to do it right?

Learn the most common mistakes small business owners make on LinkedIn -- and what to do about them.

Number 1. Special Offers

We live in a society that is as distracted as it is informed. People are making decisions on what to read, view, purchase, visit, and sample based on the information that filters through their attention dashboards. At best, even the most qualified information sourced from the most trusted contacts will receive only a cursory overview. The trick is to concisely introduce the value up front. If the offer is compelling and affiliated with their interests, the consumer will make the connection to personal value and benefits and click-through to redeem the special or coupon when ready or so inclined.

For example, @delloutlet uses Twitter and Facebook to send coupons to customers. In just one year, Dell recorded upward of $3 million in sales directly sourced from Twitter.

California Tortilla (@caltort), a chain of 39 casual Mexican restaurants based in Rockville, MD, sends coupon passwords via Twitter, which customers must say at checkout to redeem the offer.

Last year, our list of the Most Influential Women in Technology raised plenty of eyebrows, ire, and fist pumps of joy — depending on the reader. And we’ve no doubt this list will follow suit. But the overwhelming number of nominees and fresh names proved that, while women in tech may remain at a distinct disadvantage by almost any metric (average salary, top-management representation, etc), there is also plenty to celebrate and be inspired by.