Scientists at Bangor University have shown for the first time, that sharks visit shallow tropical reefs or ‘seamounts’, to benefit from cleaning services and rid themselves of cumbersome parasites. The strategy is risky however, since by being there, they become vulnerable to interference from human activity.

The paper published in PLoS ONE, (14 March 2011) describes the first observations of thresher sharks venturing into shallow coastal waters to interact with cleaner wrasse, a type of small fish that groom other fish species. Thresher sharks live in the open oceans and much of the knowledge of them to date is based on fisheries bycatch.

Last Thursday night, Robin R. Murphy, director of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue at Texas A&M University, held a goodbye party in College Station for Japanese robotics researchers who had come to the center for workshops on using their creations in an emergency.

The next day, the workshops became reality. The massive earthquake and tsunami that ravaged Japan that Friday meant the scientists, already booked on a plane, were rushing home to help.

Satoshi Tadokoro of Tohoku University, based in Sendai, one of the cities hardest hit by the disaster, raced back with his team to offer the use of a robot developed at Tohoku. The snakelike robot can enter tight spaces and use a camera to survey them, something particularly helpful in collapsed buildings, says Ms. Murphy.

Have you ever wanted to make your own app? APC Mag discusses the upside to Google’s new App Inventor for Android.

Millions of years of human evolution had come to this: a picture of a cat that meows and vibrates the phone when you touch the screen. It was a small victory – and one to which I had, admittedly, been guided by Google’s well-written tutorials – but the immensity of the accomplishment was not diminished by my friends’ puzzled stares.

As a four-time intern and former intern manager, I’ve seen it all — from great programs that motivate great workers to soul-crushing menial work that inspires interns to show up to the office too hungover to function (Yes, this happens. Quite a lot, in fact.)

But with a solid hiring plan, you can avoid the underachievers and find motivated interns who really want to put in a solid summer (or semester) of work, who will show up on time in office-appropriate clothing, and not spend the day on Facebook (unless that’s what you’ve hired them to do). Here are six tips:

1. Make sure you really want one

Hiring an intern isn’t going to save you time or ease the burden of anyone’s workload (at least not at first). You’re going to have to help him understand the office culture, teach him something worthwhile, and show him how to make a contribution. All of this takes time – and it will change your workday.

Kelli Schmith (@MarketingVeep on Twitter) posed a question via Twitter recently about what project management techniques people use on marketing communications efforts to bring them to closure when running out of time. That’s an intriguing question, and it caused me to list (in no particular order) project management techniques I employ when time is running down to complete a project:

* Figure out what we’re delivering that hasn’t been promised and stop spending time on these things.
* Cut out clear “nice to haves.”
* Eliminate unexpected things whose absence won’t be missed.

The NIH has released a Special Announcement SBIR Solicitation targeting the development of medical technologies to reduce health disparities. This topic was originally released in 2009, and reissued in 2010. Phase I grants for up to $200,000 per year for up to two years are allowed. This is an increase from the standard $150,000 per 6 to 12 months.

How do you remember the names of new business associates?

Do you:

A) repeat their name five times in your head while shaking their hand?
B) try to cement the image of their face with their name by sheer mental power?
C) associate the name with a famous actress and picture her doing a headstand on a balance beam?

If you answered A or B, you are fighting an uphill battle, one that–if you’re over 40, especially–you’re probably losing.The best answer is C, according to journalist Joshua Foer, who has discovered and elucidated memory-enhancing strategies in his memorably-titled book, Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, a story of his journey from Joe Average Memory to winner of the U.S. Memory Championship.

Policy makers from the government of Singapore to the European Union have advocated “embracing failure” to encourage entrepreneurship. During this year’s launch of the White House initiative Startup America, one attendee made an impassioned plea that the United States follow this advice. After all, wasn’t it the fearlessness of America’s great pioneers—their willingness to stumble during their quest—that led them to succeed against all odds?

Well-intentioned though they may be, these attempts to celebrate failure are misguided. Fear should not be confused with anxiety—and celebrating failure seems aimed at reducing anxiety.

Anxiety, Freud is said to have explained, is when you irrationally react to a simple stick as if it were a dangerous snake. Fear is when you react to a dangerous snake as if it were, well, dangerous. Anxiety is dysfunctional, but fear can be good: It helps protect us from things that are dangerous—such as risk taking. Entrepreneurs, in my experience, develop a healthy fear of what can go wrong. They just don’t let it paralyze them.

The Rochester region was among the nation’s top 20 metropolitan areas in performance during the economic recovery, a Brookings Institution report shows.

The results were included in the Metropolitan Policy Program’s MetroMonitor quarterly report for March 2011, and include work by Brookings fellow Howard Wiel, slated to be a panelist at Eyes on the Future 2011, a Greater Rochester Region Economic Summit on May 20 at St. John Fisher College.

Gov. Bill Haslam is the latest governor to unveil a broad-based proposal to grow the state's economy and create jobs through investments in S&T by asking lawmakers to dedicate $10 million for a research consortium that would recruit senior scientists to advance scientific discoveries into commercial applications and spur high-growth companies. Similar TBED efforts focused on investing in university research, tech commercialization, and increasing access to capital were announced earlier this year in Kansas, Maryland, Nebraska and Virginia (see the Jan. 5, Jan. 19 and Jan. 26 issues of the Digest). The governor's budget also provides funding to continue the state's investment in biofuels and aerospace engineering and recommends new funding to recruit businesses.

Funding for the Memphis Research Consortium would come from a one-time appropriation in the Education budget for the State University and Community College System. The consortium would facilitate collaboration in research, education, institutional strategy, and other medical field activities. Partners include the University of Memphis, University of Tennessee Health Science Center, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, and several private health care entities, reports The Commercial Appeal. Scientists working in the fields of genomics, population health and regenerative medicine would be targeted for recruitment.

Today, Entrepreneur Magazine announced its top ranking schools for MBA students to attend, and get a "green business" education in. The list was put together in conjunction with Princeton, and ranks the schools on sustainable practices, as well as their students' opinions on how well their MBA programs were preparing them for careers in areas of green business.

How the best green business schools were ranked

In addition to the students' opinions, the survey examined other areas where the schools were sustainable, or appealed to sustainable practices. The areas it ranked schools by were the amount of research related to sustainability conducted by the school, availability of sustainability courses, the amount of faculty teaching courses on sustainable practices, and the availability of career services dedicated to green business.

When it was launched in 1995, Fast Company magazine set a new tone in progressive business media, with a unique editorial focus on discovering the creativity and innovation in technology, ethonomics (ethical companies), leadership, and design. The publication set out to chronicle how changing companies create and compete, to highlight new business practices, and to showcase teams and individuals that were reinventing the future and reinventing business. With special editions focusing on the World’s Most Innovative Companies, World’s Most Creative People and the Most Influential Women in Technology, Fast Company has made itself a bellwether for innovation and creativity.

February’s jobs numbers provide even more evidence of the need for fresh ideas to get America out of its economic rut. While non-farm payroll employment increased, the number of unemployed people and the overall unemployment rate of 8.9 percent barely budged.

It’s been at least six months since the last holdouts realized that the Obama administration’s “stimulus package” of nearly $1 trillion failed in its principle task of restoring real economic growth and returning Americans to work. Yet what has changed? Very little, as we continued to pursue old solutions to new problems.

Genevieve Thiers' business, Sittercity.com is a network that connects parents with over one million caregivers online.

Caregivers are available in many divisions including child care, pet care, senior care, home care and tutoring.

Genevieve shares her experiences.

The Challenge: Sittercity launched in the middle of the dot com crash, and it was next to impossible to get funding.

New startups are popping up daily. With so much competition, older companies are struggling to stay relevant.

Bill Taylor, the cofounder of Fast Company and author of Practically Radical, studied businesses that are successfully reinventing themselves in today's uncertain economy.

"Long-established organizations are really being rocked to their core," he says. And if they don't adapt, they'll die.

There’s an old joke about how to make a small fortune in angel investing: start with a large fortune and invest it in angel rounds.

I guess you could say the same thing about how to fail at an entrepreneurial venture: start a new company and then do everything that could be reasonably expected of you. And that’s how you fail.

The world is not set up to make your venture successful, and in fact almost everything conspires against you and your new company.

With a nod to Garage Venture's Guy Kawasaki and his Top 10 Lies of Venture Capitalists, I offer my Top 12 Lies Angels Tell. When I showed a draft to my angel friend Malcolm, he turned to me and said, "wow, this is really cynical!" So let me acknowledge that first.

1. “That was a good presentation!”

I have to say something positive, but you’re not getting me to write a cheque. The fact is, most funding pitches are terrible; they’re more product pitches with an appeal for money tacked on at the end. Passion, yes; every entrepreneur has heard by now they must show great enthusiasm for their endeavor, but show me how I can get my money back someday, too. Who will acquire you? Are you going to raise venture capital that will keep me in the deal for six, seven, eight, nine years? Or are you aware of the new trend towards early exits? Show me how I can get my money back in three to five years and even I’ll be saying, “That was a good presentation!”

The Charlotte, North Carolina, entrepreneur wants to do something about that. His company announced on Wednesday a $25 million initiative dedicated to bringing individuals' innovations to the marketplace.

Inventors can submit their ideas to the Edison Nation Innovation Fund (www.edisonnation.com) for $25. No other money is required from them to develop the ideas, and they will share the royalties if the product succeeds.

"We're really greasing the rails. We're making it easier for those great ideas to finally get in the hands of companies," said Foreman, CEO and co-founder of Edison Nation, a search service that matches retailers' product requests with inventions.

There are many opportunities for those who are alert enough to recognize emerging trends, perceptive enough to realize their importance, and clever enough to take advantage of them. These minitrends are emerging trends that will become significantly important within 2-5 years, but are not yet generally recognized.

Unlike megatrends, Minitrends are of a scope and importance to offer attractive opportunities to individual entrepreneurs, decision-makers in small and mid-size businesses, innovative thinkers in large companies, and adventuresome investors. In my book, MINITRENDS: How Innovators & Entrepreneurs & Discover & Profit From Business & Technology Trends, I categorize the nine Minitrends below to those most applicable to different-sized groups. (In the book, I also discuss the background, current trends, and business opportunities of each of these Minitrends in more depth.)

As Rhode Island's economy shows signs of revival, entrepreneurs need more than just bravery and innovation to get their ventures off the ground — they need capital, and they need it now.

The state houses several entities — venture capital, business development, and government-funded — intended to provide developing businesses and startup companies with the loans they need to get their ventures up and running. Choosing the right one is essential to establishing and growing a new or underfunded business — but the choice may not be as simple as it once was.