Humans have been steeping leaves in hot water for 500,000 years. Us Americans drank 79 billion servings of tea last year, amounting to 3.6 billions gallons in total.

So clearly, we're quite invested in the hot stuff--as is the freshly tea-pushing Starbucks--but what does it invest in us? New research into the relationship between nutrition and the brain is helping us to understand why tea time is such an essential part of the day--for the components of tea help us be more alert, more relaxed, and healthier over the long term.

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When I was a kid, I read a book called The Listmaker. It’s about a young girl who uses lists to organize and make sense of her life. At the time I didn’t read any more into it besides the fact that this was an odd hobby for a pre-teen girl to spend so much time on.

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What is it about the “impossible” that seems to inspire, to call us to extraordinary effort, and almost by magic compel us to attempt what might seem unreasonable, unlikely or irrational?

We are wired to achieve, it seems, and calling out to that inner drive is what may distinguish the innovative, dynamic organization from the staid, somber one.  Goethe famously said:  “There is genius in bold action.” 

The CBI, the UK's leading business organisation, released a report on Monday (4 November) which concludes that the benefits of Britain's EU membership significantly outweigh the costs. It is overwhelmingly in the UK's national interest to stay in the EU, according to the report Our Global Future: the Business Vision for a Reformed EU by the CBI, an organisation which speaks on behalf of 240,000 businesses that together employ around a third of the private sector workforce in the UK.

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Glow-in-the-dark ice cream exists — but that's not even the weirdest part. Its main ingredient is jellyfish protein, which makes each lick brighter and more luminous.

Once the protein extracted from jellyfish reacts with the warm temperature of a tongue, the pH level of the tongue increases to a higher level, causing the ice cream to glow. British entrepreneur Charlie Francis, who founded ice-cream company Lick Me I'm Delicious, invented the fluorescent ice cream.

There's tons of advice out there about how exactly to answer interview questions, what to wear to that interview and how to follow-up afterwards, but what if you're having trouble even getting your foot in the door? For many people, it isn't a lack of experience, education or training that is keeping them from getting a call back — or these days, an e-mail back. Instead, it often comes down to how you're presenting yourself via your resume.

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A silver BMW 5 Series is weaving through traffic at roughly 120 kilometers per hour (75 mph) on a freeway that cuts northeast through Bavaria between Munich and Ingolstadt. I’m in the driver’s seat, watching cars and trucks pass by, but I haven’t touched the steering wheel, the brake, or the gas pedal for at least 10 minutes. The BMW approaches a truck that is moving slowly. To maintain our speed, the car activates its turn signal and begins steering to the left, toward the passing lane. Just as it does, another car swerves into the passing lane from several cars behind. The BMW quickly switches off its signal and pulls back to the center of the lane, waiting for the speeding car to pass before trying again.

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In 1967, The Public Interest, then a leading venue for highbrow policy debate, published a provocative essay by Paul Baran, one of the fathers of the data transmission method known as packet switching. Titled “The Future Computer Utility,” the essay speculated that someday a few big, centralized computers would provide “information processing … the same way one now buys electricity.”

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I am currently interning at my friend’s start-up, which is just six months old. He has given me an offer to join the business. However, I have also received a job offer from a top IT company. Both options seem lucrative. What should I take up?

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A measly eight students took the first entrepreneurship course Bob Chalfant taught at the University of Akron in the spring of 2009, shortly after a popular professor stopped teaching the subject.

To say the program has bounced back would be an understatement: Since the start of 2013, Mr. Chalfant has taught a total of 265 students about the ins and outs of starting a business.

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If you are a postdoctoral scientist or finishing up your PhD you may be interested in pursuing opportunities in the Pharmaceutical Industry.  If so, there are many differences between academia and industry and a number of them are highlighted in this article. 

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Next week, King Mohammed VI of Morocco is visiting President Obama in Washington, DC, on the heels of an announcement that his Majesty’s government will convene an entrepreneurship summit in 2014 with the U.S. Government. Morocco has much to gain from its new partnership with the United States around startups.

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For retailing, the key change produced by the Internet is that shopping online spared consumers the economic costs (in time, grief, and gas money) of visiting a store and locating a product. This has been called the “death of distance.” When even isolated individuals can buy anything from a global marketplace, physical location does not confer any commercial advantage, and online merchants might be expected to win every battle.

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GSK has selected eight winners in its first Discovery Fast Track competition, designed to translate academic research into starting points for new potential medicines. The contest attracted 142 entries across 17 therapeutic areas from 70 universities, academic research institutions, clinics and hospitals in the US and Canada.

Trying to derive a person’s wants and needs—conscious or otherwise—from online browsing and buying habits has become crucial to companies of all kinds.

Now IBM is taking the idea a step further. It is testing technology that guesses at people’s core psychological traits by analyzing what they post on Twitter, with the goal of offering personalized customer service or better-targeted promotional messages.

When Laura Stachel watched physicians performing an emergency caesarian section during a research trip to Nigeria in 2008, something happened that stunned her. The lights went out. Stachel, an obstetrician, had a flashlight with her and the physicians finished the surgery. But during her trip, she watched this same sort of problem occur over and over.

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Connecticut Innovations, the state's quasi-public technology investment arm, has released a list of 20 organizations that will share $5 million in new funding designed to "expand Connecticut's entrepreneurial network."

The funding is part of CTNext, a public-private "innovation ecosystem" formed by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy in October 2012. The idea behind the grants is to use creative projects to help start-up firms get off the ground.

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Barring Hong Kong in Asia and Tel Aviv in the Middle East, and potentially Bangalore in India, no other Asian city seems to be jockeying for this position. Tokyo, Tai Pei and Seoul can boast of some big ICT corporations but when it comes to innovation, Singapore seems to be doing something right. That's why the world is looking at the city state with a certain awe and promise, even though the Fortune magazine named only Hong Kong in Asia as one of the top four world's tech capitals after Silicon Valley and New York.

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You can hardly scan the Internet or pick up a business magazine without seeing references to innovation. Companies everywhere are emerging from decades of cost reductions and are now focusing on efficiency, while looking for the next breakthrough idea… the next Post-It Note, the Frappucino or even the new Internet.

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We spend nearly a third of our lives asleep, but scientists don't agree on sleep's purpose. Scientific American contributor Joss Fong explains what we know, and don't know, about our nightly slumber.

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