Scientists have for the first time created a functional human liver from stem cells derived from skin and blood and say their success points to a future where much-needed livers and other transplant organs could be made in a laboratory.

While it may take another 10 years before lab-grown livers could be used to treat patients, the Japanese scientists say they now have important proof of concept that paves the way for more ambitious organ-growing experiments.

Although you may try to keep your personal and professional life separate, there are some aspects of your personal life that will still wind up flowing into the other. How you care for your body can impact your business more than you may realize. Your moods and energy levels are attributed to your health and these can greatly impact your business and personal interaction with others. Practicing better fitness could improve the overall functionality of your establishment.

Hiring the right people to work for you is one of the most important (and overlooked) aspects of growing a business.  As entrepreneurs, you’re often required to wear many hats – from making sure your product maintains quality standards, hopping on sales calls, prospecting or doing customer service, your hands are completely tied.  It’s a little more manageable when you’re doing everything on your own but it gets a bit more complex when you have to start bringing on people to help out.

Everyone who has ever been part of an intense executive education course late in his career has felt the same thing after sharing so much with a group of people: let’s not lose touch! But it happens… a few reunions over the years and the numbers of “alums” dwindle and then fade away all together.

When health IT startups say they’re making a new technology platform for physicians, John Sung Kim has an immediate follow-up question – for what specialty?

That’s a question he learned was critical as he began building and trying to sell the platform developed by his first health startup, DoctorBase. It’s been a series of hits and misses, which Kim isn’t afraid to talk candidly about. In a recent interview, he explained to MedCity News one of the most surprising things he learned when he set out to build a mobile platform that would let doctors, administrators and patients communicate without having to pick up the phone.

It’s been a slow year for startup fundraising—the investments doled out by venture firms in the first quarter dropped 6 percent compared with the same period of 2012. But at least a couple of sectors have been defying that trend. One is software, where funding for the first half of 2012 was up 38 percent over 2012 levels, and another is digital health, up 12 percent.

In a report issued yesterday (slides embedded below), San Francisco-based digital health accelerator Rock Health delved into the details behind that 12 percent number.

The Iowa Innovation Council is working to develop a funding mechanism that would help startups across the state, the Business Record reported last week. An amended Iowa statute will allow the state to issue up to $8 million in tax credits each year, a five percent increase, for investments made to the Iowa Innovation Fund—intended to attact more potential private investors. “We’re excited about that (investment potential),” said Cara Heiden, a member of the council’s board of directors. “It’s a demonstration of the public and private sectors coming together. These investments have higher risk, yes, but it comes with an understanding that these investments are needed.” The three-year waiting period previously attached to the Iowa Innovation Fund tax credit also was eliminated in the new legislation.

Ever since the tech world collectively decided that programming is the essential skill all kids ought to learn, perhaps even before they learn to read, the market has been saturated with tablet apps aimed at raising the next Zuckerburg.  

Bay Area startup Play-i is taking another approach. The company is literally making physical robots to encourage tangible play with technology. 

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

It is not a natural thing for an 8th grade student in Bangladesh to memorize Lincoln's Gettysburg Address from top to bottom. But like many in my class, I did. Even though it didn't have much of an impact on me then, it is that single speech that continues to deepen my feelings about this country that I now proudly call my own.

Try as governments might, a thriving startup culture isn't legislated into existence. "Those that emerge have a group of entrepreneurs who are active in their community and have decided, hey, we're going to make this market better," says Scott Case, CEO of Startup America Partnership. They're the ones--usually a mix of first-timers and serial founders--who create networks and provide leadership. Where are they thriving right now?

It is the Fourth of July weekend as I write, art is elsewhere, and what I really love now is to set off fireworks. I’m talking backyard pyrotechnics with the traditional, bottom-of-the-line ordnance--cheap little gunpowder devices that blow up, zoom skyward, and/or emit colored fire--that is an everlasting miracle of human invention.

A new initiative from the EU aiming to boost entrepreneurship has been launched: Startup Europe’s Accelerator Assembly. It brings together a group of 20 accelerator programmes plus entrepreneurs and policy makers, in a bid to open up communication between these parties and provide more support for European startups.

The programme is being led by Seedcamp, TechStars, Seed DB, Bethnal Green Ventures, Nesta and How to Web. It’ll hold events and workshops, conduct research to increase awareness about accelerators and web startups in Europe as well as host an online community.

Based on my own experience and feedback from friends, every investor is approached by at least ten entrepreneurs with a “hot idea” for a new business, for every one who has a real “plan” for a new business. That’s why I often say that ideas are worth nothing, until they are put in the context of a business plan and real people committed to executing the plan.

In fact, you can find websites full of ideas, like these “Free Innovative Ideas,” by serial entrepreneur Kim E. Lumbard of CalTech. Or you can find books of free ideas, like “Ideas,” by Matt Schoenherr, providing 101 great ideas for increasing your visibility and profitability. Most investors will tell you that they rarely see a new idea that they haven’t heard before.

University spin-outs are the world experts in their own technology. “They’ve been working on it for twenty years - if they can’t make it work nobody can. And if it doesn’t go right, they’ve got a whole lab they can get back into to reinvent the business,” says Tony Raven, CEO of Cambridge Enterprise, the technology commercialisation arm of Cambridge University. “For a start-up in the outside world, if the technology doesn’t work, it’s game over,” Raven said.

But technology alone is not enough. Spin-outs need to make business-sense and understand their potential markets. Raven and other experts from some of Europe’s technology hotspots shared their formulae for cracking this code at a Science|Business Network roundtable, “Sharing Best Practices in Spin-Out Formation” held in Brussels on 4 June.

Summer is a popular time for Americans to set off to their favorite vacation destinations. But for small business owners, taking time off can lead to missed opportunities and missed income.

For example, less than half of small business owners, about 49 percent, plan to take even a week long summer vacation this year, according to the American Express OPEN Spring 2013 Small Business Monitor, a survey of small businesses now in its 12th year. That’s down from a high of 67 percent who planned to take a week off in 2006 and 54 percent who said they were planning to take at least a week off last year.

Facebook went public in May 2012 and its IPO was expected to turn 1,000 of its employees into millionaires. These millionaires may have made the county where they live and work, San Mateo, the best paid in the nation, The Wall Street Journal reports. San Mateo residents made an average of $3,240 per week during the fourth quarter last year, or an annual salary of $168,000. That's more than Manhattan, the nation's second-highest paid area, which brings in $2,107 per week.

Today’s 3-D printers can generally only build things out of one type of material—usually a plastic or, in certain expensive industrial versions of the machines, a metal. They can’t build objects with electronic, optical, or any kind of functions that require the integration of multiple materials. But recent advances in the research lab—including a 3-D printed battery and a bionic ear—suggest that this might soon change.

Howard Stevenson: Entrepreneurship is often thought of as starting a new business or creating innovation.  But in reality entrepreneurship, in our view, is the pursuit of opportunity beyond the resources you currently control.  Now what does that mean?  It means you have to persuade customers they’ll be better off buying your product.  You have to persuade employees that they might be better off if they work with you rather than with an established company.  And you have to persuade investors and other people that provide the resources that this is a real opportunity.  So entrepreneurs have to be able to convey a future vision of the world and then help people believe that vision of the world is possible.

A new Kickstarter project now allows you to explore the solar system with a personalized spacecraft. By contributing to the Pocket Spacecraft project, you're ensuring that the the creators will send your spacecraft — and thousands of others — to the moon.

The Pocket Spacecrafts are small, paper-thin discs, smaller than an average CD, which can be personalized by adding pictures and customizing the message it transmits.

The project lets you watch every step of the spacecraft's journey, from being built in the lab to getting loaded onto the Interplanetary CubeSat Mothership. (The CubeSat hitches a ride into space on a commercial rocket.)