NASA has announced the selection of 300 small business proposals eligible to begin negotiations for contract awards through the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs.

The SBIR and STTR programs encourage small businesses and research institutions to develop new technologies, and promote the development of new commercial products and services.

Conventional wisdom says that exercise is a key to weight loss — a no-brainer. But now, Tel Aviv University researchers are revealing that life as a couch potato, stretched out in front of the TV, can actually be “active inactivity” — and cause you to pack on the pounds.

Such inactivity actually encourages the body to create new fat in fat cells, says Prof. Amit Gefen of TAU’s Department of Biomedical Engineering. Along with his Ph.D. student Naama Shoham, Prof. Gefen has shown that preadipocyte cells — the precursors to fat cells — turn into fat cells faster and produce even more fat when subject to prolonged periods of “mechanical stretching loads” — the kind of weight we put on our body tissues when we sit or lie down.

University research parks, innovation leaders and companies were recognized for excellence in innovation by the Association of University Research Parks (AURP) at the 2011 International Conference in New Orleans. AURP presented their 2011 Annual Awards of Excellence naming the Research Park at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign the 2011 Outstanding Research Park. The awards were presented at the AURP 2011 International Conference in New Orleans, December 1st.

The 16th Annual AURP Awards of Excellence recognize the achievements of outstanding research parks and industry veterans and encourages the development of best practices among research and science parks.

Thanks to the efficiency boost provided by cloud computing’s debut about five years ago, web applications can now launch on almost a shoestring budget. That’s why there are so many new web companies that deal in things such as photo sharing, daily deals websites, travel planning and the like. The truth is, it’s easier than ever to put together a web or mobile app and call yourself a startup.

But there are a few recent developments that, taken together, are creating an even more powerful efficiency boost: one that puts resources that were once limited to well-funded corporations and research universities within the reach of a new generation of startup founders. Perhaps it’s time entrepreneurs took advantage of this new environment to solve larger problems, instead of building yet another lifestyle app.

The U.S. Senate expects to approve, by week’s end, an eight-year reauthorization of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. It would end a three-year stalemate over its funding. But it is not known if the House of Representatives will follow suit and pass it or continue to press for its own version.

By a voice vote, Senators on Tuesday approved tacking the SBIR reauthorization Senate Amendment 1115 to the $662 billion National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2012 (S. 1867), which authorizes defense spending priorities for the fiscal year that began October 1. The bill is expected to pass the full Senate by Friday before advancing to the House, which for months has considered its own SBIR reauthorization measure, with different language from the Senate’s version.

Word was that Alexander the Great valued learning so much that he told his biographers that he was more indebted to Aristotle for providing him with knowledge than he was to his own father and mother for gifting him with life.

Today’s startup business owners place a high value on learning, too.

A new study from IMD, a high-profile business school based in Lausanne, Switzerland, looked at prospective (or “aspiring” as study researchers put it) entrepreneurs and asked them a simple question: What do you really want as you start out as a startup business owner?

For years there has been a pervasive opinion across the entrepreneurial landscape that the US has a shortage of capital required to startup and grow new ventures.  It is suggested that companies cannot find the cash necessary to start new and exciting ventures. During this economic downturn, we’ve heard a crescendo of voices lamenting the lack of startup funding, as communities finally recognize that new companies are the key source of job creation in this country.  But, what evidence do we have of this shortage of capital?

State officials plan to invest nearly $30 million to nurture young Tennessee businesses, but not all entrepreneurs need apply.

Startups in certain areas, such as real estate development, construction and most retail shops, would be excluded from the state’s new co-investment fund under draft guidelines issued earlier this week.

Officials say the proposed exclusions and other limitations for the INCITE (innovation, commercialization, investment, technology and entrepreneurship) fund largely stem from the federal government, the source of the $29.7 million.

Everyone today is a reporter and a content creator. If you have a smartphone with a camera and video, you can catch an event happening and upload it to social media, Youtube or a media outlet and in 24 hours generate hundreds, thousands or a million-plus views!

Blogs, blogging and bloggers  have quickly become a “must” new media activity for any professional or company that wants to establish credibility or brand leadership in their industry. They are also a serious way to get coverage for your products and services. Content is king, especially for brand and branding promotion.

Consider some of these current statistics about blogging from Technorati that substantiate the importance, advancement and impact blogs, blogging and bloggers have today.

71 percent of bloggers only write about brands they think are reputable. 42 percent of bloggers say they blog about brands they love (or hate). Although just 2 percent of bloggers are “Mommy bloggers,” these bloggers get 500 pitches a day, and focus on writing about brands.

Never mind the worldwide economic crisis. Forget about the batch of newly public tech companies now trading below their IPO prices. Oh, and pay no mind to the shrinking pool of venture firms able to invest in start-ups.

Miso is one of several start-ups that enables viewers to interact with others while watching a program. According to venture capitalists speaking at the Appnation III: Show Me The Money conference in San Francisco Wednesday, there’s never been a better time to start a tech company, or fund one. Especially if it’s improving the TV viewing experience.

Google Ventures Partner Joe Kraus said TV was a top area of innovation in the next few years.

This week I was lucky enough collect an award at Red Magazine's Hot Women Awards 2011, which celebrates successful women in industry. What made the experience all the more rewarding was being able to spend some time with a group of women at the top of their fields. We even got to shake hands with Sam Cam.

I was particularly pleased to chat to two women who are leading the charge for female technology innovators everywhere: Cary Marsh, who founded MyDeo, and Kate Burns, the outgoing Senior Vice-President of AOL Europe and former head of Google U.K. Both are smart, impressive women who have trail-blazed their way to the very top of the tech industry and should serve as inspiration to all aspiring Lady Geeks out there.

Many of our nation’s first political leaders were also leading scientists in their day, conducting research, founding academies of scientific learning, and inventing new methods and technologies, some of which are still in use today.

Each Monday for the next three weeks we’ll be looking at a different founding father and asking, what might he have to say about the big science questions in politics today? To get us started we ask “what would Thomas Jefferson do,” or WWTJD, about climate, vaccines, and evolution?

Next week, George Washington and natural gas fracking.

“People under 35 are the people who make change happen,” said venture capitalist Vinod Khosla in November, “People over 45 basically die in terms of new ideas.”

Khosla, who believes that old entrepreneurs can’t innovate because they keep “falling back on old habits,” said this at the NASSCOM Product Enclave in Bangalore, on Nov. 9.He isn’t alone in his views.

Silicon Valley VCs talk openly about their bias toward young entrepreneurs. Some argue that Internet entrepreneurs peak at the age of 25.

Khosla and those who think like him are wrong.

“Now is not the time!” Have you ever been given that line? Even better, did you know that the classical concept of “now” that we all live by was forever destroyed by Einstein in 1905? That’s right! Two events that are simultaneous or occur at the same time in your personal reference frame occur at different times for someone who is speeding by you in their car. Wow! Talk about getting a person to church on time as famously crooned and celebrated in My Fair Lady. Obviously, the incremental difference in “now” is so tiny that we don’t notice it – unless, of course, you’ve purchased for a Christmas present the latest in a near “light speed” automobile.

The two newest public university campuses in Arizona -- Northern Arizona University’s campus in Prescott Valley, which is in its second year of operation, and Arizona State University’s Lake Havasu campus, slated to open in fall 2012 -- will be testing grounds for some fairly innovative concepts.

Tuition at both is significantly lower than at the universities’ main campuses. Administrators have pledged to try alternative delivery methods designed to cut down on costs. Both institutions have partnered with local community colleges to teach some classes. And both hope to offer accelerated degree programs.

But the most innovative feature might be one that students never see: how the universities are funded. Unlike other public campuses, neither is receiving direct funding from the state, and both received significant indirect investment from municipal governments and local residents. Whereas the main campuses fund about a quarter of their operations through state appropriations, a percentage that has decreased significantly since 2008, the branch campuses will try to be self-sufficient, operating mostly on tuition revenue, with only some administrative expenses being shared with the main campuses.

U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu was gave a talk at MIT today on "Winning the Clean Energy Race," and I got a chance afterward to ask him about the future of the ARPA-E program, which was created in 2009 to supply grants to "transformational energy research" at universities and start-up companies. Modeled after DARPA, the arm of the Pentagon that helped develop the predecessor to the Internet, ARPA-E is the "Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy." The program has funded fuel cell research at Harvard, wind turbine development at FloDesign in Wilbraham, and new solar cell production approaches at 1366 Technologies in Lexington, among others.

Most people have a pretty good idea of what it means to eat healthy foods, but few manage to do it. A new app called the Eatery aims to change that by having users rate one another's meals and providing slick data visualizations of a person's habits over time.

The app's users have rated more than two million meals so far. When overlaid on maps, this data reveals patterns in healthy eating in cities like New York and San Francisco.

It has been a long time since anyone considered Xerox an innovation powerhouse. On the contrary, Xerox typically serves as a cautionary tale of opportunity lost: many obituaries of Steve Jobs described how a fateful visit by Jobs to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in 1979 inspired many of the breakthroughs that Apple built into its Macintosh computer. Back then, Xerox dominated the photocopier market and was understandably focused on improving and sustaining its high-margin products. The company's Connecticut headquarters became the place where inventions in its Silicon Valley lab went to die. Inevitably, simpler and cheaper copiers from Canon and other rivals cut down Xerox in its core market. It is a classic story of the "innovator's dilemma." Xerox struggled to defend against threats at the low end of its business, failed to create growth in new markets, and found itself on the brink of irrelevance, if not extinction.

Tinkerers like Edison and the lesser known scientist & inventor Joseph Priestly - the first man to isolate oxygen - understood the value of attempts. One of Edison's more famous quotes, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." sums up his conviction that experimentation and perseverance are paramount to innovative success. In Priestly's day - around the time of the American Revolution - coffee houses supplied the patrons with both the chemical (caffeine) & intellectual (collaborative minds) enhancements allowing for ideas to be spread, repurposed and brought to market, thus creating real world value. Today, caffeine is still rampant and obviously more accessible than ever, but it's the other, the access to challenges, the ability to collaborate and iterate with thousands of participants via virtual communities that has of course been the phenomenal game-changer. Edison and Priestly understood that experimentation, and therefore the acceptance of failure in order to succeed, was part of the creative process. Today, global corporations and government agencies also understand this need to experiment, the need to attempt the "never been tried" and they are turning to Open Innovation Platforms such as Innocentive and TopCoder to take their innovative swings.

As 2011 draws to a close, what are the biggest challenges small business owners are facing? And what is their outlook for the coming year? A new survey conducted by online survey company Zoomerang Online Surveys and Polls and my company, GrowBiz Media, creates a mixed picture.

Overall, the survey found SMBs in a “holding pattern,” with many seeing little growth this year and planning few changes for the next. However, there’s also some positive news: “Many small businesses are optimistic about 2012 despite economic challenges in 2011,” says Alex Terry, general manager at Zoomerang Online Surveys and Polls.