The Editor’s Blog

Free trade agreements help the United States hold its lead as a top destination for foreign direct investment.

The Dallas-Ft. Worth metro area has become a leading U.S. hub for data centers.

Should burning trees to generate electricity be classified as carbon-neutral?

The future of television may depend on whether the FCC decides to end the cable TV industry's monopoly over set-top boxes.

The largest—and arguably the most critical—infrastructure project in the nation has been put on hold for another 10 years.

The finalists in DOT's Smart City Challenge want to replace gridlock with cloud-based traffic management.

The first White House Water Summit aims to mobilize a national effort to conserve and expand our water resources.

An army of robots and an ice wall are being deployed to clean up the world's worst nuclear disaster.

New York City unveils its new $4-billion train station for the World Trade Center.

Droves of high-tech startups are putting down roots in the Great Plains.

Apple and Google vow to defend our privacy even if it kills us.

The deployment of industrial robots is expected to double over the next three years.

In Greater San Marcos, TX, higher education resources and entrepreneurs join forces to bring innovations to market at the third annual Innovation Summit.

Nine states and Washington D.C. lead the pack in electricity grid modernization. Navagant Research forecasts that the global Smart Grid as a Service (SGaaS) market, estimated at $1.7 billion in 2014, will grow to $11 billion in 2023.

Development of oil and gas fields, the use of the Northern Sea Route as the shortest cargo transit route between Europe and Asia and the development of industrial, transport and tourist infrastructure.

The world's most expensive stadium will anchor a new 300-acre, $2.6-billion entertainment district in L.A.

The New Jersey Economic Development Authority (NJEDA) has found a novel way of expanding this toolset: NJEDA has made a series of "limited partnership" investments in an NJ-based private venture-capital fund that targets growth-stage tech businesses. The NJEDA is investing more than $40 million in venture capital funds, leveraging investment in NJ businesses to more than $2.5 billion.

When the project was announced nearly 10 years ago, the new-and-improved 77-kilometer waterway through the narrow Isthmus that connects North and South America was expected to reopen for business in time for the 100th anniversary of the Canal in 2014. But the daunting engineering challenge of building a third set of new locks—and a toxic combination of legal and labor issues—rendered that deadline unrealistic almost from the get-go.

Step aside, Monmouth and Quinnipiac: BF's got the odds-on favorites for next year's headlines.

Dow and DuPont have apparently agreed that they would be in a stronger position as a merged company with powerful synergies to successfully navigate an eventual breakup into more specialized units. The tentative deal also may signify the next step in the evolution of the global plastics industry, a shift in focus to specialty and advanced engineered plastics from oil-based petrochemical mainstays like polyethylene. Both companies have realized the need to get bigger before they can get smaller.

Proposition 6 created an initial SWIFT fund of $2 billion, which the TWBD expects to leverage into a total of $27 billion in financing over the next 50 years to implement the state water plan, with about half of that coming from state financial assistance. State officials said TWDB was able to approve a large number of projects in the first round because a majority of entities applying for funds requested long-term financing, which enabled the board to stretch the available funds. TWBD allocates funding for water projects based on a ranking system it developed that takes into account the length of time it will take to implement a project and the overall long-term improvement the project represents. For example, a seawater desalination plant proposed by the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority received seed funds from TWDB even though it will take much longer to build than other, higher-priority projects. TWDB must by law spend up to 20 percent of Prop 6 funds in the next five years on water conservation or re-use projects.

Driverless cars are being welcomed where you might not expect them.

The VA appears to have mismanaged the health records of nearly a million veterans; about 900,000 veterans are still waiting to get on the VA's backlog for health services; and—brace yourself—as many as 300,000 veterans may have died awaiting access to health services they were promised but never received.

Organizations in Pittsburgh, Detroit, northern Michigan, St. Louis, Alaska, Wisconsin and Nevada, have embraced business idea competitions; rewarding dozens of new ventures with grants ranging from $5,000 to $50,000. The 43North competition, said to be the largest such prize pool in the nation, offers $5 million in prize money to entrepreneurs who agree to move to (or retain their start-ups in) the city.

Geoengineering will be a growth sector in the age of climate change. The latest global warming "miracle cure" for the big CO2 problem is a new technology said to be able to extract carbon from the air and condense it into fibers that could be used as building materials or to produce components for electronics, cars, clothing and other manufactured goods.

In Auburn, NY, the hot political issue is economic development. Both candidates emphasized job creation with a youthful population base. Lattimore pushed for large-scale manufacturing plants and renewable energy projects to the Auburn area.

The number of incidents involving hacking into key infrastructure has tripled in the past two years. Most of these cyber-intrusions appear to be exploratory in nature, but a few have crossed the line and caused physical damage.

A bricks-and-mortar SimCity is set to rise near Las Cruces, NM.

Block Island, RI is poised to win the race to set up the first offshore wind farm in U.S. waters.

Researchers at West Virginia University blew the whistle on Volkswagen’s dirty diesel two years ago.

Sports gambling still is illegal outside of Vegas, or is that just a fantasy?

The most logical place in the world for solar power can’t get its act together.

China’s largest rail manufacturer will build subway cars for Boston at a new plant in Springfield, MA.

Economic development cooperation on the U.S.-Mexico border is getting stronger.