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Maryland has a future in being the perennial powerhouse in cyber security but it’s lacking something that will help the state’s industry take off like a rocket — and that’s depth.

In Friday’s print edition cover story I wrote about how colleges and universities are scrambling to change curriculum to prepare more students for success in the cyber world post graduation. Industry executives have lamented that colleges aren’t doing enough to prepare students to fill vacant positions — more than 10,000 across Maryland in 2013, according to career services firm Burning Glass.

Baltimore-area companies took home 12 percent of the money venture firms invested in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C., region in the second quarter.

Greater Baltimore companies raised a total of $29.5 million in venture capital during the period, according to a MoneyTree Report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association. Venture capitalists invested a total of $247.3 million in 58 companies in Baltimore and D.C. during the quarter.

Stanford University scientists say they have developed a new test for type 1 diabetes that will cost a fraction of the current price and could speed up diagnosis from days to hours. That could be useful anywhere, but especially in poorer countries where many people with diabetes go undiagnosed or misdiagnosed because the existing tests are too expensive to be widely offered.

In current tests, blood samples are sent to a lab, where radioactive materials are used to detect the cause of the disease: a so-called auto-antibody that attacks the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. This test is labor-intensive and costs hundreds of dollars.

Venture investors in Silicon Valley are frequent prey of startup founders who spot them in public places — and semi-public places — and start pitching. Last night, a discussion about awkward pitches led four VCs on a panel for the Silicon Valley Business Journal’s annual Pitch event to tell tales from the mens room.

The consensus? There’s no good way to do it.

Promising news for any unlucky american in immediate need of a doctor: BetterDoctor, the San Francisco based healthcare tool and online doctor search service, has closed a $10 million Series A funding round led by New Enterprise Associates and participated by existing investors including SoftTechVC and Finnish venture capital firm Lifeline Ventures.

The fund will be used to further develop the existing service, hire new employees and spread the service’s web and mobile applications to new platforms.

While the University of Virginia and Johns Hopkins can’t exactly compete with Ivy League Harvard when it comes to dominating the ranking of college rankings, the two D.C. area schools were ranked among the top 50 universities in the world by the Center for World University Rankings. Crushing other top-tier institutions like Dartmouth, Brown and McGill, the local academic titans nourishing the minds of students across the globe substantiated themselves as schools worth attending during a time of loan shark annihilation.

Qiagen N.V,, the leading global provider of sample & assay technologies that are used to transform biological materials into valuable molecular information, has launched 14 new GeneRead DNAseq V2 gene panels targeting an extensive range of cancer-related genes or gene regions. Gene panels are an integral part of many next-generation sequencing (NGS) workflows. They are used to enrich genes of interest in a sample prior to sequencing runs and as such can be seen as the core assay in the workflow.

Qiagen’s new GeneRead panels are customisable to include other genes or gene regions of clinical or biological interest and are compatible with any NGS sequencer. They are part of Qiagen’s industry-leading sample-to-library workflows, which are helping to drive the growing use of NGS in clinical applications.

President of the University of Maryland-Baltimore County since 1992, Freeman A. Hrabowski III thinks he knows what students need: lots of support. Morally, colleges owe it to students to do everything possible to help them succeed, he said in a recent visit to The Chronicle, and a higher retention rate means more tuition dollars, too.

The two-year anniversary of the monumental Supreme Court decision upholding the Affordable Care Act may not have caused much fanfare, but Steve Kraus, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, said Massachusetts should be celebrating.

Here are four takeaways from a conversation with the head of the firm’s health care investing, as he analyzes the shifts that have occurred in the two years since the Affordable Care Act was deemed constitutional.

Many medical researchers with ideas not tied to a drug backed by the pharmaceutical industry often find themselves without funding; patients with diseases or other medical conditions, particularly those that are rare, are without much power. That is, until recently.

Now, scientists are turning to crowdfunding to launch their research. Donors won’t get a free CD, T-shirt or other giveaway like they do on Kickstarter. But what fundraisers give in return is hope for a treatment and at least insight into medical conditions.