Good Morning and welcome to a mid-week Innovation Trail Mix from your upstate reporting team.
The Cuomo administration is continuing to do its incremental policy development on fracking and it's not a united front on the subject amongst elected officials on the Southern Tier.
Middle-skill jobs grew slowly across the nation last year, except in upstate New York.
The sun still came up, despite the fact that the Farm Bill expired on the weekend.
A new study confirms the old friendship between immigration and innovation.
Environment
21 universities and non-profits will receive federal funding from the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative aimed at addressing the damage to ecosystems caused by shipping traffic introduced into the lake system in the late 1950's reports The Post-Standard.
The Innovation Trail's Marie Cusick reported on the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) set up to monitor the progress of invasive species mitigation. You can view her report here.
And in Lake Champlain, there's a program to combat the aggressive sea lamprey (visualize the face-huggers from ALIEN), a species that can quickly decimate local fish populations reports Sarah Harris for North Country Public Radio and the Innovation Trail.
North Country Public Radio has been tracking the invasive species story for a long time and here is a link to a selection of their reports.
Jobs
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has crunched some numbers from the U.S. Census and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and found an increasing salary gulf between the highest and lowest paid overall, and very little growth in Upstate middle-skill jobs. As reported by the Innovation Trail and equities.com.
Government
Governor Cuomo says the health impact study on fracking will be able to withstand the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, reports our Capital Bureau correspondent Karen DeWitt.
Which is just as well, since there is a major legal conference on hydrofracking in Manhattan today, and the Innovation Trail's Matt Richmond is there.
The 2008 Farm Bill quietly expired at midnight last Sunday...standby to pay twice as much for your milk says Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), (Bloomberg) and the very well-informed David Sommerstein at North Country Public Radio makes sense of it for us.
The Innovation Trail's intrepid Ryan Delaney joined the governor for the tour of development sites around Syracuse yesterday. The governor will be coming to check out your town soon.
452 (and counting) elected public officials from 52 NY state counties have written to the governor requesting some facetime to chat about fracking.
A range of grants for biomedical research are being announced this morning by the Albany Medical Center, Rensselear Polytchnic and UAlbany this morning and the Innovation Trail's Marie Cusick will have more later in the day.
Business
Kodak's U.S. operations are burning through some cash reserves reports the Democrat and Chronicle.
A new study called "America's New Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Then and Now," concludes that nearly 25% of engineering and technology startups have a U.S. immigrant in a key role. (news.yahoo.com)
Energy
If your state appears gray, a minimum of 85% of you natural gas supply is dependent on the interstate pipeline network, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
