This week: possible investment suggestions from venture capitalists at Andreessen Horowitz, how to keep yourself from wasting time on the Internet, self-lighting sidewalks, and getting a sense of how big things are.

Where the millionaires are putting their money

Andreessen Horowitz is one of the most successful venture capital firms around. The fund invested in Skype (sold to Microsoft for $8.5 billion) and Oculus VR (sold to Facebook for $2 billion), and Instagram (sold to Facebook for $1 billion). They’ve got money in Facebook and Twitter, in Buzzfeed and Soylent).

So when the team of smart people there talk about the “things we’ve been observing or thinking about” it’s a good idea to take note. In a recent blog post, they write about 16 things, including:

• virtual reality: entertainment becomes an experience
• digital health: technology anchors our diagnostic systems, and will be helpful for our health history, too
• online video: there’s much more than YouTube yet to come
• Internet of things: could planned obsolescence be changed by connected devices?
• Bitcoin: “as different from the wire transfer system as the modern Internet is from phone lines”

Stop wasting time falling down Internet rabbit holes

A new survey of 3,000 Canadians found that 63 percent admitted to being distracted from work tasks by email, browsing, and social media use; 33 percent of those people said they lost an hour a day.

More than half of those asked said that they believe checking emails and social media instead of completing work tasks “revealed a worrying lack of impulse control” according to a release about the survey.

The research was commissioned by Stop Procrastinating, software which aims to help people who may be lacking willpower. Available for Mac and Windows operating systems, it blocks your access to the Internet and other online services for as long as you want it to.

The app can also be used by parents who want to monitor their kids’ access.

Solar-powered sidewalks

A company in the United Kingdom has come up with a material they can spray onto sidewalks and pathways that absorbs light from the sun, and then emits that energy at night. The starpaths provide enough illumination that other lighting solutions – like the common overhead lights – aren’t necessary.

Which means that being outside at night is more pleasurable, and cuts down on the light pollution. And the coating that’s used is also able to prolong the life of pathways that might otherwise need replacing.

And if you think we need to light up our public outdoor spaces for safety reasons, that’s just not true.

How big is the universe?

In January, NASA released a high-definition, panoramic picture of the Andromeda galaxy, which is just next door to our own Milky Way galaxy.

The image was composited from 7,398 exposures taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, and to view the entire image you’d need an array of more than 600 HD television screens. You can get a sense of the fine detail Hubble was able to capture using the zoom tool.

Or watch this video created by daveachuk that does the zooming in for you.