jueves, 30 de junio de 2016

More than 100 Nobel laureates are calling on Greenpeace to end its anti-GMO campaign

Rice field in the Philippines. No Golden Rice here (yet).(Shutterstock)
This week, 109 Nobel laureates signed onto a sharply worded letter to Greenpeace urging the environmental group to rethink its longstanding opposition to genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The writers argue that the anti-GMO campaign is scientifically baseless and potentially harmful to poor people in the developing world.

Joel Achenbach broke the news in the Washington Post, and you can read the full letter here. The signatories include past winners of the Nobel Prize in medicine, chemistry, physics, and economics.

Nobel laureates to Greenpeace: Your anti-GMO campaign has to end
The letter notes that scientific assessments have repeatedly found GM foods are just as safe to eat as conventional foods and don’t pose an inherent risk to the environment (though, like any technology, they can be misused). Greenpeace, it argues, is on the wrong side here:
We urge Greenpeace and its supporters to re-examine the experience of farmers and consumers worldwide with crops and foods improved through biotechnology, recognize the findings of authoritative scientific bodies and regulatory agencies, and abandon their campaign against "GMOs" in general and Golden Rice in particular.

Scientific and regulatory agencies around the world have repeatedly and consistently found crops and foods improved through biotechnology to be as safe as, if not safer than those derived from any other method of production. There has never been a single confirmed case of a negative health outcome for humans or animals from their consumption. Their environmental impacts have been shown repeatedly to be less damaging to the environment, and a boon to global biodiversity.
The laureates also take Greenpeace to task for seeking to block Golden Rice, a strain of not-yet-approved rice that has been genetically enhanced to produce beta carotene — which, its creators hope, might one day alleviate the Vitamin A deficiency that’s causing widespread death and blindness in the developing world:
Greenpeace has spearheaded opposition to Golden Rice, which has the potential to reduce or eliminate much of the death and disease caused by a vitamin A deficiency (VAD), which has the greatest impact on the poorest people in Africa and Southeast Asia. ...

WE CALL UPON GREENPEACE to cease and desist in its campaign against Golden Rice specifically, and crops and foods improved through biotechnology in general;

Now, Greenpeace is far from the only reason Golden Rice has struggled to get regulatory approval — the crop also faces very serious technical challenges. Greenpeace isn’t even the only group seeking to block it. But they’re certainly a high-profile face of GMO opposition, so the laureates are focusing on them.

In a posted response, Greenpeace denied that they were the main reason Golden Rice has failed to come to market, but still showed no sign of ending their broader anti-GMO campaign. We'll get to that, but I do want to elaborate on a few issues the letter raises.

Greenpeace accepts climate science. So why do they dismiss GMO science?
(MICHAEL KAPPELER/AFP/Getty Images)A picture taken on May 3, 2005, shows Greenpeace activists flying a kite displaying a giant corn cob on a field in Seelow, Eastern Germany, to protest against the cultivation of genetically modified maize.

Let’s start off by noting that GMOs will never be a purely scientific issue. Like every policy matter on the planet, the question of how best to incorporate biotechnology into agriculture involves value judgments about what an ideal food system might look like, how to weigh the risks against the benefits, and so on.

But those positions can at least be informed by scientific understanding. To take a different example, on climate change, Greenpeace tends to take very seriously what scientists are telling them. Their website refers frequently to the scientific consensus that the world is getting warmer and humans are the cause.

By contrast, Greenpeace’s public statements on GMOs tend to be startlingly unscientific. On their website, they refer to transgenic crops as "genetic pollution." This is absurd. When scientists create transgenic crops, they frequently use Agrobacterium to transfer genes from one plant or organism to another. But nature does this too: Scientists recently discovered that on two separate occasions in history, Agrobacterium transferred bacterial DNA into the sweet potatoes we now eat. Are sweet potatoes also "polluted"? Because it's the same thing.

In fact, many crop scientists tend to see GMOs as sitting along a continuum. Humans have long used all sorts of tools to alter plant DNA and get crops with the traits we desire — this is a big reason farms can feed 7 billion people every year. For thousands of years, farmers interbred crops to alter their genes. Like so:
(James Kennedy)

In the 20th century, plant breeders began exposing crops to radiation or mutagenic chemicals to scramble their DNA and get new traits. Today, scientists use advanced techniques (like transferring genes or CRISPR) that allow even more precision. But it’s the same basic idea. Under the circumstances, it’s no surprise that GMOs don't appear to pose a special health risk. They’re just not fundamentally different.

Now, the vast majority of the public is unaware of this fact. Most people don’t spend much time thinking about how our food is created. (One of the lovely things about the modern age is that we don’t have to.) So, in the abstract, people tend to fall back on their intuitions: Tampering with the DNA of food seems inherently unnatural. Anything "unnatural" triggers disgust. Therefore, GMOs are bad.

Those intuitions are understandable. But they're unsupported by scientific evidence. And rather than seeking to correct those misapprehensions, as they do on climate change, Greenpeace has long sought to inflame those fears. Take this line from their website: "When we force life forms and our world's food supply to conform to human economic models rather than their natural ones, we do so at our own peril." (Never mind that we’ve been doing this since the dawn of civilization.)

The Nobel laureates are, in essence, telling them to knock it off.

Ultimately, the world will face staggering challenges around food and agriculture in the 21st century. The global population is expected to soar past 9 billion, and we’ll need to figure out how to feed everyone without razing too many forests for farmland. Farmers will have to handle the droughts and heat waves that will come with global warming. There are tricky issues around antibiotic overuse, nitrogen pollution, food distribution, and much more.

Genetic engineering certainly won’t solve all those problems. (It might not even solve most of them.) But it ispotentially a valuable tool for, say, breeding plants with higher drought tolerance or engineering foods that are more nutritious. See, for example, this important work on vitamin-fortified bananas in Africa. We should be thinking seriously about how to use these tools as a larger strategy for improving our food system — not sowing fears about "genetic pollution."

Greenpeace’s campaign against Golden Rice is incoherent — though the crop faces other serious challenges

(David Greedy/Getty Images)Plant Biotechnologist Dr. Swapan Datta inspects a genetically modified "Golden Rice" plant at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), November 27, 2003.
The Nobel laureate letter particularly criticizes Greenpeace’s opposition to Golden Rice — rice that’s being modified in an attempt to alleviate Vitamin A deficiency — and here it’s worth expanding a bit.

Last year in Slate, Will Saletan wrote a damning piece on how incoherent Greenpeace’s campaign against Golden Rice was. As research advanced, the group kept shifting its position. A sample:
In 2001, Benedikt Haerlin, Greenpeace’s anti-GMO coordinator, appeared with Potrykus at a press conference in France. Haerlin conceded that Golden Rice served "a good purpose" and posed "a moral challenge to our position." Greenpeace couldn’t dismiss the rice as poison. So it opposed the project on technical grounds: Golden Rice didn’t produce enough beta carotene. …

While critics tried to block the project, Potrykus and his colleagues worked to improve the rice. By 2003 they had developed plants with eight times as much beta carotene as the original version. In 2005 they unveiled a line that had 20 times as much beta carotene as the original. GMO critics could no longer dismiss Golden Rice as inadequate. So they reversed course. Now that the rice produced plenty of beta carotene, anti-GMO activists claimed that beta carotene and vitamin A were dangerous. …

In the Philippines, where Greenpeace was fighting to block field trials of Golden Rice, its hypocrisy was egregious. "It is irresponsible to impose GE 'Golden' rice on people if it goes against their religious beliefs, cultural heritage and sense of identity, or simply because they do not want it," Greenpeace declared. But just below that pronouncement, Greenpeace recommended "vitamin A supplementation and vitamin fortification of foods as successfully implemented in the Philippines." 

Under Philippine law, beta carotene and vitamin A had to be added to sugar, flour, and cooking oil prior to distribution. The government administered capsules to preschoolers twice a year, and to some pregnant women for 28 consecutive days. If Greenpeace seriously believed that retinoids caused birth defects and should be a matter of personal choice, it would never have endorsed these programs.
It goes on and on like this. Greenpeace has simply dismissed scientific reviews showing that Golden Rice does not pose a threat to human health or the environment. Instead, it continues to file petitions to block all field trials and feeding studies in places like the Philippines.

Now, to repeat what I said above: Greenpeace and other anti-GMO groups aren’t the only obstacle to getting Golden Rice into farmers’ fields. It is fundamentally hard to create a high-yielding strain of rice that consistently produces higher levels of beta carotene. Even after 24 years of testing, researchers still haven’t been able to get Golden Rice to work perfectly in field trials. And they might be struggling even if Greenpeace had given them a pass all along.

In a reply to the Nobel laureates' letter, Greenpeace insisted as much: "Accusations that anyone is blocking genetically engineered ‘Golden’ rice are false," said Wilhelmina Pelegrina, Campaigner at Greenpeace Southeast Asia "‘Golden’ rice has failed as a solution and isn’t currently available for sale, even after more than 20 years of research."

True. But rather irrelevant. It is also fundamentally hard to create a Zika vaccine. It would nonetheless be misguided for me to wage a campaign against researchers working on the project or file a petition to stop trials without any good evidence that it was a risk — even if my protests weren’t the main hold-up.

On a final note, I do think Greenpeace does enormously vital work around the world. They played a crucial role in pressuring soy and beef companies in Brazil to reduce deforestation of the Amazon. Their efforts in China to pare back unnecessary coal-burning plants are one of the most consequential climate campaigns going.

But on GMOs, they are very much in the wrong. Let's hope this letter prods them to reflect and reconsider.
Go deeper:

ORIGINAL: Vox
June 30, 2016
Posted by Unknown at 16:23 0 comments
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domingo, 26 de junio de 2016

New Life Found That Lives Off Electricity

Scientists have figured out how microbes can suck energy from rocks. Such life-forms might be more widespread than anyone anticipated.

Yamini Jangir and Moh El-Naggar 

Scientists use carbon-fiber electrodes (gray) to lure electricity-eating microbes (orange). These microbes grow incredibly slowly, so attracting them can take time. Researchers left this electrode underground for five months.

Last year, biophysicist Moh El-Naggar and his graduate student Yamini Jangir plunged beneath South Dakota’s Black Hills into an old gold mine that is now more famous as a home to a dark matter detector. Unlike most scientists who make pilgrimages to the Black Hills these days, El-Naggar and Jangir weren’t there to hunt for subatomic particles. They came in search of life.

In the darkness found a mile underground, the pair traversed the mine’s network of passages in search of a rusty metal pipe. They siphoned some of the pipe’s ancient water, directed it into a vessel, and inserted a variety of electrodes. They hoped the current would lure their prey, a little-studied microbe that can live off pure electricity.

The electricity-eating microbes that the researchers were hunting for belong to a larger class of organisms that scientists are only beginning to understand. They inhabit largely uncharted worlds: 
  • the bubbling cauldrons of deep sea vents; 
  • mineral-rich veins deep beneath the planet’s surface; 
  • ocean sediments just a few inches below the deep seafloor. 
The microbes represent a segment of life that has been largely ignored, in part because their strange habitats make them incredibly difficult to grow in the lab.

Yet early surveys suggest a potential microbial bounty. A recent sampling of microbes collected from the seafloor near Catalina Island, off the coast of Southern California, uncovered a surprising variety of microbes that consume or shed electrons by eating or breathing minerals or metals. El-Naggar’s team is still analyzing their gold mine data, but he says that their initial results echo the Catalina findings. Thus far, whenever scientists search for these electron eaters in the right locations — places that have lots of minerals but not a lot of oxygen — they find them.

As the tally of electron eaters grows, scientists are beginning to figure out just how they work. How does a microbe consume electrons out of a piece of metal, or deposit them back into the environment when it is finished with them? A study published last year revealed the way that one of these microbes catches and consumes its electrical prey. And not-yet-published work suggests that some metal eaters transport electrons directly across their membranes — a feat once thought impossible.

The Rock Eaters
Though eating electricity seems bizarre, the flow of current is central to life. All organisms require a source of electrons to make and store energy. They must also be able to shed electrons once their job is done. In describing this bare-bones view of life, Nobel Prize-winning physiologist Albert Szent-Györgyi once said, “Life is nothing but an electron looking for a place to rest.”

Humans and many other organisms get electrons from food and expel them with our breath. The microbes that El-Naggar and others are trying to grow belong to a group called lithoautotrophs, or rock eaters, which harvest energy from inorganic substances such as iron, sulfur or manganese. Under the right conditions, they can survive solely on electricity.

The microbes’ apparent ability to ingest electrons — known as direct electron transfer — is particularly intriguing because it seems to defy the basic rules of biophysics. The fatty membranes that enclose cells act as an insulator, creating an electrically neutral zone once thought impossible for an electron to cross. “No one wanted to believe that a bacterium would take an electron from inside of the cell and move it to the outside,” said Kenneth Nealson, a geobiologist at the University of Southern California, in a lecture to the Society for Applied Microbiology in London last year.

Lucy Reading-Ikkanda for Quanta Magazine
In the 1980s, Nealson and others discovered a surprising group of bacteria that can expel electrons directly onto solid minerals. It took until 2006 to discover the molecular mechanism behind this feat: A trio of specialized proteins sits in the cell membrane, forming a conductive bridge that transfers electrons to the outside of cell. (Scientists still debate whether the electrons traverse the entire distance of the membrane unescorted.)

Inspired by the electron-donators, scientists began to wonder whether microbes could also do the reverse and directly ingest electrons as a source of energy. Researchers focused their search on a group of microbes called methanogens, which are known for making methane. Most methanogens aren’t strict metal eaters. But in 2009, Bruce Logan, an environmental engineer at Pennsylvania State University, and collaborators showed for the first time that a methanogen could survive using only energy from an electrode. The researchers proposed that the microbes were directly sucking up electrons, perhaps via a molecular bridge similar to the ones the electron-producers use to shuttle electrons across the cell wall. But they lacked direct proof.

Then last year, Alfred Spormann, a microbiologist at Stanford University, and collaborators poked a hole in Logan’s theory. They uncovered a way that these organisms can survive on electrodes without eating naked electrons.

The microbe Spormann studied, Methanococcus maripaludis, excretes an enzyme that sits on the electrode’s surface. The enzyme pairs an electron from the electrode with a proton from water to create a hydrogen atom, which is a well-established food source among methanogens. “Rather than having a conductive pathway, they use an enzyme,” said Daniel Bond, a microbiologist at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. “They don’t need to build a bridge out of conductive materials.”

Though the microbes aren’t eating naked electrons, the results are surprising in their own right. Most enzymes work best inside the cell and rapidly degrade outside. “What’s unique is how stable the enzymes are when they [gather on] the surface of the electrode,” Spormann said. Past experiments suggest these enzymes are active outside the cell for only a few hours, “but we showed they are active for six weeks.”

Spormann and others still believe that methanogens and other microbes can directly suck up electricity, however. “This is an alternative mechanism to direct electron transfer, it doesn’t mean direct electron transfer can’t exist,” said Largus Angenent, an environmental engineer at Cornell University, and president of the International Society for Microbial Electrochemistry and Technology. Spormann said his team has already found a microbe capable of taking in naked electrons. But they haven’t yet published the details.

Microbes on Mars
Only a tiny fraction — perhaps 2 percent — of all the planet’s microorganisms can be grown in the lab. Scientists hope that these new approaches — growing microbes on electrodes rather than in traditional culture systems — will provide a way to study many of the microbes that have been so far impossible to cultivate.

“Using electrodes as proxies for minerals has helped us open and expand this field,” said Annette Rowe, a postdoctoral researcher at USC working with El-Naggar. “Now we have a way to grow the bacteria and monitor their respiration and really have a look at their physiology.”

Rowe has already had some success.
In 2013, she went on a microbe prospecting trip to the iron-rich sediments that surround California’s Catalina Island. She identified at least 30 new varieties of electric microbes in a study published last year. “They are from very diverse groups of microbes that are quite common in marine systems,” Rowe said. Before her experiment, no one knew these microbes could take up electrons from an inorganic substrate, she said. “That’s something we weren’t expecting.”

Just as fishermen use different lures to attract different fish, Rowe set the electrodes to different voltages to draw out a rich diversity of microbes. She knew when she had a catch because the current changed — metal eaters generate a negative current, as the microbes suck electrons from the negative electrode.
Connie A. Walter and Matt Kapust
Yamini Jangir, then a graduate student in Moh El-Naggar’s lab at the University of Southern California, collects water from a pipe at the Sanford Underground Research Facility nearly a mile underground.

The different varieties of bacteria that Rowe collected thrive under different electrical conditions, suggesting they employ different strategies for eating electrons. “Each bacteria had a different energy level where electron uptake would happen,” Rowe said. “We think that is indicative of different pathways.”

Rowe is now searching new environments for additional microbes, focusing on fluids from a deep spring with low acidity. She’s also helping with El-Naggar’s gold mine expedition. “We are trying to understand how life works under these conditions,” said El-Naggar. “We now know that life goes far deeper than we thought, and there’s a lot more than we thought, but we don’t have a good idea for how they are surviving.”

El-Naggar emphasizes that the field is still in its infancy, likening the current state to the early days of neuroscience, when researchers poked at frogs with electrodes to make their muscles twitch. “It took a long time for the basic mechanistic stuff to come out,” he said. “It’s only been 30 years since we discovered that microbes can interact with solid surfaces.”

Given the bounty from these early experiments, it seems that scientists have only scratched the surface of the microbial diversity that thrives beneath the planet’s shallow exterior. The results could give clues to the origins of life on Earth and beyond. One theory for the emergence of life suggests it originated on mineral surfaces, which could have concentrated biological molecules and catalyzed reactions. New research could fill in one of the theory’s gaps — a mechanism for transporting electrons from mineral surfaces into cells.

Moreover, subsurface metal eaters may provide a blueprint for life on other worlds, where alien microbes might be hidden beneath the planet’s shallow exterior. “For me, one of the most exciting possibilities is finding life-forms that might survive in extreme environments like Mars,” said El-Naggar, whose gold mine experiment is funded by NASA’s Astrobiology Institute. Mars, for example, is iron-rich and has water flowing beneath its surface. “If you have a system that can pick up electrons from iron and have some water, then you have all the ingredients for a conceivable metabolism,” said El-Naggar. Perhaps a former mine a mile underneath South Dakota won’t be the most surprising place that researchers find electron-eating life.

ORIGINAL: Quanta Magazine
June 21, 2016
Posted by Unknown at 14:24 0 comments
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viernes, 24 de junio de 2016

How Brexit will impact the science and technology industry

Policy, regulation, trade, and science funding will all be hit by the UK's decision to leave the EU

Credit Getty Images / Saeed Khan 
The United Kingdom has voted to leave the European Union.
Prime minister David Cameron has stated his intention to step-down from the role in three months, but said Article 50, which would legally invoke leaving Europe, would not be enacted immediately.

The responsibility for invoking the Article will fall with the new prime minister and it is expected that negotiations on the exact terms of the UK leaving will take two years. The vote has prompted stock market declines around the world and a drop in the value of Sterling as investors react to the position of the UK.

Many in the science and technology community predicted that a vote to leave would have a significant impact on the industries. This is how they have responded to the result.

Startups and technology industry
None of the UK's private companies valued at more than $1 billion supported leaving the EU, The Guardian report in May. The 14 unicorns, of which five explicitly said they would be supporting remain, were concerned that leaving the Union would affect trade and business.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) said the UK leaving the EU "could do severe regional and global damage" to trade relationships.

TechUK, a trade body representing more than 900 UK companies in the technology sector, has responded to the vote saying that it "opens up many uncertainties about the future". The group said it had starting to plan how it should respond to policy and regulatory changes that will be caused by leaving the EU.

"Tech companies will need to come together and speak with one voice to ensure their needs are understood and acted upon," TechUK said in a statement.

Whether the UK is able to stay in the single market will be a key point that will impact businesses. London Mayor Sadiq Khan has said he will push for the country to stay within the trading agreement as part of the forthcoming negotiations between EU and the UK.

Science funding
Academic researchers at UK universities benefit from European Union funded grants. Approximately 18.3 per cent of the UK's funding from the EU goes to scientific research and development, a House of Lords committee has said. A reduction on this funding would have a significant impact on UK universities.

Following the referendum result, Dame Julia Goodfellow, the president of Universities UK – a collection 133 universities – said the body would look to "secure opportunities" for students and researchers to be able to access "vital pan-European programmes".

"Our first priority will be to convince the UK government to takes steps to ensure that staff and students from EU countries can continue to work and study at British universities," Goodfellow said in a statement.
Universities UK statement on the outcome of the EU referendum
24 June 2016
Source. Universities UK
Dame Julia Goodfellow, President of Universities UK said:

'Leaving the EU will create significant challenges for universities. Although this is not an outcome that we wished or campaigned for, we respect the decision of the UK electorate. We should remember that leaving the EU will not happen overnight – there will be a gradual exit process with significant opportunities to seek assurances and influence future policy.

'Throughout the transition period our focus will be on securing support that allows our universities to continue to be global in their outlook, internationally networked and an attractive destination for talented people from across Europe. These features are central to ensuring that British universities continue to be the best in the world.

'Our first priority will be to convince the UK Government to take steps to ensure that staff and students from EU countries can continue to work and study at British universities in the long term, and to promote the UK as a welcoming destination for the brightest and best minds. They make a powerful contribution to university research and teaching and have a positive impact on the British economy and society. We will also prioritise securing opportunities for our researchers and students to access vital pan-European programmes and build new global networks.

Notes
Universities UK is the representative organisation for the UK's universities. Founded in 1918, its mission is to be the definitive voice for all universities in the UK, providing high quality leadership and support to its members to promote a successful and diverse higher education sector. With 133 members and offices in London, Cardiff (Universities Wales) and Edinburgh (Universities Scotland), it promotes the strength and success of UK universities nationally and internationally. Visit: www.universitiesuk.ac.uk

Policy and regulation
Many UK laws and regulations are derived from EU legislation. The UK's position in relation to these will be negotiated once Article 50 has been invoked.

The Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment (IEMA), a membership body of environmentalists and those working in the industry said "environment and climate policy risked being watered down" as a result of Brexit.

"It is therefore essential that the government gives a commitment that, in negotiating the terms of the UK’s exit from the EU, an equivalent or enhanced level of environmental protection and climate policy will be implemented here in the UK," the group said in a statement.

Data protection is another EU-prescribed area. A new European Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was passed in April after more than four years of negotiation. The regulations, which will outline how citizen's data is processed, is set to be implemented across the EU in 2018.

ORIGINAL: Wired
Friday 24 June 2016 
Posted by Unknown at 12:08 0 comments
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jueves, 23 de junio de 2016

50 Smartest Companies 2016

50 Smartest Companies 2016. Credit: Illustration by Matthew Hollister
Our editors pick the 50 companies that best combine innovative technology with an effective business model.
Each year we identify 50 companies that are “smart” in the way they create new opportunities. Some of this year’s stars are large companies, like Amazon and Alphabet, that are using digital technologies to redefine industries. Others are wrestling with technological changes: companies like Microsoft, Bosch, Toyota, and Intel. Also on the list are ambitious startups like 23andMe, a pioneer in consumer-accessible DNA testing; 24M, a reinventor of battery technology; and Didi Chuxing, a four-year-old ride-hailing app that’s beating Uber in the Chinese market. Still, despite the excitement of recent advances in such fields as artificial intelligence and genomic medicine, technology has failed to energize the overall economy. In our opening essay, we explore why that is so and what needs to change.


1 Amazon
Headquarters: Seattle, Washington
Industry: Internet & Digital Media
Status: Public
Valuation: $337 billion
Last year we included Amazon on our list of the 50 Smartest Companies for incorporating robots into its fulfillment centers. This year the standout is the surprising success of its Alexa Voice Service and the growing family of devices it powers (the Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, and Tap). Alexa makes it easy to search the Web, play music, and adjust your lights and thermostat—just by speaking inside your home. Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud-computing operation, also deserves notice as the Industry: leader and Amazon’s fastest-growing and most profitable division.
$89.99 What the Echo Dot, the most affordable device to feature Alexa Voice Service, sells for.

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2 Baidu
Headquarters: Beijing, China
Industry: Internet & Digital Media
Status: Public
Valuation: $55 billion
Outside its core business of Internet search and ad sales, Baidu is doing notable work on speech recognition and conversational interfaces. In 2015, it announced the development of a speech recognition engine called Deep Speech 2 that uses deep learning to recognize spoken words, sometimes more accurately than a person can. Baidu conducts AI research in part to improve its products and services and better compete with rivals such as Alibaba and Tencent. The company is also aggressively pursuing the autonomous-car market and recently established a team in Silicon Valley to lead research and engineering in computer vision, robotics, and sensors, among other areas.
100 Baidu plans to employ more than 100 autonomous-car researchers and engineers in California by year’s end.

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3 Illumina
Headquarters: San Diego, California
Industry: Biotech
Status: Public
Valuation: $20 billion


The world’s largest DNA-sequencing company hopes to expand its technology’s role in diagnosing illness. This year it formed a new companyto develop blood tests that cost $1,000 or less and can detect many types of cancer before symptoms arise, greatly improving the chances of survival. The spinoff, called Grail, is being headed by Jeff Huber, a former senior Google executive who lost his wife to colon cancer. The testing concept, sometimes called a “liquid biopsy,” uses Illumina’s high-speed sequencing machines to scour a person’s blood for fragments of DNA released by cancer cells.
$2.2 billion Revenue reached last year, up 19 percent from the previous year.

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4 Tesla Motors
Headquarters: Palo Alto, California
Industry: Transportation
Status: Public
Valuation: $28 billion


Tesla topped this list last year for its plan to extend its battery technology from cars to residential and commercial applications. This year, Tesla’s Autopilot technology stands out for the way it integrates feedback from a camera, radar, ultrasonic sensors, and GPS to aid drivers on highways, help them avoid collisions, and assist them in parking. Besides advancing semi-autonomous driving, Tesla is also making electric vehicles more accessible by introducing its most affordable car yet, the $35,000 Model 3.
50 percent According to CEO Elon Musk, drivers have a 50 percent lower chance of having an accident when driving with Tesla Autopilot.

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5 Aquion Energy
Headquarters: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Industry: Energy
Status: Private
Valuation: Valuation: not available, $190 million raised


Aquion continues to raise money for its innovative batteries, which have made it a successful startup in a notoriously tough Industry:. Investors include Bill Gates and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as well as the corporate venture capital arms of energy Industry: giants Shell and Total. Invented by Carnegie Mellon professor Jay Whitacre, the batteries are made with nontoxic materials that can provide long-term storage of energy from solar, wind, and other intermittent sources at a very low cost. Whitacre says the company’s been disciplined in its development of a manufacturing process, basing it on existing models and materials to improve its chance of working.
Backers Include Bill Gates, Shell.

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6 Mobileye
Headquarters: Jerusalem, Israel
Industry: Computing & Communications
Status: Public
Valuation: $8 billion


How can automakers compete with companies developing self-driving vehicles, such as Google parent Alphabet? One increasingly popular option is to partner with Mobileye, which makes machine vision systems and motion detection algorithms that warn drivers when they are deviating from driving lanes or about to collide with cars in front of them. Mobileye is already working on autopilot and collision avoidance technology for Audi, BMW, General Motors, Nissan, Tesla, Volkswagen, and Volvo and recently inked an agreement with two undisclosed automakers to provide systems for fully autonomous cars.
600 Number of employees who are annotating the images used to train its autonomous driving system.


7 23andMe
Headquarters: Mountain View, California
Industry: Biotech
Status: Private
Valuation: $1.1 billion Valuation:


Now focused on getting its customers to share their data with medical researchers, 23andMe has partnered with leading medical centers, including Stanford and Mount Sinai. To date, the company has gathered DNA from more than one million customers, more than 80 percent of whom they say are participating in research.
One million The company has sequenced the DNA of more than one million customers.

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8 Alphabet
Headquarters: Mountain View, California
Industry: Internet & Digital Media
Status: Public
Valuation: $491 billion


Google parent company Alphabet pursues many projects, including a number of riskier “moon shot” technologies, but its ventures into AI and autonomous driving are the standouts. Earlier this year, DeepMind—which is part of Google—attracted global attention for beating a world champion player at the game Go. The matchup revealed the sophistication of its AI technology. Alphabet also continues to work on fully autonomous cars and recently signed a deal to incorporate its technology into Chrysler minivans—its first partnership with a major automaker.
1.6 million Number of miles Alphabet’s autonomous cars have driven so far.

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9 Spark Therapeutics
Headquarters: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Industry: Biotech
Status: Public
Valuation: $918 million
The company’s focus is on developing one-time, life-altering treatments for debilitating genetic diseases, a whole new model of personalized, precise treatment. Many of its key personnel come from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and their work focuses on finding treatments for rare diseases where no or only palliative therapies exist currently.
Collaborators Corporate collaborators include Pfizer, Genable Technologies, and Clearside Biomedical.

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10 Huawei
Headquarters: Shenzhen, China
Industry: Computing & Communications
Status: Public
Valuation: $1 billion
Huawei has been selling cell phones for more than a decade and smartphones since 2009, but it long struggled to break into the premium-device and U.S. markets. Its 2015 launch of the Nexus 6P phone, which it co-designed and manufactured for Google, showed it can make high-end, high-quality smartphones. Continued strength in entry-level devices, coupled with growing clout in more expensive phones, helped Huawei grow smartphone shipments 58 percent year-over-year and become the no. 3 smartphone vendor worldwide.
27.5 million Number of smartphones Huawei shipped in the first quarter of 2016, according to market researcher IDC.

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11First Solar
Headquarters: Tempe, Arizona
Industry: Energy
Status: Public
Valuation: $5 billion
First Solar designs and manufactures solar panels using a low-cost thin-film semiconductor technology and also develops solar farms that utilities can use. It differs from many solar companies in that it is in the black, making $546 million in profit in 2015 on nearly $3.6 billion in revenue.
$546 million Profits earned in 2015.

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12 Nvidia
Headquarters: Santa Clara, California
Industry: Computing & Communications
Status: Public
Valuation: $22 billion


A number of chip makers are targeting the autonomous-car market, andNvidia is distinguishing itself by offering an entire platform and accompanying software development kit for self-driving cars. The platform uses AI to give vehicles “360° situational awareness.” Nvidia says that more than 50 automakers (including Audi, BMW, Ford, and Tesla), suppliers, developers, and research institutions are experimenting with the platform. Nvidia is also using its strength in gaming graphics chips to move into the VR market and released a platform (chip module plus developer kit) for drones last year.
$1.3 billion Revenue increased 13 percent in the most recent quarter, to $1.3 billion, compared with $1.15 billion a year ago.

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13 Cellectis
Headquarters: New York City, New York
Industry: Biotech
Status: Public
Valuation: $1 billion


Cellectis is scheduled to do a formal trial of its engineered immune cells as a leukemia treatment as soon as this year. This field of immune engineering was one of our 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2016, and Cellectis is shaping its early development.
$300 million Though not profitable, the company has over $300 million in cash, enough to last through 2018.

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14 Enlitic
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
Industry: Biotech
Status: Private
Valuation: Valuation: not available, $15 million raised


Enlitic produces deep-learning software that can analyze x-rays. It’s being tested by radiologists in Australia, which will be key to establishing how well it can help doctors make diagnoses and design treatments. The recent departure of its founder Jeremy Howard, well known in the machine-learning field, seems to pose a challenge for the company, but new leadership asserts that applications of its algorithms will soon expand to the detection of lung cancer and bone fractures.
50 percent Claims its algorithm read chest CT images 50 percent more accurately than experts in its own test.

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15 Facebook
Headquarters: Menlo Park, California
Industry: Internet & Digital Media
Status: Public
Valuation: $345 billion


Facebook continues to develop its mobile advertising business and refine its mobile apps, but the Oculus Rift is its most exciting technology right now. Following years of anticipation, the virtual-reality headset was released in late March.
$599 Rift sells for $599.

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16 SpaceX
Headquarters: Hawthorne, California
Industry: Transportation
Status: Private
Valuation: $12 billion


If spaceflight were more affordable, more missions could be flown, more scientific discoveries could be made, and new business opportunities could open up. SpaceX has figured out the first step toward driving down costs by landing its rocket boosters on ships after sending them into space. Retrieving rockets makes it possible to reuse them. SpaceX plans to eventually schedule launches every few weeks.
Four Number of times SpaceX attempted to land a rocket on a barge before succeeding.

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17 Toyota
Headquarters: Toyota City, Japan
Industry: Transportation
Status: Public
Valuation: $152 billion


The Toyota Research Institute will study the future of mobility, artificial intelligence, and robotics. Other recent forward-looking moves include the launch of Mirai, a hydrogen-fuel-cell vehicle for the mass market. Mirai has a range of over 300 miles and emits only water vapor. Toyota is now working on developing a network of affordable hydrogen fuel stations.
Leader Roboticist Gill Pratt is CEO of the Toyota Research Institute.

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18 Airware
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
Industry: Computing & Communications
Status: Private
Valuation: Valuation: not available, $70 million raised


Airware is already one of the biggest drone startups, having raised more than $70 million in venture funding, and it is poised to become much bigger. Rather than actually making drones, it provides a control system for any type of drone.
Leader Airware’s founder and CEO also leads an investment fund that supports businesses creating technologies for commercial drones.

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19 IDE Technologies
Headquarters: Kadima, Israel
Industry: Energy
Status: Private
Valuation: Valuation: not available (owned in equal parts by publicly traded Delek Group and Israel Chemical)


Its large-scale desalination process is finding more customers. In the U.S. IDE won the job of reactivating a mothballed plant in Santa Barbara, California, and its prospects look strong as long as extracting salt from water to make it potable continues to be economical. Demand will certainly be there: worldwide, some 700 million people don’t have access to enough clean water, and that number is expected to explode to 1.8 billion by 2025.
26 percent By October IDE will be producing 26 percent of Santa Barbara’s water.


20 Tencent
Headquarters: Shenzhen, China
Industry: Transportation
Status: Public
Valuation: $193 billion


Tencent is Asia’s largest Internet company, with a well-used Web portal and a messaging app, WeChat, that is China’s largest. The company recently branched into the enterprise market by launching a business-focused version of WeChat that facilitates communication (messages, phone calls, e-mails) between colleagues, as well as employee expense reports and other record-keeping. Since Tencent derives most of its revenue from online and smartphone games, it has also been investing in mobile-games companies, including the U.S. firms Glu Mobile, and Pocket Gems. It recently bought Riot Games, which makes the hit League of Legends.
78 percent Tencent’s largest business segment, mostly games, accounts for 78 percent of its revenue.

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21 Didi Chuxing
Headquarters: Beijing, China
Industry: Transportation
Status: Private
Valuation: Reported Valuation: $28 billion


Chinese roads are jammed, and a rise in car ownership has led to a jump in people interested in part-time driving work, but competition with Uber has been fierce. Uber and Didi are battling for market share by paying drivers subsidies to pick up rides. Didi claims its drivers complete 14 million rides a day to Uber’s one million. The company’s ambitions don’t end at China’s borders. It has partnerships in India and Southeast Asia, including stakes in Lyft and Indian ride-share app Ola.
14 million Number of rides its drivers complete a day.

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22 Oxford Nanopore
Headquarters: Oxford, United Kingdom
Industry: Biotech
Status: Private
Valuation: Valuation: not available, $355 million raised


Its sequencer is small and portable—greatly expanding its applications and market—because it analyzes DNA by drawing the molecules through tiny, delicate pores. The platform, which went on sale in 2015 and is enough of a threat to competitor Illumina to draw a lawsuit, can analyze DNA, RNA, proteins, and other types of molecules. Potential applications include scientific research, personalized medicine, food safety, crop science, and security and defense. It will soon be tested in space.
Intellectual property Illumina, once an investor, is now suing the company for patent infringement.

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23 24M
Headquarters: Cambridge, Massachusetts
Industry: Energy
Status: Private
Valuation: Valuation: not available, $50 million raised


Lithium-ion batteries power everything from smartphones and tablets to electric cars and buses. They are expensive, however, and cumbersome to manufacture. Startup 24M developed a new design and manufacturing process that will cut costs. The battery Industry: is striving to produce batteries that cost $100 per kilowatt-hour or less, and 24M says its batteries will cross that threshold sooner than competitors—by 2020.
50 percent The company claims it can reduce the cost of lithium-ion batteries by 50 percent.

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24 Alibaba
Headquarters: Hangzhou, China
Industry: Internet & Digital Media
Status: Public
Valuation: $192 billion


Alibaba, which runs an eBay-like store, a popular virtual mall, and other e-commerce services, is now the world’s largest online marketplace as measured by annual gross merchandise volume. The growth of mobile and video ads also favors Alibaba, which already dominates the Chinese mobile-ad market and recently acquired Youku Tudou, China’s largest online video service. Beyond China, Alibaba has become a backer of other technology companies. In the past year, it invested in Groupon, Magic Leap, and Snapchat in the U.S., as well as the Indian payments and commerce business Paytm and Singapore’s national postal and logistics company, SingPost.
$485 billion Gross value of merchandise sold through Alibaba in its last fiscal year.

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25 Bristol-Myers Squibb
Headquarters: New York City, New York
Industry: Biotech
Status: Public
Valuation: $119 billion


Leads in cancer immunotherapy, working on “checkpoint inhibitors" for numerous forms of cancer. Opdivo, one of two inhibitors the company markets, works by allowing immune-system T cells to attack cancer. It’s approved for skin, lung, and kidney cancer, and when successful, the treatments appear to have enabled patients’ immune systems to eradicate their tumors. It is expensive, however, and that has caused issues with European regulators.
Five years One-third of patients with advanced melanoma survived for five years in a study of Opdivo.

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26 Microsoft
Headquarters: Redmond, Washington
Industry: Computing & Communications
Status: Public
Valuation: $405 billion


When we included Microsoft on last year’s list for its HoloLens augmented-reality technology, the system had not yet shipped. Now a preproduction “Developer Edition” is available and Microsoft is starting to use it for augmented-reality experiences. Attempting to switch its focus from desktop software to cloud and mobile services, and having recently announced a mammoth $26 billion purchase of business social network LinkedIn, the company is also pushing forward with innovative research, including some on deep neural networks that it has incorporated into Skype for simultaneous language translation. The research will also be applied to a variety of computer vision tasks.
152 A Microsoft network that won a global image recognition contest in 2015 used 152 layers of virtual neurons.

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27 Fanuc
Headquarters: Oshino-mura, Japan
Industry: Computing & Communications
Status: Public
Valuation: $30 billion


Fanuc began as part of Fujitsu and is the world’s largest maker of industrial robots. It recently announced a novel technology that will connect robots to networks so factory owners can download apps to them. In June 2015, Fanuc also partnered with a Japanese machine-learning company to create artificial-intelligence technology that enables its robots to learn skills independently.
Eight Number of hours a Fanuc robot needs to learn a task with 90 percent accuracy.

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28 Sonnen
Headquarters: Wildpoldsried, Germany
Industry: Energy
Status: Private
Valuation: Valuation: not available, more than $20 million raised, including GE Ventures’ recent investment


Its system connects homes with solar panels to lithium batteries in a storage system it calls a virtual power plant, offering consumers electricity that is 25 percent cheaper than power from the grid. The company’s new trading platform gives German homeowners a way to both purchase power and sell excess solar power across the utility grid.
25 percent Electricity on its system is 25 percent cheaper than the electricity on the grid, according to the company.

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29 Improbable
Headquarters: London, United Kingdom
Industry: Computing & Communications
Valuation: Valuation: not available, $22 million raised


The company, which came out of work done originally when the founders were students at the University of Cambridge, is developing an environment for building virtual worlds at a new scale and complexity. With advances in robotics and driverless cars, such simulations have become more important as a testing ground. Improbable’s technology allows large amounts of information to be shared between multiple servers nearly instantaneously, which is appealing to gaming developers looking to allow many players to experience a virtual world together.
Funding Andreessen Horowitz is a major backer.

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30 Movidius
Headquarters: San Mateo, California
Industry: Computing & Communications
Status: Private
Valuation: Valuation: not available, $90 million raised


Movidius makes chips for computer-vision applications, which will be necessary to develop smarter mobile devices and drones. Google’s Tango tablet uses Movidius chips, as does DJI’s Phantom 4 drone. Movidius also recently announced a new chip geared for augmented and virtual reality.
On the radar Drones using Movidius technology can sense obstacles to avoid collisions.

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31 Intrexon
Headquarters: Germantown, Pennsylvania
Industry: Biotech
Status: Public
Valuation: $3 billion


Its Oxitec division’s genetically engineered mosquito, which yields offspring that die quickly, has been released in Grand Cayman and parts of Brazil in an attempt to reduce the spread of Zika and other diseases. In March, the World Health Organization recommended a pilot deployment of Oxitec’s solution. The company has been buying up companies specializing in synthetic biology in a variety of applications, but it has not been transparent about how its technology works, leading to some negative speculation about the company.
$174 million Acquisitions increased sales from $8 million to $174 million in five years.

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32 Carbon
Headquarters: Redwood City, California
Industry: Energy
Status: Private
Valuation: Valuation: not available, $141 million raised


Carbon has developed a new technique based on stereolithography that it says is as much as 100 times faster than rivals’ 3-D printing methods and fast enough to be used in place of injection molding to produce certain parts. Carbon will face competition from HP, which has its own new printing technology based on a different class of materials. But the startup is backed by some high-powered investors, including Google Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Silver Lake Kraftwerk, and its board members include the former CEOs of Ford and DuPont.
$40,000 Use of its 3-D printers costs $40,000 a year.

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33 Bosch
Headquarters: Stuttgart, Germany
Industry: Computing & Communications
Status: Public
Valuation: $649 billion


Bosch’s vision for an industrial Internet of things starts with manufacturing facilities that are becoming increasingly connected and automated, a way to increase productivity in an era of global competition and relatively high domestic wages. The company estimates that by 2020 technologies like connected assembly lines, predictive maintenance, and machines that can do some self-monitoring will combine to boost company revenue by more than $1 billion while saving a comparable amount in operational expenses.
$80 billion Record revenue generated in 2015.

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34 T2 Biosystems
Headquarters: Lexington, Massachusetts
Industry: Biotech
Status: Public
Valuation: $201 million


T2 Biosystems has begun selling its technology for detecting the pathogenic fungus Candida, an often deadly infection. The test is run in three to five hours, as opposed to two to six days, and today 16 hospitals use it.
35 Number of customers who now use the company’s bench-top diagnostic system.

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35 Editas Medicine
Headquarters: Cambridge, Massachusetts
Industry: Biotech
Status: Public
Valuation: $1 billion


A pioneer of the controversial and exciting CRISPR gene-editing technology, Editas intends to begin testing a new form of gene repair in humans in 2017. The idea is to use CRISPR to cut out the genetic mutation that causes Leber’s congenital amaurosis, a rare retinal disease that leads to blindness, so the cell can repair itself with a normal version. Though CRISPR technology was invented just a few years ago, it is so precise and cheap to use that it has quickly become a tool in biology laboratories.
$94 million Money raised in its February IPO, and the stock is up 85 percent since then.

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36 Nestlé
Headquarters: Vevey, Switzerland
Industry: Biotech
Status: Public
Valuation: $238 billion


Food giant Nestlé has jumped into microbiome research, working to develop “healthy gut” products for its Health Science division. Among its bets on nutritional therapies, the company has made repeated investments in Seres Therapeutics, most recently investing $120 million in the company to support its efforts to develop medicines aimed at the bacteriological balance in the digestive tract. The first experimental treatments are focused on Clostridium difficile infection and inflammatory bowel disease.
$2 billion At a slow time for its core food business, its nutritional therapies division has reached $2 billion in annual revenue in its first five years, and more strong growth is predicted.

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37 RetroSense Therapeutics
Headquarters: Ann Arbor, Michigan
Industry: Biotech
Status: Private
Valuation: not available, $12 million raised


Its therapy uses optogenetics, a technology that uses a combination of gene therapy and light to precisely control nerves. In its treatment of retinitis pigmentosa, the eye is injected with viruses carrying DNA from light-sensitive algae; this is intended to confer light sensitivity on certain nerve cells in the eye.
$12 million Revenue raised from foundations and private investors as well as the Michigan Economic Development Corporation.

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38 Line, subsidiary of Naver
Headquarters: Tokyo, Japan
Industry: Internet & Digital Media
Status: Private
Valuation: expected to be more than $5 billion


Line’s growth has slowed, but it is still a leader among the world’s messaging apps when it comes to making money from its users. The company steadily introduces new features, such as chatbot functionality for corporate marketing campaigns and group calls for up to 200 people. (In comparison, Skype limits group calls to 25 people.) In its home market of Japan, Line offers taxi booking inside its app and will soon provide phone service through a deal with Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo. Its IPO expected later this year could value the company at more than $5 billion.
218 million Number of monthly active users.


39 TransferWise
Headquarters: London, United Kingdom
Industry: Computing & Communications
Status: Private
Valuation: $1.1 billion


TransferWise matches people who looking to make currency trades around the world, at much lower fees than traditional institutions. It has already captured 5 percent of the U.K.’s money-transfer market and recently expanded to the U.S., Canada, Japan, and Mexico, among other places. Its goal of disrupting multinational banks and Western Union has attracted investments from Andreessen Horowitz and Richard Branson, among others.
$750 million Money TransferWise helps users exchange every month.

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40 Veritas Genetics
Headquarters: Danvers, Massachusetts
Industry: Biotech
Status: Private
Valuation: Not available


By making whole-genome sequencing and interpretation affordable, Veritas gives patients and doctors a fuller picture than what’s possible with common genetic tests, improving their diagnostic value. The company also offers cancer screening tests for $199 to $299.
$1,000 Whole-genome sequencing, including interpretation and counseling, costs under $1,000. The supply is limited to 5,000 customers in 2016.

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41 FireEye
Headquarters: Milpitas, California
Industry: Computing & Communications
Status: Public
Valuation: $2 billion


The company’s security system can be updated at any time to defend against constantly mutating cyber threats. It also encourages clients to focus on quickly resolving attacks, not just trying to avoid them. FireEye has grown to a significant size in an often fragmented Industry:, and it’s been hired to investigate high-profile cybersecurity failures at JPMorgan Chase, Sony Pictures, and Target.
In the works New products focus on securing public and private clouds and detecting targeted e-mail attacks.

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42 SevenBridges
Headquarters: Cambridge, Massachusetts
Industry: Computing & Communications
Status: Private
Valuation: Valuation: not available, $45 million raised


Its bioinformatics software platform runs one of the world’s largest genomic data sets, the U.S. National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Genome Atlas. This gives cancer researchers worldwide immediate access to a petabyte of patient data and computational resources to analyze it, facilitating research collaboration. SevenBridges is also storing and analyzing data from the 100,000 genomes collected by the British National Health Service. The company’s long-term vision is to support drug research and the practice of precision medicine customized to each patient.
11,000 Number of patients that have contributed 33 cancer types and subtypes to its Cancer Genomics Cloud.

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43 Slack
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
Industry: Computing & Communications
Status: Private
Valuation: $4 billion


In the past year, Slack’s number of daily users increased from 750,000 to three million. During that time, the company rolled out voice calls as a beta feature and launched a directory for third-party apps, an $80 million fund to invest in Slack developers, and a toolkit for creating chatbots. It also introduced a “Sign In with Slack” feature that lets business users sign up for apps using their Slack identity credentials. The momentum helped Slack raise $200 million more in funding, for a current total of $540 million, at a Valuation: of $3.8 billion.
Three million Number of daily active Slack users.

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44 Coupang
Headquarters: Seoul, South Korea
Industry: Internet & Digital Media
Status: Private
Valuation: $5 billion


Originally a Groupon clone, Coupang is now widely viewed as the Amazon.com of Korea. Like Amazon, it is betting on same-day delivery as an amenity to lure consumers. It has invested millions in a sophisticated logistics system that spans warehouses, trucks, thousands of delivery people, and proprietary algorithms to link everything together. Coupang is also focused on making it easier and more compelling to buy items via smartphone. The aggressive approach brought in $1 billion in funding from Japan’s SoftBank last year.
$5 billion Coupang’s most recent Valuation:.


45 IBM
Headquarters: Armonk, New York
Industry: Computing & Communications
Status: Public
Valuation: $142 billion


IBM remains in turnaround mode. It has suffered 16 consecutive quarters of declining sales but continues to invest in cloud computing and analytics. Part of that investment involves buying up companies such as Truven Health Analytics and the Weather Company. The purchases come with huge data sets IBM can use to train its AI system, Watson.
100 Number of clients that have built Watson into a product.

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46 Snapchat
Headquarters: Los Angeles, California
Industry: Internet & Digital Media
Status: Private
Valuation: $20 billion


Snapchat is still experimenting with innovative new content, which was the reason it made this list last year. This year, Snapchat’s most significant moves relate to expanding its advertising business. Advertisers value Snapchat as a way to reach consumers aged 13 to 34, but they have criticized the company for charging high rates without sharing much data about ads’ performance. Snapchat recently addressed these concerns by signing deals that let Viacom sell ads on its behalf and allow Nielsen to supply campaign data to advertisers.
10 billion Number of videos that are seen on the app every day.

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47 Africa Internet Group
Headquarters: Lagos, Nigeria
Industry: Internet & Digital Media
Status: Private
Valuation: $1 billion


Africa Internet Group (AIG) was founded by the German tech incubator Rocket Internet in 2012 and runs an array of e-commerce companies throughout Africa. Its flagship business is the online retailer Jumia, which it says is Africa’s largest e-commerce mall. It also owns the continent’s leading hotel booking portal and classified-ad marketplaces for cars and real estate. Besides Rocket Internet, AIG has funding from Axa, Goldman Sachs, and two large telecommunications companies: MTN Group and Orange. Though it is not yet profitable, investors view AIG as a way to access Africa’s developing online economy
26 Africa Internet Group operates in 26 African countries.


48 LittleBits
Headquarters: New York City, New York
Industry: Computing & Communications
Status: Private
Valuation: Valuation: not available, $62 million raised


Its mostly open-source building kits are now for sale at Barnes & Noble, and the company has added new executives from Lego and MakerBot.
$299 Basic kits sell for $99 to $299.

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49 Intel
Headquarters: Santa Clara, California
Industry: Computing & Communications
Status: Public
Valuation: $140 billion


Despite its long domination of the PC chip market, Intel has struggled to keep ahead of customer demands, particularly the drive for mobile computing. Now the company is trying to find better footing in new domains such as the cloud and Internet-connected devices, experimenting with reprogrammable processors for deep neural networks, and moving a fundamentally new kind of computer memory to market.
$16.7 billion Money Intel spent to buy Altera, a maker of programmable logic devices.

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50 Monsanto
Headquarters: St. Louis, Missouri
Industry: Biotech
Status: Public
Valuation: $44 billion


Monsanto is using RNA interference to create alternatives to conventional genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. Already able to kill bugs by getting them to eat leaves coated with specially designed RNA, the company is now trying to develop sprays that penetrate plant cells to block certain plant genes. Potential applications include ideas like a spray that causes tomatoes to taste better or one that helps plants survive a drought. In May, Bayer made a $62 billion offer for the company, which Monsanto turned down, though management did indicate an openness to discussing further offers.
$1.5 billion Money invested last year in research on new biotech traits, genomics, and more.

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June 21, 2016
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