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"Welcome to You.” So says the genetic test kit that 23andMe will send to your home. Pay $199, spit in a tube, and several weeks later you’ll get a peek into your DNA. Have you got the gene for blond hair? Which of 36 disease risks could you pass to a child?

In a three-month period at the end of 1879, Thomas Edison tested the first practical electric lightbulb, Karl Benz invented a workable internal-combustion engine, and a British-American inventor named David Edward Hughes transmitted a wireless signal over a few hundred meters. These were just a few of the remarkable breakthroughs that Northwestern University economist Robert J. Gordon tells us led to a “special century” between 1870 and 1970.

The tube was out back, 11 feet in diameter, 60 feet long, the unfinished end spiraling into wide ribbons of steel - like a gigantic Pillsbury dough container with its seams gaping open. Behind the tube was a big blue tent known as the robot school, where autonomous welders wheel or crawl along, making the tubes airtight. The goal is to put tracks and electromagnets inside the tube and vacuum most of the air out.

Companies taking advantage of amazing new digital technologies dominate our list of 50 Smartest Companies. But despite impressive advances in artificial intelligence and automation, the economy remains in a troubling slowdown.

It’s the simplest business model conceivable: hand thousands of dollars over to individuals in return for nothing, no strings attached. Krisiloff insists he and his Y Combinator colleagues can’t wait to get started giving away the money. “This could be really transformative,” he says. “It may help change how humans, society, and technology all operate together in the future.”

Inside a large, windowless room in an electronics factory in south Shanghai, about 15 workers are eyeing a small robot arm with frustration. Near the end of the production line where optical networking equipment is being packed into boxes for shipping, the robot sits motionless.

Innovative mobile services in China are making commerce flourish and bringing new conveniences to daily life. Is that happening despite or because of the country’s strict controls on online expression?

Donald Trump says that if he becomes president, he will “get Apple to start making their computers and their iPhones on our land, not in China.” Bernie Sanders has also called for Apple to manufacture some devices in the US instead of China.

Malaria kills half a million people each year, mostly children in tropical Africa. The price tag for eradicating the disease is estimated at more than $100 billion over 15 years. To do it, you’d need bed nets for everyone, tens of thousands of crates of antimalaria drugs, and millions of gallons of insecticides. But it would take more than stuff. You’d need things the poorest countries in the world don’t have, like strong governments, purchasing power, and functioning public health systems. So malaria keeps killing.

Toyota spends $10 billion a year on research, more than any other automaker except Volkswagen. That pays for endless incremental improvements in everything from lithium batteries to seatbelt design, but such tweaks may not be enough anymore if Toyota is to remain the world’s top seller of cars.

Donning headphones, we tapped into Skype Translator, a creation of Microsoft’s research team. My chatting partners were part-time consultants to Microsoft, who happened to be thousands of miles away from my West Coast U.S. base. When I asked Chen where he grew up, it didn’t faze me to hear him say a few lines in Mandarin. A few seconds later, a friendly synthetic voice told me: “My hometown is in the northeast in China, Liaoning Province, Anshan.”

This week energy forecaster GTM Research predicted that the price of building big solar-power farms will drop below $1 a watt by 2020. That’s a big deal because it’s seen as the threshold below which building solar power arrays becomes competitive, without subsidies, with the cost of fossil-fuel plants. It’s also the target set in 2011 by the US Department of Energy’s SunShot Initiative. But there are important caveats.

Improving the energy efficiency of buildings is considered the fastest and least expensive way to cut energy use and, thus, carbon emissions. Although many states have programs in place to promote energy efficiency, mostly through rebates, the market has largely stalled because of high up-front costs, heavy regulation, limited funding mechanisms, and uncertainties surrounding the actual savings provided.

Metal 3-D printing, which has been around for decades, is finally coming into its own as a genuine mass manufacturing technology: Sales of machines that print metal objects have risen rapidly as manufacturers, especially in the aerospace industry, gear up for commercial production of additively made parts they’ve been developing for years.

Having your blood pressure taken by a cuff that inflates and deflates around your upper arm is reliable, but it’s not very fast or portable, and it isn’t able to give you continuous measurements over time. A startup called Blumio is trying a different tactic. It’s building blood-pressure measuring technology that uses radar - typically employed for things like tracking ships or speeding cars by monitoring the phase changes in electromagnetic waves as they reflect off of them.

Google’s cuddly-looking robotic cars have taken a big step on the way to developing a harder edge: they’ve learned to honk. In the Google Self-Driving Car Project’s latest monthly report (PDF), the company says it has been testing horn algorithms in its prototype cars for some time, playing the horn sound inside the cars as a way to make sure they’re not beeping in a way that would confuse other drivers. As the algorithm has improved, the cars have recently begun “broadcasting our car horn to the world.”

If Tesla wins the race to commercialize automated driving, it might have less to do with some technological edge than its crazy customers. At the unveiling of Tesla’s sleek and “affordable” new car, the Model 3, Musk hinted that some “next level” features had yet to be revealed. This has led some to speculate that the Model 3 might be the first car equipped to hit the road with full autonomy. Tesla has some unique technological advantages in pursuing autonomy.

A proposal by a group of scientists and businesspeople to synthesize a human genome from scratch is attracting sharp criticism for dodging the big ethical questions such a step raises. The proposal is to string together synthetically made DNA and shape from it a human genome able to power a cell in a dish, according to lead authors Jef Boeke of New York University’s Langone Medical Center and biotechnologist George Church of Harvard Medical School.

A two-year government study has found a small increase in two types of cancer in male rats exposed to the kind of radiation that cell phones emit. Given the ubiquity of cell-phone usage, the implications of the findings are substantial, if they are replicated in humans.

Air particulates are invisible, but a new generation of indoor air monitors makes it easy to know the air quality instantaneously and take immediate corrective action. In my family’s case, we learned that turning on the exhaust fan helps - it lowers the PM2.5 from 250 to 100 micrograms per cubic meter, but getting the number below 50 required opening windows in the front and back of the house to get cross ventilation.