x research

Google X and the Science of Radical Creativity

How the secretive Silicon Valley lab is trying to resurrect the lost art of invention

I. The Question

A snake-robot designer , a balloon scientist, a liquid-crystals technologist, an extradimensional physicist, a psychology geek, an electronic-materials wrangler, and a journalist walk into a room. The journalist turns to the assembled crowd and asks: Should we build houses on the ocean?

The setting is X, the so-called moonshot factory at Alphabet, the parent company of Google. And the scene is not the beginning of some elaborate joke. The people in this room have a particular talent: They dream up far-out answers to crucial problems. The dearth of housing in crowded and productive coastal cities is a crucial problem. Oceanic residences are, well, far-out. At the group’s invitation, I was proposing my own moonshot idea, despite deep fear that the group would mock it.

Like a think-tank panel with the instincts of an improv troupe, the group sprang into an interrogative frenzy. “What are the specific economic benefits of increasing housing supply?” the liquid-crystals guy asked. “Isn’t the real problem that transportation infrastructure is so expensive?” the balloon scientist said. “How sure are we that living in densely built cities makes us happier?” the extradimensional physicist wondered. Over the course of an hour, the conversation turned to the ergonomics of Tokyo’s high-speed trains and then to Americans’ cultural preference for suburbs. Members of the team discussed commonsense solutions to urban density, such as more money for transit, and eccentric ideas, such as acoustic technology to make apartments soundproof and self-driving housing units that could park on top of one another in a city center. At one point, teleportation enjoyed a brief hearing.

X is perhaps the only enterprise on the planet where regular investigation into the absurd is not just permitted but encouraged, and even required. X has quietly looked into space elevators and cold fusion. It has tried, and abandoned, projects to design hoverboards with magnetic levitation and to make affordable fuel from seawater. It has tried—and succeeded, in varying measures—to build self-driving cars, make drones that deliver aerodynamic packages, and design contact lenses that measure glucose levels in a diabetic person’s tears.

These ideas might sound too random to contain a unifying principle. But they do. Each X idea adheres to a simple three-part formula. First, it must address a huge problem; second, it must propose a radical solution; third, it must employ a relatively feasible technology. In other words, any idea can be a moonshot—unless it’s frivolous, small-bore, or impossible.

The purpose of X is not to solve Google’s problems; thousands of people are already doing that. Nor is its mission philanthropic. Instead X exists, ultimately, to create world-changing companies that could eventually become the next Google. The enterprise considers more than 100 ideas each year, in areas ranging from clean energy to artificial intelligence. But only a tiny percentage become “projects,” with full-time staff working on them. It’s too soon to know whether many (or any) of these shots will reach the moon: X was formed in 2010, and its projects take years; critics note a shortage of revenue to date. But several projects—most notably Waymo, its self-driving-car company , recently valued at $70 billion by one Wall Street firm—look like they may.

X is extremely secretive. The company won’t share its budget or staff numbers with investors, and it’s typically off-limits to journalists as well. But this summer, the organization let me spend several days talking with more than a dozen of its scientists, engineers, and thinkers. I asked to propose my own absurd idea in order to better understand the creative philosophy that undergirds its approach. That is how I wound up in a room debating a physicist and a roboticist about apartments floating off the coast of San Francisco.

I’d expected the team at X to sketch some floating houses on a whiteboard, or discuss ways to connect an ocean suburb to a city center, or just inform me that the idea was terrible. I was wrong. The table never once mentioned the words floating or ocean . My pitch merely inspired an inquiry into the purpose of housing and the shortfalls of U.S. infrastructure. It was my first lesson in radical creativity. Moonshots don’t begin with brainstorming clever answers. They start with the hard work of finding the right questions.

C reativity is an old practice but a new science. It was only in 1950 that J. P. Guilford, a renowned psychologist at the University of Southern California, introduced the discipline of creativity research in a major speech to the American Psychological Association. “I discuss the subject of creativity with considerable hesitation,” he began, “for it represents an area in which psychologists generally, whether they be angels or not, have feared to tread.” It was an auspicious time to investigate the subject of human ingenuity, particularly on the West Coast. In the next decade, the apricot farmland south of San Francisco took its first big steps toward becoming Silicon Valley.

Yet in the past 60 years, something strange has happened. As the academic study of creativity has bloomed, several key indicators of the country’s creative power have turned downward, some steeply. Entrepreneurship may have grown as a status symbol, but America’s start-up rate has been falling for decades. The label innovation may have spread like ragweed to cover every minuscule tweak of a soda can or a toothpaste flavor, but the rate of productivity growth has been mostly declining since the 1970s. Even Silicon Valley itself, an economic powerhouse, has come under fierce criticism for devoting its considerable talents to trivial problems , like making juice or hailing a freelancer to pick up your laundry.

Breakthrough technology results from two distinct activities that generally require different environments— invention and innovation . Invention is typically the work of scientists and researchers in laboratories, like the transistor, developed at Bell Laboratories in the 1940s. Innovation is an invention put to commercial use, like the transistor radio, sold by Texas Instruments in the 1950s. Seldom do the two activities occur successfully under the same roof. They tend to thrive in opposite conditions; while competition and consumer choice encourage innovation, invention has historically prospered in labs that are insulated from the pressure to generate profit.

The United States’ worst deficit today is not of incremental innovation but of breakthrough invention. Research-and-development spending has declined by two-thirds as a share of the federal budget since the 1960s. The great corporate research labs of the mid-20th century, such as Bell Labs and Xerox Palo Alto Research Center ( parc ), have shrunk and reined in their ambitions. America’s withdrawal from moonshots started with the decline in federal investment in basic science. Allowing well-funded and diverse teams to try to solve big problems is what gave us the nuclear age, the transistor, the computer, and the internet. Today, the U.S. is neglecting to plant the seeds of this kind of ambitious research, while complaining about the harvest.

No one at X would claim that it is on the verge of unleashing the next platform technology, like electricity or the internet—an invention that could lift an entire economy. Nor is the company’s specialty the kind of basic science that typically thrives at research universities. But what X is attempting is nonetheless audacious. It is investing in both invention and innovation. Its founders hope to demystify and routinize the entire process of making a technological breakthrough—to nurture each moonshot, from question to idea to discovery to product—and, in so doing, to write an operator’s manual for radical creativity.

II. The Inkling

Inside X’s Palo Alto headquarters, artifacts of projects and prototypes hang on the walls, as they might in a museum—an exhibition of alternative futures. A self-driving car is parked in the lobby. Drones shaped like Jedi starfighters are suspended from the rafters. Inside a three-story atrium, a large screen renders visitors as autonomous vehicles would see them—pointillist ghosts moving through a rainbow-colored grid. It looks like Seurat tried to paint an Atari game.

Just beyond the drones, I find Astro Teller. He is the leader of X, whose job title, captain of moonshots, is of a piece with his piratical, if perhaps self-conscious, charisma. He has a long black ponytail and silver goatee, and is wearing a long-sleeved T‑shirt, dark jeans, and large black Rollerblades. Fresh off an afternoon skate?, I ask. “Actually, I wear these around the office about 98 percent of the time,” he says. I glance at an X publicist to see whether he’s serious. Her expression says: Of course he is .

Teller, 47, descends from a formidable line of thinkers. His grandfathers were Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, and Gérard Debreu, a mathematician who won a Nobel Prize in Economics. With a doctorate in artificial intelligence from Carnegie Mellon, Teller is an entrepreneur, a two-time novelist, and the author of a nonfiction book, Sacred Cows , on marriage and divorce—co-written with his second wife. His nickname, Astro, though painfully on the nose for the leader of a moonshot factory, was bestowed upon him in high school, by friends who said his flattop haircut resembled Astroturf. (His given name is Eric.)

In 2010, Teller joined a nascent division within Google that would use the company’s ample profits to explore bold new ideas, which Teller called “moonshots.” The name X was chosen as a purposeful placeholder—as in, We’ll solve for that later . The one clear directive was what X would not do. While almost every corporate research lab tries to improve the core product of the mother ship, X was conceived as a sort of anti–corporate research lab; its job was to solve big challenges anywhere except in Google’s core business.

When Teller took the helm of X (which is now a company, like Google, within Alphabet), he devised the three-part formula for an ideal moonshot project: an important question, a radical solution, and a feasible path to get there. The proposals could come from anywhere, including X employees, Google executives, and outside academics. But grand notions are cheap and abundant—especially in Silicon Valley, where world-saving claims are a debased currency—and actual breakthroughs are rare. So the first thing Teller needed to build was a way to kill all but the most promising ideas. He assembled a team of diverse experts, a kind of Justice League of nerds, to process hundreds of proposals quickly and promote only those with the right balance of audacity and achievability. He called it the Rapid Evaluation team.

In the landscape of ideas, Rapid Eval members aren’t vertical drillers but rather oil scouts, skillful in surveying the terrain for signs of pay dirt. You might say it’s Rapid Eval’s job to apply a kind of future-perfect analysis to every potential project: If this idea succeeds, what will have been the challenges? If it fails, what will have been the reasons?

The art of predicting which ideas will become hits is a popular subject of study among organizational psychologists. In academic jargon, it is sometimes known as “creative forecasting.” But what sorts of teams are best at forecasting the most-successful creations? Justin Berg, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, set out to answer this question in a 2016 study focused on, of all things, circus performances.

Berg found that there are two kinds of circus professionals: creators who imagine new acts, and managers who evaluate them. He collected more than 150 circus-performance videos and asked more than 300 circus creators and managers to watch them and predict the performers’ success with an audience. Then he compared their reactions with those of more than 13,000 ordinary viewers.

Creators, Berg found, were too enamored of their own concepts. But managers were too dismissive of truly novel acts. The most effective evaluation team, Berg concluded, was a group of creators. “A solitary creator might fall in love with weird stuff that isn’t broadly popular,” he told me, “but a panel of judges will reject anything too new. The ideal mix is a panel of creators who are also judges, like the teams at X.” The best evaluators are like player-coaches—they create, then manage, and then return to creating. “They’re hybrids,” Berg said.

R ich DeVaul is a hybrid. He is the leader of the Rapid Eval team but he has also, like many members, devoted himself to major projects at X. He has looked into the feasibility of space elevators that could transport cargo to satellites without a rocket ship and modeled airships that might transport goods and people in parts of the world without efficient roads, all without ever touching the ground. “At one point, I got really interested in cold fusion,” he said. “Because why not?”

One of DeVaul’s most consuming obsessions has been to connect the roughly 4 billion people around the world who don’t have access to high-speed internet. He considers the internet the steam engine or electrical grid of the 21st century—the platform technology for a long wave of economic development. DeVaul first proposed building a cheap, solar-powered tablet computer. But the Rapid Eval team suggested that he was aiming at the wrong target. The world’s biggest need wasn’t hardware but access. Cables and towers were too expensive to build in mountains and jungles, and earthbound towers don’t send signals widely enough to make sense for poor, sparsely populated areas. The cost of satellites made those, too, prohibitive for poor areas. DeVaul needed something inexpensive that could live in the airspace between existing towers and satellites. His answer: balloons. Really big balloons.

The idea struck more than a few people as ridiculous. “I thought I was going to be able to prove it impossible really quickly,” said Cliff L. Biffle, a computer scientist and Rapid Eval manager who has been at X for six years. “But I totally failed. It was really annoying.” Here was an idea, the team concluded, that could actually work: a network of balloons, equipped with computers powered by solar energy, floating 13 miles above the Earth, distributing internet to the world. The cause was huge; the solution was radical; the technology was feasible. They gave it a name: Project Loon.

At first, Loon team members thought the hardest problem would be sustaining an internet connection between the ground and a balloon. DeVaul and Biffle bought several helium balloons, attached little Wi‑Fi devices to them, and let them go at Dinosaur Point, in the Central Valley. As the balloons sluiced through the jet stream, DeVaul and his colleagues chased them down in a Subaru Forester rigged with directional antennae to catch the signal. They drove like madmen along the San Luis Reservoir as the balloons soared into the stratosphere. To their astonishment, the internet connection held. DeVaul was ecstatic, his steampunk vision of broadband-by-balloon seemingly within grasp. “I thought, The rest is just ballooning! ” he said. “ That’s not rocket science .”

He was right, in a way. Ballooning of the sort his team imagined isn’t rocket science. It’s harder.

Let’s start with the balloons. Each one, flattened, is the size of a tennis court, made of stitched-together pieces of polyethylene. At the bottom of the balloon hangs a small, lightweight computer with the same technology you would find at the top of a cell tower, with transceivers to beam internet signals and get information from ground stations. The computer system is powered by solar panels. The balloon is designed to float 70,000 feet above the Earth for months in one stretch. The next time you are at cruising altitude in an airplane, imagine seeing a balloon as far above you as the Earth is far below.

The balloons have to survive in what is essentially an alien environment. At night, the temperature plunges to 80 degrees below zero Celsius, colder than your average evening on Mars. By day, the sun could fry a typical computer, and the air is too thin for a fan to cool the motherboard. So Loon engineers store the computer system in a specially constructed box—the original was a Styrofoam beer cooler—coated with reflective white paint.

The computer system, guided by an earthbound data center, can give the balloon directions (“Go northeast to Lima!”), but the stratosphere is not an orderly street grid in which traffic flows in predictable directions. It takes its name from the many strata, or layers, of air temperatures and wind currents. It’s difficult to predict which way the stratosphere’s winds will blow. To navigate above a particular town—say, Lima—the balloon cannot just pick any altitude and cruise. It must dive and ascend thousands of feet, sampling the gusts of various altitudes, until it finds one that is pointing in just the right direction. So Loon uses a team of balloons to provide constant coverage to a larger area. As one floats off, another moves in to take its place.

Four years after Loon’s first real test, in New Zealand, the project is in talks with telecommunications companies around the world, especially where cell towers are hard to build, like the dense jungles and mountains of Peru. Today a network of broadband-beaming balloons floats above rural areas outside of Lima, delivering the internet through the provider Telefónica.

Improving internet access in Latin America, Africa, and Asia to levels now seen in developed countries would generate more than $2 trillion in additional GDP, according to a recent study by Deloitte. Loon is still far from its global vision, but capturing even a sliver of one percentage point of that growth would make it a multibillion-dollar business.

III. The Fail

Astro Teller likes to recount an allegorical tale of a firm that has to get a monkey to stand on top of a 10-foot pedestal and recite passages from Shakespeare. Where would you begin? he asks. To show off early progress to bosses and investors, many people would start with the pedestal. That’s the worst possible choice, Teller says. “You can always build the pedestal. All of the risk and the learning comes from the extremely hard work of first training the monkey.” An X saying is “#MonkeyFirst”—yes, with the hashtag—and it means “do the hardest thing first.”

But most people don’t want to do the hardest thing first. Most people want to go to work and get high fives and backslaps. Despite the conference-keynote pabulum about failure (“Fail fast! Fail often!”), the truth is that, financially and psychologically, failure sucks. In most companies, projects that don’t work out are stigmatized, and their staffs are fired. That’s as true in many parts of Silicon Valley as it is anywhere else. X may initially seem like a paradise of curiosity and carefree tinkering, a world apart from the drudgery required at a public company facing the drumbeat of earnings reports. But it’s also a place immersed in failure. Most green-lit Rapid Eval projects are unsuccessful, even after weeks, months, or years of one little failure after another.

At X, Teller and his deputies have had to build a unique emotional climate, where people are excited to take big risks despite the inevitability of, as Teller delicately puts it, “falling flat on their face.” X employees like to bring up the concept of “psychological safety.” I initially winced when I heard the term, which sounded like New Age fluff. But it turns out to be an important element of X’s culture, the engineering of which has been nearly as deliberate as that of, say, Loon’s balloons.

Kathy Hannun told me of her initial anxiety, as the youngest employee at X, when she joined in the spring of 2012. On her first day, she was pulled into a meeting with Teller and other X executives where, by her account, she stammered and flubbed several comments for fear of appearing out of her depth. But everyone, at times, is out of his or her depth at X. After the meeting, Teller told her not to worry about making stupid comments or asking ignorant questions. He would not turn on her, he said.

Hannun now serves as the CEO of Dandelion, an X spin-off that uses geothermal technology to provide homes in New York State with a renewable source of heating, cooling, and hot water. “I did my fair share of unwise and inexperienced things over the years, but Astro was true to his word,” she told me. The culture, she said, walked a line between patience and high expectations, with each quality tempering the other.

X encourages its most successful employees to talk about the winding and potholed road to breakthrough invention. This spring, André Prager, a German mechanical engineer, delivered a 25-minute presentation on this topic at a company meeting, joined by members of X’s drone team, called Project Wing. He spoke about his work on the project, which was founded on the idea that drones could be significant players in the burgeoning delivery economy. The idea had its drawbacks: Dogs may attack a drone that lands, and elevated platforms are expensive, so Wing’s engineers needed a no-landing/no-infrastructure solution. After sifting through hundreds of ideas, they settled on an automatic winching system that lowered and raised a specialized spherical hook—one that can’t catch on clothing or tree branches or anything else—to which a package could be attached.

In their address, Prager and his team spent less time on their breakthroughs than on the many failed cardboard models they discarded along the way. The lesson they and Teller wanted to communicate is that simplicity, a goal of every product, is in fact extremely complicated to design. “The best designs—a bicycle, a paper clip—you look and think, Well of course, it always had to look like that ,” Prager told me. “But the less design you see, the more work was needed to get there.” X tries to celebrate the long journey of high-risk experimentation, whether it leads to the simplicity of a fine invention or the mess of failure.

Because the latter possibility is high, the company has also created financial rewards for team members who shut down projects that are likely to fail. For several years, Hannun led another group, named Foghorn, which developed technology to turn seawater into affordable fuel. The team appeared to be on track, until the price of oil collapsed in 2015 and its members forecast that their fuel couldn’t compete with regular gasoline soon enough to justify keeping the project alive. In 2016, they submitted a detailed report explaining that, despite advancing the science, their technology would not be economically viable in the near future. They argued for the project to be shut down. For this, the entire team received a bonus.

Some might consider these so-called failure bonuses to be a bad incentive. But Teller says it’s just smart business. The worst scenario for X is for many doomed projects to languish for years in purgatory, sucking up staff and resources. It is cheaper to reward employees who can say, “We tried our best, and this just didn’t work out.”

Recently, X has gone further in accommodating and celebrating failure. In the summer of 2016, the head of diversity and inclusion, a Puerto Rican–born woman named Gina Rudan, spoke with several X employees whose projects were stuck or shut down and found that they were carrying heavy emotional baggage. She approached X’s leadership with an idea based on Mexico’s Día de los Muertos , or Day of the Dead. She suggested that the company hold an annual celebration to share stories of pain from defunct projects. Last November, X employees gathered in the main hall to hear testimonials, not only about failed experiments but also about failed relationships, family deaths, and personal tragedies. They placed old prototypes and family mementos on a small altar. It was, several X employees told me, a resoundingly successful and deeply emotional event.

N o failure at X has been more public than Google Glass, the infamous head-mounted wearable computer that resembled a pair of spectacles. Glass was meant to be the world’s next great hardware evolution after the smartphone. Even more quixotically, its hands-free technology was billed as a way to emancipate people from their screens, making technology a seamless feature of the natural world. (To critics, it was a ploy to eventually push Google ads as close to people’s corneas as possible.) After a dazzling launch in 2013 that included a 12-page spread in Vogue , consumers roundly dissed the product as buggy, creepy, and pointless. The last of its dwindling advocates were branded “glassholes.”

I found that X employees were eager to talk about the lessons they drew from Glass’s failure. Two lessons, in particular, kept coming up in our conversations. First, they said, Glass flopped not because it was a bad consumer product but because it wasn’t a consumer product at all. The engineering team at X had wanted to send Glass prototypes to a few thousand tech nerds to get feedback. But as buzz about Glass grew, Google, led by its gung-ho co-founder Sergey Brin, pushed for a larger publicity tour—including a ted Talk and a fashion show with Diane von Furstenberg. Photographers captured Glass on the faces of some of the world’s biggest celebrities, including Beyoncé and Prince Charles, and Google seemed to embrace the publicity. At least implicitly, Google promised a product. It mailed a prototype. (Four years later, Glass has reemerged as a tool for factory workers, the same group that showed the most enthusiasm for the initial design.)

But Teller and others also saw Glass’s failure as representative of a larger structural flaw within X. It had no systemic way of turning science projects into businesses, or at least it hadn’t put enough thought into that part of the process. So X created a new stage, called Foundry, to serve as a kind of incubator for scientific breakthroughs as its team develops a business model. The division is led by Obi Felten, a Google veteran whose title says it all: head of getting moonshots ready for contact with the real world.

“When I came here,” Felten told me, “X was this amazing place full of deep, deep, deep geeks, most of whom had never taken a product out into the world.” In Foundry, the geeks team up with former entrepreneurs, business strategists from firms like McKinsey, designers, and user-experience researchers.

One of the latest breakthroughs to enter Foundry is an energy project code-named Malta, which is an answer to one of the planet’s most existential questions: Can wind and solar energy replace coal? The advent of renewable-energy sources is encouraging, since three-quarters of global carbon emissions come from fossil fuels. But there is no clean, cost-effective, grid-scale technology for storing wind or solar energy for those times when the air is calm or the sky is dark. Malta has found a way to do it using molten salt. In Malta’s system, power from a wind farm would be converted into extremely hot and extremely cold thermal energy. The warmth would be stored in molten salt, while the cold energy (known internally as “coolth”) would live in a chilly liquid. A heat engine would then recombine the warmth and coolth as needed, converting them into electric energy that would be sent back out to the grid. X believes that salt-based thermal storage could be considerably cheaper than any other grid-scale storage technology in the world.

The current team leader is Raj B. Apte, an ebullient entrepreneur and engineer who made his way to X through parc . He compares the project’s recent transition to Foundry to “when you go from a university lab to a start-up with an A-class venture capitalist.” Now that Apte and his team have established that the technology is viable, they need an industry partner to build the first power plant. “When I started Malta, we very quickly decided that somewhere around this point would be the best time to fire me,” Apte told me, laughing. “I’m a display engineer who knows about hetero-doped polysilicon diodes, not a mechanical engineer with a background in power plants.” Apte won’t leave X, though. Instead he will be converted into a member of the Rapid Eval team, where X will store his creative energies until they are deployed to another project.

Thinking about the creation of Foundry, it occurred to me that X is less a moonshot factory than a moonshot studio. Like MGM in the 1940s, it employs a wide array of talent, generates a bunch of ideas, kills the weak ones, nurtures the survivors for years, and brings the most-promising products to audiences—and then keeps as much of the talent around as possible for the next feature.

IV. The Invention

Technology is feral . It takes teamwork to wrangle it and patience to master it, and yet even in the best of circumstances, it runs away. That’s why getting invention right is hard, and getting commercial innovation right is hard, and doing both together—as X hopes to—is practically impossible. That is certainly the lesson from the two ancestors of X: Bell Laboratories and Xerox parc . Bell Labs was the preeminent science organization in the world during the middle of the 20th century. From 1940 to 1970, it gave birth to the solar cell, the laser, and some 9 percent of the nation’s new communications patents. But it never merchandised the vast majority of its inventions. As the research arm of AT&T’s government-sanctioned monopoly, it was legally barred from entering markets outside of telephony.

In the 1970s, just as the golden age at Bell Labs was ending, its intellectual heir was rising in the West. At Xerox parc , now known as just parc , another sundry band of scientists and engineers laid the foundation for personal computing. Just about everything one associates with a modern computer—the mouse, the cursor, applications opening in windows—was pioneered decades ago at parc . But Xerox failed to appreciate the tens of trillions of dollars locked within its breakthroughs. In what is now Silicon Valley lore, it was a 20‑something entrepreneur named Steve Jobs who in 1979 glimpsed parc ’s computer-mouse prototype and realized that, with a bit of tinkering, he could make it an integral part of the desktop computer.

Innovators are typically the heroes of the story of technological progress. After all, their names and logos are the ones in our homes and in our pockets. Inventors are the anonymous geeks whose names lurk in the footnotes (except, perhaps, for rare crossover polymaths such as Thomas Edison and Elon Musk). Given our modern obsession with billion-dollar start-ups and mega-rich entrepreneurs, we have perhaps forgotten the essential role of inventors and scientific invention.

The decline in U.S. productivity growth since the 1970s puzzles economists; potential explanations range from an aging workforce to the rise of new monopolies. But John Fernald, an economist at the Federal Reserve, says we can’t rule out a drought of breakthrough inventions. He points out that the notable exception to the post-1970 decline in productivity occurred from 1995 to 2004, when businesses throughout the economy finally figured out information technology and the internet. “It’s possible that productivity took off, and then slowed down, because we picked all the low-hanging fruit from the information-technology wave,” Fernald told me.

The U.S. economy continues to reap the benefits of IT breakthroughs, some of which are now almost 50 years old. But where will the next brilliant technology shock come from? As total federal R&D spending has declined—from nearly 12 percent of the budget in the 1960s to 4 percent today—some analysts have argued that corporate America has picked up the slack. But public companies don’t really invest in experimental research; their R&D is much more D than R . A 2015 study from Duke University found that since 1980, there has been a “shift away from scientific research by large corporations”—the triumph of short-term innovation over long-term invention.

The decline of scientific research in America has serious implications. In 2015, MIT published a devastating report on the landmark scientific achievements of the previous year, including the first spacecraft landing on a comet, the discovery of the Higgs boson particle, and the creation of the world’s fastest supercomputer. None of these was an American-led accomplishment. The first two were the products of a 10-year European-led consortium. The supercomputer was built in China.

As the MIT researchers pointed out, many of the commercial breakthroughs of the past few years have depended on inventions that occurred decades ago, and most of those were the results of government investment. From 2012 to 2016, the U.S. was the world’s leading oil producer. This was largely thanks to hydraulic fracturing experiments, or fracking, which emerged from federally funded research into drilling technology after the 1970s oil crisis. The recent surge in new cancer drugs and therapies can be traced back to the War on Cancer announced in 1971. But the report pointed to more than a dozen research areas where the United States is falling behind, including robotics, batteries, and synthetic biology. “As competitive pressures have increased, basic research has essentially disappeared from U.S. companies,” the authors wrote.

It is in danger of disappearing from the federal government as well. The White House budget this year proposed cutting funding for the National Institutes of Health, the crown jewel of U.S. biomedical research, by $5.8 billion, or 18 percent. It proposed slashing funding for disease research, wiping out federal climate-change science, and eliminating the Energy Department’s celebrated research division, arpa-e .

The Trump administration’s thesis seems to be that the private sector is better positioned to finance disruptive technology. But this view is ahistorical. Almost every ingredient of the internet age came from government-funded scientists or research labs purposefully detached from the vagaries of the free market. The transistor, the fundamental unit of electronics hardware, was invented at Bell Labs, inside a government-sanctioned monopoly. The first model of the internet was developed at the government’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, now called darpa . In the 1970s, several of the agency’s scientists took their vision of computers connected through a worldwide network to Xerox parc .

“There is still a huge misconception today that big leaps in technology come from companies racing to make money, but they do not,” says Jon Gertner, the author of The Idea Factory , a history of Bell Labs. “Companies are really good at combining existing breakthroughs in ways that consumers like. But the breakthroughs come from patient and curious scientists, not the rush to market.” In this regard, X’s methodical approach to invention, while it might invite sneering from judgmental critics and profit-hungry investors, is one of its most admirable qualities. Its pace and its patience are of another era.

V. The Question, Again

Any successful organization working on highly risky projects has five essential features, according to Teresa Amabile, a professor at Harvard Business School and a co-author of The Progress Principle . The first is “failure value,” a recognition that mistakes are opportunities to learn. The second is psychological safety, the concept so many X employees mentioned. The third is multiple diversities—of backgrounds, perspectives, and cognitive styles. The fourth, and perhaps most complicated, is a focus on refining questions, not just on answers; on routinely stepping back to ask whether the problems the organization is trying to solve are the most important ones. These are features that X has self-consciously built into its culture.

The fifth feature is the only one that X does not control: financial and operational autonomy from corporate headquarters. That leads to an inevitable question: How long will Alphabet support X if X fails to build the next Google?

The co-founders of Google, Brin and Larry Page, clearly have a deep fondness for X. Page once said that one of his childhood heroes was Nikola Tesla, the polymath Serbian American whose experiments paved the way for air-conditioning and remote controls. “He was one of the greatest inventors, but it’s a sad, sad story,” Page said in a 2008 interview. “He couldn’t commercialize anything, he could barely fund his own research. You’d want to be more like Edison … You’ve got to actually get [your invention] into the world; you’ve got to produce, make money doing it.”

Nine years later, this story seems like an ominous critique of X, whose dearth of revenue makes it more like Tesla’s laboratory than Edison’s factory. Indeed, the most common critique of X that I heard from entrepreneurs and academics in the Valley is that the company’s prodigious investment has yet to produce a blockbuster.

Several X experiments have been profitably incorporated into Google already. X’s research into artificial intelligence, nicknamed Brain, is now powering some Google products, like its search and translation software. And an imminent blockbuster may be hiding in plain sight: In May, Morgan Stanley analysts told investors that Waymo, the self-driving-car company that incubated at X for seven years, is worth $70 billion, more than the market cap of Ford or GM. The future of self-driving cars—how they will work, and who exactly will own them—is uncertain. But the global car market generates more than $1 trillion in sales each year, and Waymo’s is perhaps the most advanced autonomous-vehicle technology in the world.

What’s more, X may benefit its parent company in ways that have nothing to do with X’s own profits or losses. Despite its cuddly and inspirational appeal, Google is a mature firm whose 2017 revenue will likely surpass $100 billion. Growing Google’s core business requires salespeople and marketers who perform ordinary tasks, such as selling search terms to insurance companies. There is nothing wrong with these jobs, but they highlight a gap—perhaps widening—between Silicon Valley’s world-changing rhetoric and what most people and companies actually do there.

Explore the November 2017 Issue

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X sends a corporate signal, both internally and externally, that Page and Brin are still nurturing the idealism with which they founded what is now basically an advertising company. Several business scholars have argued that Google’s domination of the market for search advertising is so complete that it should be treated as a monopoly. In June, the European Union slapped Google with a $2.7 billion antitrust fine for promoting its own shopping sites at the expense of competitors. Alphabet might use the projects at X to argue that it is a benevolent giant willing to spend its surplus on inventions that enrich humanity, much like AT&T did with Bell Labs.

All of that said, X’s soft benefits and theoretical valuations can go only so far; at some point, Alphabet must determine whether X’s theories of failure, experimentation, and invention work in practice. After several days marinating in the company’s idealism, I still wondered whether X’s insistence on moonshots might lead it to miss the modest innovations that typically produce the most-valuable products. I asked Astro Teller a mischievous question: Imagine you are participating in a Rapid Eval session in the mid-1990s, and somebody says she wants to rank every internet page by influence. Would he champion the idea? Teller saw right through me: I was referring to PageRank, the software that grew into Google. He said, “I would like to believe that we would at least go down the path” of exploring a technology like PageRank. But “we might have said no.”

I then asked him to imagine that the year was 2003, and an X employee proposed digitizing college yearbooks. I was referring to Facebook, now Google’s fiercest rival for digital-advertising revenue. Teller said he would be even more likely to reject that pitch. “We don’t go down paths where the hard stuff is marketing, or understanding how people get dates.” He paused. “Obviously there are hard things about what Facebook is doing. But digitizing a yearbook was an observation about connecting people, not a technically hard challenge.”

Recommended Reading

Can Google Succeed as Alphabet?

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

The First Holiday Without a Loved One

X has a dual mandate to solve huge problems and to build the next Google, two goals that Teller considers closely aligned. And yet Facebook grew to rival Google, as a platform for advertising and in financial value, by first achieving a quotidian goal. It was not a moonshot but rather the opposite—a small step, followed by another step, and another.

Insisting on quick products and profits is the modern attitude of innovation that X continues to quietly resist. For better and worse, it is imbued with an appreciation for the long gestation period of new technology.

Technology is a tall tree, John Fernald told me. But planting the seeds of invention and harvesting the fruit of commercial innovation are entirely distinct skills, often mastered by different organizations and separated by many years. “I don’t think of X as a planter or a harvester, actually,” Fernald said. “I think of X as building taller ladders. They reach where others cannot.” Several weeks later, I repeated the line to several X employees. “That’s perfect,” they said. “That’s so perfect.” Nobody knows for sure what, if anything, the employees at X are going to find up on those ladders. But they’re reaching. At least someone is.

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FRAXA Research Foundation – Finding a Cure for Fragile X Syndrome

Accelerating Fragile X Research for Effective Treatments

Fragile X Syndrome Timeline

30 years of outstanding fragile x research - the fraxa timeline.

Discover the evolution of Fragile X research through the work of FRAXA Research Foundation, which is dedicated to finding effective treatments and ultimately a cure for Fragile X syndrome . This interactive timeline showcases milestones, breakthroughs, and key events that have shaped our evolving understanding of Fragile X syndrome.

Explore these pivotal moments to understand the unwavering dedication of researchers and FRAXA's far-reaching impact on countless lives. Join us as we look ahead to a future full of hope and promise for individuals and families affected by Fragile X.

Fragile X Gene Mutation Is Discovered

Fragile X Protein Is Identified

Fragile X protein is identified and cloned by the gene’s discoverers. This protein, FMRP , is lacking in people who have Fragile X syndrome.

FRAXA Research Foundation Is Founded

FRAXA Funds First Research Project

FRAXA Funds First Gene Therapy Study

FRAXA Start Fragile X Advocacy in Washington, DC

FRAXA Launches Fragile X Listserv

FRAXA launches first ever online Fragile X community “the listserv” providing a global lifeline prior to social media.

Fragile X Knockout Mouse Model Introduced

fraxa.org Launches

FRAXA Funds Dr. Hagerman to Run a Clinical Trial

FRAXA's Scientific Advisory Board Welcomes Nobel Laureate

Cause of FXTAS Discovered

First Nobel Laureate Conducts Fragile X Research

FRAXA Launches First Annual Fragile X Banbury Research Meeting

FRAXA organized and hosted the inaugural Fragile X Banbury Research meeting, which paved the way for many discoveries and trials. These meetings were held annually until 2011.

Children’s Health Act of 2000 Creates and Funds 3 Research Centers of Excellence

First National Fragile X Awareness Day

mGlur Theory of Fragile X Formulated

FRAXA Funded Researches Identify Specific RNA Targets of FMRP

FRAXA Funds First Clinical Trial of an Investigational New Drug

FRAXA Funds Clinical Trial of the Available Drug Lithium

Roche, Novartis, and Seaside Therapeutics All Join the Fragile X Syndrome Field

Roche, Novartis Pharmaceuticals, and Seaside Therapeutics all join the Fragile X syndrome field, hunting for mGluR antagonists to treat Fragile X.

Doris Buffett Challenge Doubles FRAXA's Fragile X Research Funding

New York Times Front Page Reports Success of Novartis Trial

FRAXA Drug Validation Initiative (FRAXA-DVI) Funded

FRAXA Starts Working with Tetra Therapeutics

First Use of Artificial Intelligence in Fragile X Syndrome

FRAXA Launches Collaboration with Purposeful

Positive Results Reported in Phase 2 Fragile X Clinical Trial of PDE4D Inhibitor

FRAXA-DVI Successfully Tests Available Medicines Predicted by Purposeful

FRAXA Launches World Fragile X Day

FRAXA Funds Clinical Trial of Drug Combination Predicted by Purposeful

FRAXA Passes the $30 Million Mark in Direct Research Funding

FRAXA Funds Collaboration to Build Drug Testing Platform in Belgium

Fragile X Banbury Research Meeting Returns

Multiple Large Phase 3 Fragile X Clinical Trials

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Disease X: A hidden but inevitable creeping danger

Muhammad junaid tahir.

1 Lahore General Hospital, Lahore, Pakistan

Imaduddin Sawal

2 Dow University of Health Sciences, Karachi, Pakistan

Mohammad Yasir Essar

3 Medical Research Center, Kateb University, Kabul, Afghanistan

Abdul Jabbar

4 Department of Clinical Medicine, Faculty of Veterinary Science, University of Veterinary and Animal Sciences, LahorePunjabPakistan

Irfan Ullah

5 Kabir Medical College, Gandhara University, Peshawar, Pakistan

6 School of Pharmacy, Monash University, Jalan Lagoon Selatan, Bandar Sunway, Subang Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia

To the Editor— An old adage says, “Prevention is better than cure.” Nothing exemplifies this idea better than “Disease X.” According to the World Health Organization (WHO), “Disease X represents the knowledge that a serious international epidemic could be caused by a pathogen currently unknown to cause human disease.” 1

Richard Hatchett, chief executive officer (CEO) of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), said about Disease X, “It might sound like science fiction, but Disease X is something we must prepare for.” 2 In a list of diseases that the WHO considers high priority in terms of research and development, Disease X occupies a spot among diseases such as Ebola, Zika, and coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). 1 Unexpected outbreaks of infectious disease (Disease X) have repeatedly rocked the medical confidence and have taken the medical world by surprise. 3

Some experts have even commented that COVID-19, caused by severe acute respiratory coronavirus virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), met the standards to be considered the first Disease X, 4 while some authors have called Zika a Disease X. 5 However, one unfortunate possibility is that COVID-19 and other recent pandemics might have been milder versions of what will eventually be the most prominent Disease X.

Disease X is supposed to be caused by a “pathogen X.” Such a pathogen is expected to be a zoonosis, most likely an RNA virus, emerging from an area where the right mix of risk factors highly promotes the risk for sustained transmission. 6

The WHO has been criticized for underreacting on pandemics such as the 2014 Ebola pandemic, 7 and as an organization with limited funding and weak political power, the WHO usually fails when it comes to timely and strong acts to reduce the spread of transmissible diseases. 8

A study that aimed at figuring out where the responsibility lies for the 2014 Ebola outbreak also concluded that while the WHO might have been partly to blame, it’s also the lack of cooperation from governments and delayed funding aggravates the situation. 7

Scientists have also commented that although the COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on the world, as soon as it disappears into the background, healthcare systems will remain the same. Politicians might use the weak recovering economy due to the pandemic as a reason to delay funding for epidemic preparation, as a result failing to produce timely effective measures. 8

Similarly, while emerging zoonotic pathogens are a threat that needs to be monitored, the possibility of an engineered pandemic pathogen also cannot be ignored. 9 The release of such pathogens, either through laboratory accidents or as an act of bioterrorism, might lead to a disastrous Disease X as well and has been remarked as a global catastrophic risk. 10

There is a dire need to seriously fund the surveillance of, research into, and treatment of emerging potential pandemic agents that could cause Disease X. 8 Despite the grim situation, steps can be taken to stop Disease X and to reduce the spread and damage of Disease X by properly and preemptively preparing for it. (1) We need to develop international guidelines to control bioterrorism. Bioterrorism attacks could also result in an epidemic, for example, if Ebola or Lassa viruses were used as biological agents. (2) Advice of the academics should be sought in a timely way without any political involvement. (3) Immediate and appropriate travel restrictions and airport screening will need to be implemented to contain the spread of pathogen X across borders. (4) The world’s scientists, clinicians, and infectious disease experts must act collaboratively to investigate, control, and eliminate the disease in a timely way. (5) Widespread testing and aggressive contact tracing can effectively contain the outbreak. (6) Timely investments can be made to accelerate the development, availability, and approval of medical countermeasures (like diagnostics, vaccines, and clinical trials) required before and during the pandemic. (7) Active surveillance of virus laboratories is needed to avoid a potential leak of a new virus.

A One Health approach has also been proposed that provides a complete way to address the underlying issues for the spread of Disease X: bridging institutional gaps, defining priority risk areas and pathogens, and emphasizing supposed risk factors for subsequent events involving emerging and re-emerging infectious disease pathogens. 11 The COVID-19 pandemic was not the first to wreak havoc on the world and it will not be the last. Thus, we need to prepare for the next outbreak as soon as possible.

Acknowledgments

Financial support.

No financial support was provided relevant to this article.

Conflicts of interest

All authors report no conflicts of interest relevant to this article.

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Three recent FTC enforcement actions reflect a heightened focus on pervasive extraction and mishandling of consumers’ sensitive personal data.

Proposed Settlements with Avast [1] , X-Mode [2] , and InMarket [3]

In mid February, the FTC announced a proposed settlement to resolve allegations that Avast, a security software company, unfairly sold consumers’ granular and re-identifiable browsing information—information that Avast amassed through its antivirus software and browser extensions after telling consumers that Avast’s software would protect their privacy, and that any disclosure of their browsing information would only be in aggregate and anonymous form.

In January of this year, the FTC announced proposed settlements with two data aggregators, X-Mode Social and InMarket, to resolve a host of allegations stemming from how those companies handled consumers’ location data. Both companies, the FTC alleged, collected precise location data from consumers’ phones through the data aggregators’ own mobile apps and those of third parties (via software development kits, or “SDKs,” provided by the data aggregators). X-Mode, the FTC alleged, sold consumers’ location data to private government contractors without first telling consumers or obtaining consumers’ consent to do so. And InMarket, the agency alleged, used consumers’ location data to sort them into particularized audience segments—like “parents of preschoolers,” “Christian church goers,” “wealthy and not healthy,” etc.—that InMarket then provided to advertisers.

Taken together, these matters reflect several common themes that highlight serious privacy threats imposed on consumers by business models that monetize people’s personal information.

• Browsing and location data paint an intimate picture of a person’s life, including their religious affiliations, health and medical conditions, financial status, and sexual orientation.

The FTC’s proposed complaint against Avast alleges that a sample of just 100—of the trillions—of data points maintained by Avast showed visits by people to the following websites: an academic paper on a study of symptoms of breast cancer; Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s presidential candidacy announcement; a CLE course on tax exemptions; government jobs in Fort Meade, Maryland with a salary greater than $100,000; a link (then broken) to the mid-point of a FAFSA (financial aid) application; directions on Google Maps from one location to another; a Spanish-language children’s YouTube video; a link to a French dating website, including a unique member ID; and cosplay erotica.

X-Mode, the FTC alleges, ingested more than 10 billion location data points—which the company advertised as being 70% accurate within 20 meters or less—that were linked to timestamps and unique persistent identifiers. Plotting this data on a map reveals each person’s movements, and the unique persistent identifiers make it easy to sync up a person’s movements with information—like each person’s name, email address, etc.—from publicly available sources or other data brokers.

Similarly, the FTC’s proposed complaint against InMarket alleges the company collected the precise geolocation information from 100 million unique devices each year from 2016 to the present, and cross-referenced these location histories with points of interest to identify consumers who had visited particular locations.

Browsing and location data are sensitive. Full stop.  None of the underlying datasets at issue in the FTC’s proposed complaints against Avast, X-Mode, or InMarket are alleged to have contained people’s names, social security numbers, or other traditional standalone elements of personally identifiable information (or “PII”). Indeed, the FTC’s proposed complaint against Avast acknowledges Avast’s use of a proprietary algorithm to find and remove these elements from its users’ browsing data before selling it. What makes the underlying data sensitive springs from the insights they reveal and the ease with which those insights can be attributed to particular people.

Years of research shows that datasets often contain sensitive and personally identifiable information even when they do not contain any traditional standalone elements of PII, [4] and re-identification gets easier every day—especially for datasets with the precision of those at issue in the FTC’s proposed complaints against Avast, X-Mode, and InMarket. Accordingly, the FTC’s proposed orders would require Avast, X-Mode, and InMarket to treat people’s browsing and location information as the sensitive data that it is. These companies, for example, would be subject to bans prohibiting the disclosure or use of browsing (Avast) and location (X-Mode and InMarket) information in various circumstances, and all three companies must establish and maintain robust privacy programs designed to protect their users’ browsing (Avast), location (X-Mode and InMarket

• People have no way to object to—let alone control—how their data is collected, retained, used, and disclosed when these practices are hidden from them. 

Avast, the FTC alleges, claimed its browser extensions and antivirus software would “block[] annoying tracking cookies that collect data on your browsing activities” and “[p]rotect your privacy by preventing […] web services from tracking your online activity.” But for years, the FTC alleges, Avast sold the very browsing information they promised to protect—often without any notice to users at all. Where Avast did describe its information practices, the FTC’s proposed complaint alleges Avast deceptively promised that any sharing would be in “anonymous and aggregate” form.

The FTC’s proposed complaint against X-Mode alleges in detail how the company misled people by asserting their location data would be used solely for “ad personalization and location-based analytics”—meaning consumers had no way to know that X-Mode also sold their location data to government contractors for national security purposes.

And as the FTC alleges in the proposed InMarket complaint, users of the company’s “CheckPoints” and “ListEase” apps had no way to know InMarket would collect their precise location information (often multiple times per hour) and combine it with data collected from multiple other sources to build extensive profiles for precise ad targeting because the apps’ consent interfaces only told people their data would be used for the app’s functionality:

• “Allow CheckPoints to access your location? This allows us to award you extra points for walking into stores” (CheckPoints app on iOS)
• “Allow Location Permissions to unlock reminders. Get a reminder when you’re in the store so you never forget to grab the items you need!” (ListEase app on Android)

Compounding the problem, the FTC alleges, were X-Mode’s and InMarket’s use of SDKs embedded in other developers’ apps to expand X-Mode’s and InMarket’s reach. When a developer incorporates a company’s code into their app through an SDK, that developer amplifies any privacy risks inherent in the SDK by exposing their app’s users to it. Often, such code may have location and other data tracking capabilities and, because the app developer is not the company that created the SDK, the app developer may not know how their users’ data will ultimately be stored, used, and disclosed. The developer, however, will know if an SDK requires access to location permissions before they add the SDK to their app.

Purpose matters.  Data handling must align with the purposes for which it was collected. Helping people prepare their taxes does not mean tax preparation services can use a person’s information to advertise, sell, or promote products or services. [5] Similarly, offering people a flashlight app does not mean app developers can collect, use, store, and share people’s precise geolocation information. [6] The law and the FTC have long recognized that a need to handle a person’s information to provide them a requested product or service does not mean companies are free to collect, keep, use, or share that person’s information for any other purpose—like marketing, profiling, or background screening.

The FTC alleges that Avast, X-Mode, and InMarket each ignored this basic principle, and the proposed orders seek to hold them to account. Under the proposed orders, for example, Avast will have to pay $16.5 million (which the FTC plans to return to affected consumers), and all three companies will have to comply with substantial limits on how they handle people’s browsing (Avast) and location (X-Mode and InMarket) data going forward—including provisions ensuring that people are able to actually consent to how their data is collected and used.

• Any safeguards used to maintain people’s privacy are often outstripped by companies’ incentives and abilities to match data to particular people.

The value proposition for many data purchasers is often the same thing that exposes people’s privacy: ever-more granular data, and the insights and inferences such data convey. Companies that sell or license data sometimes include language in their contracts prohibiting recipients from re-identifying the people in the data, or restricting how recipients use the data they buy. But not all contracts contain such prohibitions. Those that do are often still insufficient to maintain consumers’ privacy, even when bolstered by technical safeguards.

As the FTC’s proposed complaint against Avast alleges, some of the company’s underlying contracts did not prohibit data buyers from re-identifying Avast users. Under one such contract, for example, the FTC alleges that an Avast subsidiary granted a company specializing in identity services a “world-wide license” to use Avast users’ browsing information for “targeting, messaging and other data driven marketing activities served to consumers and businesses”—including “ID Syncing Services” and “Data Distribution Services.” And even where Avast’s underlying contracts included a re-identification prohibition, the FTC alleges that recipients were still permitted to match information with Avast users’ browsing data so long as the information was not “personally-identifiable,” and Avast never audited or otherwise confirmed that recipients complied with such prohibitions.

While the FTC’s proposed complaint against X-Mode recognizes that the company included some use restrictions in its contracts, [7] even when paired with technical measures and auditing requirements, such use restrictions may not deter misuse by downstream actors. And at least twice, the FTC alleges, X-Mode sold location data to customers who violated restrictions in their contracts by reselling the data they bought from X-Mode to companies even further downstream.

Companies must do better. Honoring privacy promises and obligations means implementing and adhering to safeguards that actually maintain people’s privacy. Promises and contract clauses are important, but they must be backed up by action. Going forward, the FTC’s proposed orders against Avast, X-Mode, and InMarket seek to ensure these companies comply with the law. In addition to prohibiting Avast, X-Mode, and InMarket from misrepresenting how they handle people’s information—including the extent to which consumers’ browsing (Avast) and location (all three) information is aggregated or anonymized (Avast) or deidentified (X-Mode and InMarket)—the FTC’s proposed orders require these companies to design, implement, maintain, and document safeguards to protect the  personal information they handle.

As these actions underscore, the FTC is committed to protecting people from the unlawful collection, retention, use, and disclosure of their information.

• Browsing and location data are sensitive. Full stop.
• Purpose matters: Firms do not have free license to market, sell, and monetize people’s information beyond purposes to provide their requested product or service.
• Companies must do better: Safeguards used to maintain people’s privacy are often outstripped by companies’ incentives and abilities to match data to particular people. Firms should not let business model incentives that focus on the bottom line outweigh the need for meaningful privacy safeguards.

“Across these cases, we have established that businesses by default cannot sell people’s sensitive data or disclose it to third parties for advertising purposes,” Chair Khan emphasized in her statement [8] accompanying the proposed Avast settlement. Collecting, storing, using, and sharing people’s sensitive information without their informed consent violates their privacy, and exposes them to substantial secondary harms like stigma, discrimination, physical violence, and emotional distress. The FTC will not stand for it. The Commission will use all of its tools to continue to protect Americans from abusive data practices and unlawful commercial surveillance. [9]

Thank you to the attorneys who led the investigations, and to all who contributed to this post: Andy Hasty, Noam Kantor, Aaron Alva, Elizabeth Averill, Bhavna Changrani, Simon Fondrie-Teitler, Alex Gaynor, Julia Horwitz, Amritha Jayanti, Nick Jones, Kevin Moriarty, Gorana Neskovic, Stephanie Nguyen, Brian Shull, Ben Swartz, Cathlin Tully, David Walko, Ben Wiseman, and Daniel Zhao. 

[1] FTC Order Will Ban Avast from Selling Browsing Data for Advertising Purposes, Require It to Pay $16.5 Million Over Charges the Firm Sold Browsing Data After Claiming Its Products Would Block Online Tracking (February 22, 2024), available at  https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/02/ftc-order-will-ban-avast-selling-browsing-data-advertising-purposes-require-it-pay-165-million-over .

[2] FTC Order Prohibits Data Broker X-Mode Social and Outlogic from Selling Sensitive Location Data (January 9, 2024), available at https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/ftc-order-prohibits-data-broker-x-mode-social-outlogic-selling-sensitive-location-data .

[3] FTC Order Will Ban InMarket from Selling Precise Consumer Location Data (January 18, 2024), available at  https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/ftc-order-will-ban-inmarket-selling-precise-consumer-location-data .

[4]  See, e.g., Luc Rocher, Julien M. Hendrickx, and Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, Estimating The Success of Re-Identifications in Incomplete Datasets Using Generative Models, 10 Nature Commc’ns 3069 (2019), available at  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6650473/ .

[5]  Notice of Penalty Offenses Concerning Misuse of Information Collected in Confidential Contexts (Sept. 18, 2023),  https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/NPO-Misuse-Information-Collected-Confidential-Contexts.pdf .

[6]  In the Matter of Goldenshores Technologies, LLC and Erik M. Geidl, FTC File No. 1323087 (2014),  https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/132-3087-goldenshores-technologies-llc-erik-m-geidl-matter .

[7]  For example, purporting to restrict recipients from using “the X-Mode Data (alone or combined with other data) to associate any user, device or individual with any venue that is related to healthcare, addiction, pregnancy or pregnancy termination, or sexual orientation.”

[8]  Statement of Chair Lina M. Khan, Joined by Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Commissioner Alvaro M. Bedoya, In the Matter of Avast Limited Commission File No. 202-3033 (February 21, 2024), available at  https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/2024.02.21StatementofChairKhanRegardingAvast.pdf .

[9]   FTC Order Prohibits Data Broker X-Mode Social and Outlogic from Selling Sensitive Location Data (January 9, 2024), available at  https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/ftc-order-prohibits-data-broker-x-mode-social-outlogic-selling-sensitive-location-data .

More from the Technology Blog

Ai (and other) companies: quietly changing your terms of service could be unfair or deceptive, a few key principles: an excerpt from chair khan’s remarks at the january tech summit on ai, keeping your privacy enhancing technology (pet) promises, tick, tick, tick. office of technology’s summit on ai.

X-ray fluorescence assists Purdue Health Sciences undergraduates with exposure science, environmental health and toxicology research

Health Sciences senior Anthony Bovenschen shows the portable “gun” piece of X-ray fluorescence machinery in the lab of Jae Park, Health Sciences associate professor. Tim Brouk

Anthony Bovenschen, a senior in the Purdue University School of Health Sciences , might have made the cast of “Vanderpump Rules” rethink their drinking habits had the results of his research study been different.

In fall 2023, the young researcher in associate professor Jae Hong Park’s lab investigated eight different bottles of various wines for traces of heavy metals — elements such as lead, arsenic and chromium that are harmful to human health. The work relied heavily on X-ray fluorescence (XRF), which uses X-ray technology to measure amounts of toxic metals in objects such as glass, cork and wine.

Bovenshcen did not find anything harmful within the wine or cork, but he did gain more research and lab experience. While medical school is the Honors College student’s goal after graduation, the four years he spent in Park’s lab have been formative and valuable for him as a future medical professional.

“I enjoy it so much, and I just know how important this could be as a stepping stone for students who want to go on to graduate or professional school or are trying to get a job straight out of college,” Bovenschen said. “This is a great thing to put on your resume.”

Acquired through a grant from the Provost Office’s instructional equipment program, this field-portable XRF machine represents a collaborative asset among Purdue Health Sciences faculty, serving both teaching and research purposes. While multiple faculty have XRFs in their labs, this field-portable machine stands out for its user-friendly interface, making it intuitive for Health Sciences undergraduate researchers from various labs to operate. Featuring a portable, handheld XRF “gun” for fieldwork, it is capable of conversion to a benchtop unit and can be seamlessly connected to a computer. This machine proves to be as versatile as it is invaluable for identifying substances hazardous to human health.

Scanning for elemental ‘fingerprints’

The field-portable XRF equipment comes with presets tailored for specific sample types.  During Bovenschen’s experiments in the fall, there was no preset specifically for wine, so the researcher utilized the “soil” preset instead. The machine conducted thorough analyses down to the atomic level, distinguishing between various elements and searching for potentially toxic heavy metals. The researcher sifts through the data, seeking the presence of the target metals.

“Every element has its own fingerprint,” Bovenschen said. “When the X-rays hit these atoms, they excite them. The X-rays rebound back into the machine with different energy levels, depending on what atom it’s hitting. The XRF is able to analyze many different metals at the same time, and it tells you the concentration in parts per million.”

Bovenschen utilized the benchtop mode, wherein the handheld XRF gun is securely fixed within a test stand equipped with a tray for sample placement and a sturdy lid, ensuring user safety by shielding them from any stray X-rays. With just a few clicks on the screen, he could obtain results within minutes. This user-friendly interface makes XRF technology accessible even to novice undergraduate researchers, allowing them to gain valuable hands-on experience safely and without direct exposure to X-rays.

Back to bioaerosols

As Bovenschen prepares for his May graduation, he is finishing his Purdue undergraduate research career on a bioaerosol project in Park’s lab. Bioaerosol is an inclusive term for air particulates of biological origins, such as viruses and bacteria, that can be breathed in and cause harm to humans. But regardless of the type of project, Bovenschen gained immense experience and confidence over his four years of lab experience as he explores medical schools.

“Just being around all this research, being able to talk to others about their work, not only is it getting skills in this area of science but also people skills,” Bovenschen explained.

Park agreed. The active involvement of undergraduates in research from the outset not only enriches their experience within Purdue’s College of Health and Human Sciences but also significantly bolsters their prospects for future career paths or graduate studies.

Thanks to Park’s initiatives and the utilization of cutting-edge technology like the XRF machine, students gain invaluable hands-on experience in the lab, coupled with essential proficiency in advanced technology. This comprehensive approach equips them to undertake a wide range of Health Sciences student projects with competence and confidence.

“Once they complete all the trainings, student researchers are free to use it,” Park said. “With XRF, they can measure the metals in cells, metals in welding fumes extracted from a factory and within respiratory filters. It has so many uses — easy to use and convenient.”

A View into the Generative AI Legal Landscape 2024

• March 7, 2024
• Aparna Sinha
• Ankit Tandon
• Jennifer Richards
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Over the past year, the legal technology (LegalTech) field has been experiencing a significant renaissance of interest in light of generative AI capabilities. Recent technical advances have improved the accuracy of generative AI applications, leading to a surge in AI-first LegalTech startups and substantial venture funding in the sector (~$700 million in startup funding since early 2023). However, the adoption of this technology faces serious challenges, including structural hurdles and incumbents’ strong advantage in accessing legal domain data.

Some key observations and highlights:

• Emerging technical solutions are addressing the main challenges of using Generative AI in legal applications, such as lack of consistency and accuracy, limited explainability, privacy concerns, and difficulty in obtaining and training models on legal domain data.
• Structural impediments in the legal industry, such as the billable hour, lack of standardization, vendor dependence, and incumbent control, moderate the success of generative AI startups.
• Our defined “client-facing” LegalTech market is segmented into three broad lines of work: Research and Analysis, Document Review and Drafting, and Litigation. We view the total LegalTech market in the United States to be estimated at ~$13B in 2023, with litigation being the largest category.
• LegalTech incumbents play a significant role in the adoption of generative AI technologies, often opting for market consolidation through partnerships or acquisitions rather than building solutions organically.
• Future evolution in LegalTech may involve specialization in areas such as patent and IP, immigration, insurance, and regulatory compliance. There is also potential for productivity tools and access to legal services, although the latter faces structural challenges related to the Unauthorized Practice of Law (UPL).

Our paper suggests that while there is significant potential for generative AI in the LegalTech market, founders must carefully consider the industry’s specific dynamics and structural hurdles when introducing new AI-driven technologies. Targeting less data-dependent areas, partnering with incumbents, or focusing on horizontal areas within LegalOps and regulatory compliance may provide better initial opportunities for startups. Despite the challenges, the momentum in LegalTech driven by generative AI should not be underestimated, as it has the potential to provide an unprecedented depth and understanding of legal practice.

To read our full paper, see here.

Convergent Research Announces Major New Funding Commitment to Forest Neurotech

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Initiative will transform neurotechnology with minimally invasive ultrasound

LOS ANGELES–(BUSINESS WIRE)–March 11, 2024–

Convergent Research today announced a new $14 million funding commitment from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt to Forest Neurotech , an initiative designed to create next-generation brain-computer-interfaces (BCIs) for individuals with neurological injuries or diseases. In addition to support from Eric Schmidt, Forest Neurotech has received funding from Griffin Catalyst, the philanthropic organization of Citadel CEO Kenneth C. Griffin, the Riley & Susan Bechtel Foundation, and James Fickel.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240311581698/en/

Forest Neurotech is developing a novel ultrasound-based BCI that can sense and modulate the whole brain without penetrating it. Most BCIs rely on invasive procedures that access a limited region of the brain while damaging brain tissue and causing harmful biological responses. Forest’s ultrasound technology reaches deep into the brain, providing researchers with a minimally invasive platform to develop diagnostics, monitoring, and therapeutics across the whole brain. This revolutionary approach opens a wide range of potential applications, from mitigating seizures to treating severe depression and more.

Operating as a Focused Research Organization (FRO) , Forest Neurotech is a new breed of non-profit startup. FROs are an innovative funding structure pioneered by Convergent Research , to support moonshot efforts that create new scientific tools and datasets. Forest’s state-of-the-art tools, research, and discoveries will be shared with the broader scientific community, aligning with Convergent Research’s commitment to open science.

Forest Neurotech was founded by Sumner Norman, Tyson Aflalo, and Will Biederman, leveraging recent advances in ultrasound neurotechnologies .

Convergent Research is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that pioneers the launch of Focused Research Organizations (FROs) to unblock research bottlenecks. We act as a venture creation studio for our subsidiary FROs, providing operational, financial, and legal support. Our core mission is to identify and undertake audacious “moonshot” scientific endeavors that are large-scale, systematic, and promise significant societal benefits-and which could not be addressed in our current scientific funding environment.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240311581698/en/

For media inquiries, please contact: [email protected] or [email protected]

VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings.

Research suggests that menopause explains why some female whales live so long

F emales of some whale species have evolved to live drastically longer lives so they can care for their families, new research shows.

The study focused on five whale species that—along with humans—are the only mammals known to go through menopause. The paper, published in the journal Nature , is titled "The evolution of menopause in toothed whales."

The findings show that females of these whale species that experience menopause live around 40 years longer than other female whales of a similar size.

By living longer without extending their "reproductive lifespan" (the years in which they breed), these females have more years to help their children and grandchildren, without increasing the "overlap" period when they compete with their daughters by breeding and raising calves at the same time.

This new research shows that—despite being separated by 90 million years of evolution—whales and humans show remarkably similar life histories, which have evolved independently.

The study was carried out by the universities of Exeter and York, and the Center for Whale Research.

"The process of evolution favors traits and behaviors by which an animal passes its genes to future generations," said lead author Dr. Sam Ellis, from the University of Exeter.

"The most obvious way for a female to do this is to breed for the entire lifespan—and this is what happens in almost all animal species. There are more than 5,000 mammal species, and only six are known to go through menopause.

"So the question is: how and why did menopause evolve? Our study provides some of the answers to this fascinating puzzle."

Menopause is known to exist in five species of toothed whale: short-finned pilot whales, false killer whales, killer whales, narwhals and beluga whales.

As well as outliving females of other similar-sized species, females in these five species outlive the males of their own species. For example, female killer whales can live into their 80s, while males are typically dead by 40.

"The evolution of menopause and a long post-reproductive life could only happen in very specific circumstances," said Professor Darren Croft, of the University of Exeter and Executive Director at the Center for Whale Research

"Firstly, a species must have a social structure in which females spend their lives in close contact with their offspring and grand-offspring.

"Secondly, the females must have an opportunity to help in ways that improve the survival chances of their family. For example, female toothed whales are known to share food and use their knowledge to guide the group to find food when it is in short supply."

Professor Dan Franks, from the University of York, said, "Previous research on menopause evolution has tended to focus on single species, typically humans or killer whales.

"This study is the first to cross several species, enabled by the recent discovery of menopause in multiple species of toothed whales.

"Our study provides evidence that menopause evolved by expanding female lifespan beyond their reproductive years, rather than from reduced reproductive lifespan.

"This is a question that has long been asked in anthropology, but can only be directly answered with a comparative study."

Commenting on parallels with the evolution of menopause in humans, Professor Croft added, "It's fascinating that we share this life history with a taxonomic group we're so different from.

"Despite these differences, our results show that humans and toothed whales show convergent life history—just like in humans, menopause in toothed whales evolved by selection to increase the total lifespan without also extending their reproductive lifespan."

More information: Samuel Ellis, The evolution of menopause in toothed whales, Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07159-9 . www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07159-9

Provided by University of Exeter

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March 11, 2024

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Male roundworms are picky when choosing a mate, new research finds

by University of Rochester Medical Center

A piece of rotting fruit is likely covered in hundreds if not thousands of microscopic roundworms, including C. elegans—a popular experimental model system for studying neurogenetics. With a lifespan of only a few weeks, C. elegans must reproduce quickly and often.

The species is made up of hermaphrodites and males . The hermaphrodites have female bodies, can self-fertilize, and can mate with males. Recent research from of the Portman Lab at the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester, found the males do not mate indiscriminately—they are selective about things like age, mating history, and nutrition.

"We have been aware of many of the mating cues this species uses, but this is the first time we have been able to look at them together to learn more about what they tell a male about a potential mate," Doug Portman, Ph.D., professor of Biomedical Genetics said.

"Assessing a mate's characteristics seems to be something that only the male does. Understanding sex differences in C. elegans gives us important insight into how genes influence the function of neurons and circuits to guide innate behaviors—like choosing a mate."

C. elegans is an invaluable tool to neuroscience research. Scientists have identified all of the roundworm's neurons—there are only a few hundred of them—and the connections between its neurons have also been mapped, providing a model for understanding how neuronal circuits work in humans. It is well understood that mating is a priority for male C. elegans.

Previous research out of the Portman lab found male C. elegans will suppress the ability to locate food in order to find a mate.

In a study appearing in Current Biology , the Portman lab conducted experiments to observe how roundworms in petri dishes choose between potential mates.

They discovered that the male worms used diverse chemical (pheromones) and physical (touch) signals to determine the sex, age, nutritional health, and mating history of the hermaphrodites.

Researchers found male worms can determine a hermaphrodite's nutritional status—whether it is healthy or food-deprived—and whether it has previously mated.

When given a choice, the males showed preference toward hermaphrodites that have not previously mated with another male and are nutritionally healthy. However, once a hermaphrodite is a few days old—approaching middle age for a worm—it puts out a powerful sex pheromone that attracts males over long distances. That is because it starts to run out of its own sperm, so finding a mate becomes more important.

"Each time we learn more about the role genetic sex plays in neural circuits to generate different behavioral outcomes, and the neuronal mechanisms that underlie them, we come closer to understanding the role that genes play in sculpting innate behavior," Portman said.

"We now aim to better understand how the male's neural circuits integrate different mating cues and arrive at a decision about what to do."

Journal information: Current Biology

Provided by University of Rochester Medical Center

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