What would be the best way to deliver nutrition to the 7.1 billion odd people on this planet? Science would tell you that it is not the animals. Researchers at the Not Company (NotCo) which is a food-tech startup based at Chile have developed food products that is no longer based on animal ingredients but entirely based on plants. They use machine learning technology to develop tasty, nutritious and affordable plant-based food. However, the food looks and tastes like the classic (animal-based) food.

A good friend recently told me that it takes a special kind of nerd to appreciate what Google's AlphaGo did to international Go champion Lee Sedol: a nerd that is both a Go nerd and a computer nerd. For Go nerdiness, I am recently enamored with the massively complex game that has exponentially more outcomes and dimensions than chess. As for the tech nerdiness, many of us assumed that after DeepBlue beat Kasparov in chess, any other game was a foregone conclusion. But actually, it's taken twenty years for a computer to rise to the level of top-ranked Go players, because high-level Go incorporates less calculation of a limited set of future outcomes and far more intuition. Challenges like this are not just an interesting competition.

Any savvy investor with a hand in tech stock knows that an innovation gold rush is well underway. Although the market is viciously competitive, creative upstarts that aim to change the game in their field are increasingly gaining an edge over bigger, less adaptable entities. The name of the game is Change, so the companies to watch are those who are making the biggest waves in their industry, the ones who promise to disrupt the status quo, the ones who are launching new methods and ideas in stagnant landscapes. In 2016, these are just five companies to keep an eye on, because when their innovations go mainstream, we'll be looking at tidal waves. Ten years ago, when the concept of "the cloud" first got rolling, the public looked at the technology with a skeptical eye.

'We can presume that the goal of the EAGIs is to emancipate themselves from human control while also participating in the world economy which would be the most efficient way to acquire necessary resources (using the economic means or political means or a mix of both?).' The last phrase refers to an observation made by Franz Oppenheimer in The State. Oppenheimer noted that there are only two means of acquiring the resources necessary for survival, the political means or the economic means. The political means involve the threat or use of violence and/or fraud. The economic means is peaceful, voluntary exchange.

Quantum physics can fly in the face of human intuition--even that of a physicist such as Mario Krenn at the University of Vienna. This counterintuitive quality makes it difficult for researchers to design experiments to explore the field. Now, to avoid intuitive pitfalls, Krenn and his colleagues have devised a computer program to automatically design new quantum experiments that they would not have thought of themselves. The way that all known particles behave can be explained with quantum physics. A major feature of this branch of physics is that the world becomes a vague, bizarre place at its very smallest levels. For example, atoms and other basic building blocks of the universe can exist in states of flux known as superpositions, meaning they can seemingly be located in two or more places at the same time, or spin in opposite directions simultaneously; and with the phenomenon of quantum entanglement, two or more objects can get connected such that what happens to one instantaneously affects whatever is linked to it, no matter how far apart they are in the universe.

The James Webb telescope will be the world biggest and most powerful telescope when it launches in 2018. Nasa describes it as a'time machine' that can peer back 200 million years after the Big Bang. This week, Nasa engineers in Maryland got a little closer to launch with the completion of testing on its science cameras and the installation of the final flight mirrors. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope completed primary mirror sits in the cleanroom at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and supported over it on the tripod is the secondary mirror After over a year of planning, nearly four months of final cold testing and monitoring, the testing on the science instruments module of the observatory was completed. They were removed from a giant thermal vacuum chamber at Nasa Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland called the Space Environment Simulator.

Global technology leaders and senior executives from around the world spoke on a range of topics, including Digital India, Smart Cities, Make in India, Skill India and cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, 3D printing, drones, robotics, robotic surgeries and genomics, at the two-day EmTech India 2016 event, held in New Delhi on 18 and 19 March. The event was organized by Mint and MIT Technology Review, published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The speakers included R.S. Sharma, chairman of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India; John Chambers, executive chairman of Cisco Systems Inc. and chairman of the US-India Business Council; Una-May O'Reilly, principal research scientist, AnyScale Learning For All Group, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; and Harsh Mariwala, chairman of Marico Ltd. The full list can be accessed here. Here are edited excerpts from their speeches and discussions that followed. John Chambers, executive chairman of Cisco Systems Inc and Chairman of US-India Business Council (USIBC), reiterated the reason for his bullishness on India in a chat with Mint's R. Sukumar, on the first day of EmTech India 2016. When most of us here read the India narrative, it is not uniformly positive. Yet, you are amazingly bullish on the country. What do you see that others don't? Sometimes when you see what is happening in other countries and other businesses around the world from the outside, you are able to gather data very quickly, and then you can connect the dots on the market transitions. I am very bullish on the country for that very simple reason--follow and connect the dots on transitions. The transition to digitization will be the biggest technology change ever. I don't go into a country unless the leader, he or she, really understands this. Second, I don't go to a country that does not have sustainable differentiation capabilities.

The ability to access and use financial services is critical to managing day-to-day life, weathering unexpected events, and capturing opportunities. Yet, some 46 percent of working-age adults in developing countries remain excluded from the formal financial system. It means they use the age-old informal mechanisms such as the moneylender, the pawnbroker, or the rotating savings club that can be unreliable and very expensive. In developed countries, working families are more likely to be under- or badly served rather than outright excluded. In the US, for example, every year some 25 million households use alternative services such as payday lenders or check cashers.

How will Practo cope up with network connectivity when Internet penetration in tier 3 cities is not high? How can telecom operators play a role in aiding remote healthcare? Today, it is true that mobile broadband has not been fully covered in our country, but we believe that India will get there soon. Today, we have around 30 percent of our traffic coming from tier 2 and 3 towns, so we can say that the Internet has reached some parts of these cities. From the B2B side, our product Practo Tab runs our entire Practo Ray software in offline mode; hence doctors and other healthcare providers can use it in this mode and then synchronize it back with the cloud once they get connectivity.

Awesome post, Ray! It's always encouraging to learn that one is not alone in thinking there's a Tsumani of change ahead. And that we need to try and tame the beast, or the beast will tame us. I was yesterday at a (fascinating) breakfast seminar with a very small group of business leaders here in Argentina. One of the founders of the Singularity University was leading the debate. And one of the topics we discussed at large was the consequence of AI automating jobs… everywhere, anywhere.