Two new projects, including one from a Pulitzer-winning reporter, claim they've solved the mystery of Bitcoin's creator. So why does the hunt continue? In December 2024, at the suggestion of a mutual friend, I met with a professional investigator named Tyler Maroney. He told me he was on a quest to discover the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin, and he felt that he had cracked the case. My first thought was, join the club. Literally dozens of journalists and investigators have spent months or even years trying to uncover the mysterious creator of the most popular cryptocurrency, who ended his (or her or their) online presence in 2011 and amassed around $83 billion in Bitcoin.

EXPRESSING A DISEASE: Want to know whether you have Covid-19 or even Alzheimer's? Artificial intelligence might soon have an answer just by listening to your voice. Leading researchers are developing technology that sorts through evidence of so-called vocal biomarkers to hone in on medical conditions that might not be detectable during routine office visits or exams. "This line might seem to have been lifted from a Star Trek script," said Bertalan Meskó, director of the Medical Futurist Institute. "But we are close to having such conversations with our computers."

EXPRESSING A DISEASE: Want to know whether you have Covid-19 or even Alzheimer's? Artificial intelligence might soon have an answer just by listening to your voice. Leading researchers are developing technology that sorts through evidence of so-called vocal biomarkers to hone in on medical conditions that might not be detectable during routine office visits or exams. "This line might seem to have been lifted from a Star Trek script," said Bertalan Meskó, director of the Medical Futurist Institute. "But we are close to having such conversations with our computers."

Late last year, I picked up John Carreyrou's "Bad Blood," which chronicles the long con pulled by Elizabeth Holmes, an entrepreneur who dropped out of Stanford at nineteen to found Theranos, a company that she claimed would reinvent the biomedical industry. I was instantly engrossed--"Bad Blood" unfolds like a thriller, offering a breathless barrage of details exposing how Holmes deceived her investors and colleagues at nearly every turn. Holmes wanted to disrupt the blood test: she boasted that her company was developing a method for running hundreds of lab tests from a single drop of blood, employing a machine called "The Edison" that used nanotechnology and robotics to analyze the sample. In just a few short years, thanks to Carreyrou's investigations and leaks from whistle-blowers, Holmes went from Silicon Valley's golden girl--named the youngest self-made female billionaire by Forbes--to a disgraced fraudster whose company was under investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. "Bad Blood" does a formidable job charting the Theranos ordeal, but it doesn't get into Holmes's head.

Silicon Valley has a term for startups that reach the $1 billion valuation mark: unicorns. It suggests not only that hugely successful startups are rare, but also that there's something unreal about them. Founded by a 19-year-old Stanford dropout, Elizabeth Holmes, who went on to become the world's youngest self-made female billionaire, it raised nearly a billion dollars from investors and was valued at $10 billion at its peak. It claimed to have developed technology that dramatically increased the affordability, convenience, and speed of blood testing. It partnered with Safeway and Walgreens, which together spent hundreds of millions of dollars building in-store clinics that were to offer Theranos tests. Tens of thousands of Americans had their blood tested by its proprietary technology. The problem was that Theranos' technology was never close to ready. In a series of devastating articles published in the Wall Street Journal starting in 2015, reporter John Carreyrou reminded us that unicorns are usually found only in fairy tales.

Last week, Business Insider reported that employees of the troubled startup Theranos had created a Space Invaders-style video game featuring the Wall Street Journal's John Carreyrou as a target. Carreyrou began reporting on the company in 2015 and revealed that Theranos was misleading investors about its technology. Theranos and CEO Elizabeth Holmes said the company could test just a small drop of blood for a number of diseases -- claims the company was never able to back up and eventually led to massive financial troubles, employee layoffs and fraud charges from the SEC. Today, Business Insider shared a video of employees playing the video game at the company. A number of people at the startup are said to blame Carreyrou for Theranos' growing problems and Vanity Fair reported in 2016 that staff erupted in a chant of, "Fuck you, Carreyrou," during a meeting.