As a kid, Mark Cuban sold stamps door-to-door and then gave disco lessons to help pay his way through Indiana University. Cuban first built streaming pioneer Broadcast. com with Todd Wagner in 1995 and sold it to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in 1999. Today, he owns a minority stake in the NBA's Dallas Mavericks and is cofounder of Cost Plus Drugs, which he launched in January 2022 with the aim of lowering prescription drug prices. See where the shark ranks among the top innovators on the #Forbes250# list. (Photo: Guerin Blask for Forbes)

Hey @grok, YES/NO Are they ALL of Jewish ancestry, even partially? 🔸 Magnus Hirschfeld — behind the world’s first major sex-change clinic. 🔹 Stanley Biber — pioneered sex-change surgery in America, performing thousands. 🔸 Reed Erickson — bankrolled early trans medicine in America. 🔹 Harry Benjamin — pioneered hormones and surgery for trans patients in America. 🔸 Norman Spack — helped open a pioneering clinic treating trans children. 🔹 Robert Spitzer — led the push that removed homosexuality from the DSM. 🔸 Gregory Pincus — behind the birth-control pill. 🔹 Karen DeCrow — a lawyer who pushed to rewrite America’s laws around divorce. 🔸 David Einhorn — helped pioneer the push to liberalize divorce in America. 🔹 Alan Guttmacher — led America’s birth-control push. 🔸 Robert Stoller — pioneered modern gender identity theory. 🔹 Harris Kornstein — helped turn Drag Queen Story Hour into a nationwide library movement for kids across America. 🔹 Leo Wollman — pioneered hormone treatment for trans patients in America. 🔸 Reuben Sturman — built America’s biggest porn distribution empire. 🔹 Bernard Nathanson — co-founded one of America’s main abortion-rights groups, NARAL. 🔸 Betty Friedan — a major force in the nationwide push to legalize abortion.

Pioneer Labs announced sPL.001 today which is a microbe engineered to grow on Martian dirt & turn it into building material. The organism is Cupriavidus necator, a bacterium that naturally stores carbon as PHB, a bioplastic. The recipe is genuinely elegant: 40 grams of Martian regolith per liter of water supplies nitrogen & phosphorus, while the carbon comes from acetate made from atmospheric CO2 using a small electrocatalysis device. Dirt, water & air in, printable plastic out. The reason regolith is hard: it's heavily salted & contains 0.5 to 4% perchlorate, a bleach-like compound that kills most lab strains. Getting a chassis organism to grow in that at all is the achievement here. The idea isn't new, which is a point in its favor. A 2015 study estimated that C. necator producing PHB on Mars could cut the shipped mass needed to 3D-print a six-person habitat by 85%. Pioneer Labs is trying to actually build the organism. Now the caveats. This is a company announcement with no paper and no peer review yet. The claim that one rocket's equipment yields a small city's worth of material in four years is a model, not a demonstration. Despite the terraforming language, the microbe lives in sealed heated bioreactors - their own roadmap describes indoor biomanufacturing as a stepping stone toward an outdoor organism, which is a much harder problem. Still, the framing is right. You cannot ship a city. You can ship a bacterium and let it eat the planet.

Aviation pioneer Wally Funk, who was the oldest woman to travel into space, has died at age 87. @rachelvscott looks back at her more than 60-year journey to launch into space after being told she couldn't go because she was a girl.

Internet pioneer and Domain Name System (DNS) inventor Paul Mockapetris on AI risk, human oversight and one of the “deep secrets” behind AI. From the @america250 x Forbes America Innovates stage. #Forbes250# #A250#

Introducing our new Pioneer Program: Create local content, i.e. guides, tutorials, discoveries on Bitget Wallet. Access exclusive Pioneer events. Earn rewards. Be featured. Apply here: More details: