One word: plastics.

The U.S. Trade Representative put Alibaba’s Taobao on its blacklist for the second year in a row over suspected counterfeits sold on the shopping platform, a move the Chinese e-commerce giant said did not reflect its IP-protection efforts.

Self-driving cars, a.k.a. autonomous vehicles, appear poised to take over the world. They’re everywhere, on movie screens and in magazine pages. The Jetsons-esque notion that a car could drive you to your desired destination — look Ma, no hands! — is beginning to sink in for many of us, even as we putter to work and other destinations in our exceedingly manual vehicles.

Target’s $7bn plan to fix its business paid off handsomely during the holiday season.

Eco-conscious diners can rely on restaurants to tell them their fish comes from a sustainable source, but it can be hard to know for sure.

After responding to increased demand from consumers, dairy farmers have now found themselves with a surplus of organic milk. Shoppers have been opting for plant-based alternatives like almond milk more often than organic cow’s milk, leaving the industry with more of the very perishable organic product than retailers can sell.

In August one of Silicon Valley’s hottest startups closed a $17m round of funding. The Series A had attracted some of the biggest names in tech.

In 2015 Nick Ouzounov and Alexander Lorestani applied to the San ­Francisco-based biotech accelerator IndieBio. The two Princeton Ph.D.s had an idea for a way to engineer a microbe that could build vast amounts of protein designed for specific functions. They envisioned that it could have biopharma applications, such as being used to produce insulin.