Google is setting up its self-driving car unit as its own separate entity called Waymo under the Alphabet umbrella. The name is derived from its mission of finding “a new way forward in mobility.”

“We’re now an independent company within the Alphabet umbrella,” Waymo CEO John Krafcik told. He also noted that the Waymo team conducted the first fully driverless ride on public roads in Austin last year, using a car with no steering wheels and no pedals in “everyday traffic” on city streets. This historic first, fully driverless ride on public roads put Steve Mahan, a legally blind friend of Waymo principal engineer Nathaniel Fairfield, in the self-driving car solo.

Alphabet, Google’s new holding company and moonshot incubator, may soon take a crack at a longtime obsession of biological researchers: Deploying genetically modified mosquitoes to fight disease.

A Google engineering VP who co-created the Chrome browser says he wants to start a project that would genetically engineer mosquito's to help eradicate diseases like malaria and dengue fever. This trial was conducted by the biotech company Oxitec, who genetically modified male mosquitoes to pass on a specific mutation to their offspring — one that kills them before they are able to reproduce or pass on the disease.

Google is dead. Long live Alphabet. The tech company announced that it would rebrand itself as Alphabet – a new holding company whose largest wholly owned subsidiary will be Google.

In a surprise blog post made public after the stock markets closed Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founders, announced a radical shake-up of the company’s corporate structure and management, handing control of its core search engine business to rising star Sundar Pichai. The new company, Alphabet, will preside over a collection of companies, the largest of which will be Google. Even the site’s new address also eschewed convention.