This year’s Frontiers of Knowledge Award for the Biomedicine category has gone to the neuroscientists Edward Boyden, Karl Deisseroth and Gero Miesenböck. Their work involves the development of optogenetics, a technique enabling the study of the brain with unprecedented resolution, opening up new possibilities for research.

ABA English, the online English language academy whose growth is based on audiovisual content and technology, in May closed a funding round of 10.5 million euros.

Finnish ecologist Ilkka Hanski has been distinguished with the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Ecology and Conservation Biology for opening up a new branch of ecology – metapopulation biology – which combines field work and mathematical modeling to predict how species will be affected by the pressing problem of habitat fragmentation by human action.

Marvin Minksy, regarded as the father of Artificial Intelligence (AI), has died at the age of 88 as a result of a brain hemorrhage. In 2014, Minsky was awarded the BBVA Foundation 'Frontiers of Knowledge' prize in Information and Communication Technologies. He was a professor emeritus at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston and made significant contributions in the areas of mathematics, cognitive science, robotics and philosophy.

Neuroscientists Edward Boyden, Karl Deisseroth and Gero Miesenböck have been distinguished with the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge award in Biomedicine for their groundbreaking work in optogenetics, a technique that uses light to activate or deactivate proteins in neurons, enabling control over their activity with an unprecedented level of accuracy.

The 33rd floor of the new BBVA Bancomer Tower on Paseo de la Reforma is the newly opened headquarters of the BBVA Bancomer Innovation Center, the first of its kind in Mexico. It will be a meeting point for the country’s innovation ecosystem, which will bring together entrepreneurs, developers and startups.

Physicists Stephen Hawking and Viatcheslav Mukhanov have been distinguished with the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences for discovering that quantum fluctuations triggered the formation of galaxies formed during the first phase of the evolution of the Universe. The jury underscored that this insight, now borne out by space telescope observations, is a fundamental result in cosmology.

U.S. mathematician Stephen Arthur Cook has been granted the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Information and Communication Technologies category for his important role in identifying what computers can and cannot solve efficiently. His work has had a dramatic impact on all fields where complex computations are crucial.