Facebook posted its second quarter earnings for investors today. The social media giant reported $6.44 billion in revenue and $2.05 billion in profit. That’s a 59 percent increase over the $4.04 billion in revenue during the same period last year. Its monthly active users now number 1.71 billion, a 15 percent increase from this same period last year, and it has more than 1 billion daily active users on mobile, where 84 percent of its revenue is generated. If Facebook continues growing at this pace, it will have over 2 billion monthly active users by the end of next year.

Since its IPO four years ago, Facebook’s stock price has more than tripled. With Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp each being used by over 1 billion people, the company has proven that it can continue to grow. Facebook also appears to have figured out how to effectively monetize its apps, generating over 84 percent of its revenue from mobile users. And so far the vast majority of that revenue comes from Facebook and Instagram, with Messenger and WhatsApp still largely untapped.

Mark Zuckerberg is looking well beyond social networking for Facebook’s next act. The company is spending billions on research and development of virtual reality, high-speed wireless connectivity, and drones that beam internet access down from the sky with frickin’ lasers.

A group of researchers have identified a gene implicated in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a disease that attacks neurons in the brain and spinal cord. They identified the gene using funds from the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, which raised $115 million to benefit research on the disorder — which may mean Bill Gates got doused in freezing water for more than entertainment value.

The finding only applies to cases of ALS that are passed down through families; these are the minority of ALS cases, accounting for only 10 percent of patients.

The mutant gene NEK1 that the scientists identified was observed in 3 percent of ALS cases

The group, from University of Massachusetts Medical School’s Project MinE, used the genomes of more than 1,000 people with ALS who had a family member who was also made ill by the disease; they were compared to the genomes of more than 7,300 controls. The mutant gene NEK1 that the scientists identified was observed in 3 percent of ALS cases, the scientists wrote. It appears to be involved in a lot of functions in the body, including DNA-damage responses and the shape and structure of nerves.

Though the gene isn’t responsible for most cases of ALS, it may provide clues for scientists who are struggling to figure out its mechanism — just as the original finding of the APOE gene’s involvement in Alzheimer’s disease clued scientists in to the role that a protein called beta-amyloid plays in the mind-robbing illness.

The Ice Bucket Challenge, which swept across the internet from mid-July through August 2014, was a social media phenomenon started to raise awareness for ALS that gained popularity in large part because of the huge number of celebrities that participated. From Jimmy Fallon to Homer Simpson to Bill Gates, celebrities took to social media to share videos of their attempts. Even Donald Trump took the opportunity to douse himself in, of course, Trump-brand bottled water:

As the Internet of Things grows at a rapid rate, so does my skepticism for each additional “smart” product that makes it to market. The latest gadget of questionable necessity is a new line of smart shirts that are capable of detecting dangerous pollutants in the air. The concept is a cool fusion of tech and fashion, but I’m not sure how useful the shirts will be.

The three shirts, made by Aerochromics, are each built to detect either carbon monoxide, particle pollution, or radioactivity. Basically, when the shirts find dangerous levels of pollutants in the air, they change color, displaying a bold geometric pattern and alerting the wearer.

I’m not sure how useful the shirts will be

The way the shirts work is pretty complicated. The shirt that detects particle pollution, for example, has two small sensors, one on the front and one on the back. When particle pollution is detected, the shirt activates heat pads that change the white dots to black. In the carbon monoxide-detecting shirt, contact with carbon monoxide initiates a reaction with chemicals in the shirt’s dye to turn its black stripes white.

The shirts are meant to inform wearers about the air quality in their cities, according to Aerochromics founder Nikolas Bentel. “Knowing if an urban area is safe should be public knowledge,” he says. “The shirt completely changing colors allows people around the user to also be aware of their surroundings.”

While it’s nice to know when you’re breathing poisonous air, I’m not really sure what you’re supposed to do when your Aerochromics shirt suddenly changes pattern, indicating that the room you’re in has unsafe levels of radiation or carbon monoxide. For all its focus on sounding the alarm, Aerochromics doesn’t offer any suggestion of what to do after.

The shirts are meant to inform wearers about the air quality in their cities

Maybe that’s because the shirts began as a personal art project. Bentel was interested in exploring the future of urban living and the threat unchecked pollution poses to the environment. Once Bentel conceived of the idea for the detector shirts, however, he decided to turn them into a mass-produced consumer product, so that other people living in cities could easily see the quality of the air they breathe. “I felt that it was important to be able to sell the clothing to get the technology into the hands of real people,” says Bentel.

Ultimately, he hopes the shirts will create a dialogue surrounding the dangers of pollution in our daily lives. For those willing to shell out $500 to start that conversation, they are a great way to get the message across. For the rest of us, however, planting a tree might be the better option.

Netflix released its earnings report for the second quarter today. The company was one of 2015’s best performing stocks, but has seen its share price stumble in recent months on projections of slower growth. Today it reported $1.97 billion in revenue and net income of $41 million. Adding to worries about its growth, the company added just 1.54 million subscribers, well below its own projections of 2.5 million new customers. The stock is down around 14 percent in after-hours trading.

In its letter to investors, Netflix blamed the weak subscriber growth on churn, meaning older customers exiting. “Our global member forecast for Q2 was 2.5m and we came in at 1.7m. Gross additions were on target, but churn ticked up slightly and unexpectedly, coincident with the press coverage in early April of our plan to un­grandfather longer tenured members and remained elevated through the quarter,” Netflix wrote. “We think some members perceived the news as an impending new price increase rather than the completion of two years of grandfathering.”

The company stuck to its guns on the price hikes, writing that “while un­grandfathering and associated media coverage may moderate near­ term membership growth, we believe that un­grandfathering will provide us with more revenue to invest in our content to satisfy members, thus driving long­term growth.”

Netflix needs to increase revenues, because in recent years it has invested heavily in expansion and original content. These improvements have enticed subscribers to join the service; Netflix gained 13 million new subscribers in 2014, and another 17 million in 2015. In both years, Netflix saw new subscriptions spike in the fourth quarter, with the second quarter yielding the lowest number of new subscribers.

Today’s earnings report showed that the company may have seen the end of the explosive growth it generated in the run up to its expansion into 130 new countries. The company may soon have new upside in its domestic market, as it gains access to Comcast’s X1 box, and perhaps hubs for other cable providers in the near future, but so far, it’s not banking on these partnerships for new growth. In its investor letter, Netflix wrote it “does not include any boost in the US from the Comcast X1 launch due to uncertainty on timing as we and Comcast will only release Netflix on the X1 when the viewer experience is great.”

Great art has the capacity to transport viewers across the emotional spectrum. It can be revitalizing, devastating, beautiful, and terrifying. It can also be made by a hamster. The Hamster Powered Hamster Drawing Machine by Neil Mendoza is one such artistic rarity. Mendoza, whose previous creations include a magical hair creature and something called the Ponytron, has never shied from the experimental. In his latest work, a hamster running in a hamster wheel powers a complicated apparatus to draw, what else, a hamster running in a hamster wheel.

Silly as it may seem, constructing the contraption required an impressive amount of engineering and digital know-how. Mendoza generated vectors of the machine using openFrameworks and Box2D to precisely mill the two larger cams out of plywood. Using a Raspberry Pi and software written in openFrameworks, Mendoza transmitted the hamster onto an LED screen for a better viewing experience.

Hamsters are not the first animals to flex their artistic capabilities. And in the broader competition for non-human artistic supremacy, hamsters cannot yet rival Google’s DeepDream algorithms, an AI capable of creating entire art exhibitions and music collections. But a hamster is much cuter.

DO ANIMALS HAVE EMPATHY?