It’s highly unlikely Uber actually had anything to do with 9 kilograms of suspected heroin and fentanyl, some in glassine bags stamped with the company’s name, that were seized by the Drug Enforcement Agency in New York on Friday. But, as Gothamist reports, one of four men allegedly found with the drugs was a driver for the ride-hailing service, and it’s certainly not the news the company needs after its recent troubles.

Fentanyl, the potent opioid often imported from underground factories in China, has been blamed for a rise in overdoses amid the nationwide addiction crisis. I wrote more about these high-potency drugs here.

In an interview announcing his new online Deep Learning course, the Google Brain founder and former head of Baidu’s artificial intelligence group, Andrew Ng, also weighed in on the debate over Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a threat to humanity.

“There seems to be a negative correlation,” Ng told Fast Company, “between how much someone knows AI and how afraid they are of it.”

For those keeping score, he is effectively taking Mark Zuckerberg’s side in a recent online spat with Elon Musk.

In the mid-’90s, Lonely Planet was one of the first travel brands to hit the web. Its site, which offers suggestions on what to do, where to eat, and how to travel, embraced the digital age head on, earning itself a place in the hearts of travelers everywhere.

Now it hopes that you’ll want to create some of that awesome travel content yourself. Today it’s launching Trips, a platform where anyone can post feature-rich accounts of their latest travel adventure, be it a trip around the world or a walk around the neighborhood. It’s sort of a Medium-meets-Instagram approach to travel reporting, where travelers can upload images and videos from their journey, write some text (or not), and then publish a pretty polished-looking post on the platform for anyone to see.

In a way, it’s a nod back to the company’s beginnings as a guidebook publisher. Lonely Planet launched over 40 years ago, focusing on physical books to help people plan their travels. Years later, it was not only one of the first travel-guide sites on the web, but one of the first third-party apps on the iPhone.

“[Lonely Planet] is a company that has for a long time been at the forefront of whatever new platforms were out there,” says CEO Daniel Houghton. He says guidebooks are still a huge part of the company’s business–and, of course, something it’s really proud of–but the brand is also always willing to try new things as well.

“We sell more books every year than we did the year before,” he tells Fast Company.

In 2016, Lonely Planet launched Guides, an app that brings guidebook-like content, with information on what to do and where to stay when you travel, to smartphones. The app was downloaded more than a million times over the course of the year. Trips is the first time, outside of its forums, where Lonely Planet has allowed its users to create their own content.

“[Trips] is kind of part two of our mobile strategy,” says Houghton. What you create is pretty much up to you, and it exists just within the Trips platform, not in Guides or any of Lonely Planet’s other products.

“It’s really travel inspiration, and helping people decide where they want to go just to learn about the world,” Houghton says. He sees people using the product to create professional-looking accounts of their trips that they then share with friends and family. Think of it like the turbocharged version of dumping all your vacation photos on Facebook.

“Some of the stories we’ve seen are really editorial and incredible narratives, and then some of them are more of just a ton of images with a map,” Houghton says. Flipping through some of the stories posted by beta users, you’ll find those that are just a few amateur-looking pictures, but there are just as many others that rival what you might find in a glossy travel magazine. Creating your own post can be done in just a few seconds if you’re only posting photos, or it could be a process you spend days on.

At launch, Trips is only available on the iPhone, but the plan is to bring it to Android soon. The company is taking a page from Instagram and only showing you content from people you’ve chosen to follow on the platform. A separate Lonely Planet-curated section displays highlights from those you don’t. Finished posts can be viewed in the app, but can also be shared with friends via SMS, or posted on social media. And friends and family can view those posts how they were originally created to be seen without having the app.

Unlike Instagram, there are no built-in filters or photo editing tools. You can’t even put two photos side by side on a page (the default is for them to be full-sized). If you want to do any editing, you’ll have to do it before you bring your pics or video into the app.

However, the platform is built to make your content–even if it’s just a few blurry pics taken on your iPhone–look like it was done by a pro.

“We’re really excited, because we’ve never had an opportunity for our community or our fans to jump in and share,” Houghton says. The hope is that, through sharing, users’ posts will inspire even more travels.

Abraham Lincoln may have perished from the earth in 1863, but he’s been a central figure in animatronics since at least the 1960s. Recently, the company responsible for Disney’s humanoid robots showed off a new fake Abraham Lincoln, with an eye-popping range of very realistic facial expressions (including, yes, an eye-popping one).

Developed by Garner Holt Productions, the technology originated, as so much does, in the military—and specifically in a Westworld-like simulation where the furniture is made of foam and the bad guys are made out of robots. As founder Garner Holt explains in a blog post:

We first implemented this sort of work in our projects for the U.S. Marines in the Infantry Immersion Trainer at Camp Pendleton. We created a series of animatronic townspeople to populate the immersive training environment—some of them were slated to be hostile combatants. An effective way to illustrate an animatronic character’s scripted intentions or whether they are friendly or hostile is through changing the figure’s facial expression—in this case, our figures could scowl or raise their eyebrows and smile or frown, all accomplished by mechanical means beneath the animatronics’ silicone face masks. It was a subtle yet very effective way to forewarn Marines that the “townspeople” they were encountering may be getting ready to attack.

The Infantry Immersion Trainer, a former tomato packing plant-turned-state-of-the-art urban training facility at Camp Pendleton, California, has used robot “surrogates” to train thousands of members of the Navy and Marine Corps since at least 2010. The point is to help reduce the cost of finding and hiring human actors to fill each individual role during training scenarios at this 32,000-square-foot, $2.5 million facility and other military simulators. A recent three-year program at the Office for Naval Research, the Human Surrogate Interaction program, is currently investigating how humans interact with virtual avatars, physical animatronics, and other types of surrogates.

“If human role players are not available because of cost or other reasons, this research will help us understand the type of surrogate to replace them with so that the level of training is not diminished,” Peter Squire, ONR program officer, said in a December statement. “The way people react to and interact with the different surrogates in this study is crucial to understanding how we can improve our military training systems.”

Capable of changing facial appearance and behavior “to represent people of different races, genders, and personalities,” humanoid robots, the Navy notes, have been used to “play the part of a local villager in Afghanistan seeking compensation for goats that had been killed,” for instance, and “been demonstrated in Sexual Assault Prevention and Response training scenarios, with a virtual surrogate taking on the characteristics of a victim or aggressor.”

How This Happened, And What Happens Next

Not all robots are created equal. While most animatronics move at a rate of 32 frames per second—including the Shaman character in Disney’s World of Avatar attraction, which Disney touts as its most advanced animatronic character on display—the Lincoln automaton can pull off 1,000 frames per second. That level of smooth realism is thanks to the latest in animatronic (or, if you like, autonomatronic) technology.

Miniature aircraft and industrial-quality servo-motors, now more widely available, allow engineers to cram many more functions within a smaller space. This allows for 45 individual actuators in the head—including 12 that operate just the lips, four on each eye, and so on. “These servo-motors are quite different from the traditional hobby servos used in movie animatronics or by the many expressive “robotic” heads being developed by universities and hobbyists,” writes Holt in a blog post.

A proprietary silicone skin mask attaches to the mechanical parts of the figure with dozens of unique flexible magnetic grippers, allowing it a balance of tightness and looseness. The skin, writes Holt, is “the real star of the figure, and is so malleable it can replicate wrinkling around the eyes, crinkling the nose, and a variety of strikingly lifelike creases that appear and disappear as the face moves from expression to expression—it’s incredible! Most importantly, it’s been thoroughly tested to prove it’s highly durable for theme park use.”

A new programming system to allow the large number of facial functions and speech-related motions to be processed at lightning speed. “With this sort of fluid realism, combined with facial recognition and tracking and other AI features, I believe we’ll soon be looking at animatronics that effectively blur the line between fantasy and reality.”

The new robo Lincoln is part of a new line of highly expressive motorized figures—Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Thomas Edison, and anyone you want to custom order—that GHP will offer to theme parks and museums as “turnkey” displays.

Meanwhile, robots good for military training could have a bright future as replacements for text placards or tour guides, argues Holt. “Something I’ve seen time and time again in attractions and exhibits is people lose interest in reading explanatory tags pretty quickly, and even videos lose interest after a minute or two in most settings,” Holt writes. “But people always listen and watch animatronics—they’re visually appealing, have a sense of magic to them, and, when done properly, provide an illusion of life that compels audiences to pay attention (with 30-50 functions in each face, the level of lifelike realism will, I think, be totally immersive).”

Lincoln has a long history as a robot: The animatronic Abe in “Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln” at Disneyland, which debuted at the 1964 Worlds Fair Hall in Chicago, is considered Disney’s first robot, and a landmark in animatronics. Using hydraulics, it could raise its eyebrows, move its mouth, and pinch its lips to make various speech motions, and could even move its teeth to simulate an “eff” sound.

In his blog post, Holt quoted an email from Bob Gurr, an Imagineer and Disney ride designer. “Having watched the facial animation progression from Wathel’s first efforts in 1955, thru Jack Gladish’s first Chinaman, then the 1964 Lincoln [through today], I’m probably the sole witness to all of it.” After seeing the new Lincoln face, he wrote, “I’m still flabbergasted.”

There’s more flabbergasting to come, apparently. A more advanced animatronic currently under way at the company involves a figure that can “track individuals in an audience, lock onto faces, follow specific faces, colors, or images (like logos or other insignia), and cross-reference what it sees with an index of faces and other images so that the character can ‘recognize’ individuals or specific insignia.”

Such animatronics won’t be confined to museums or Disney parks, either, Holt predicts: It may be altogether fitting and proper that they come home with us, too. “One day, robots with expressive faces like this may be in homes, and we’d love to be part of that.”

At this point, I’m surprised none of my friends or coworkers have had a stint as Tidal’s CEO. The Jay Z-owned music subscription service went through three chief executives in just two years and just hired its fourth: Richard Sanders, the former president of the Google-backed music royalties collection startup Kobalt, where he served for five years.

Even as the music subscriptions have exploded–and now make up most of the music industry’s revenue–Tidal has struggled to grow past a few million customers, despite the star power of Jay Z and several other big name artist co-owners. Earlier this year, the company got a $200 million investment from Sprint in exchange for ownership of one-third of the company. The Sprint deal offers Tidal access to the mobile carrier’s millions of customers, although the specifics of the deal and what it means for Tidal’s subscriber base have yet to be fully defined. Spotify recently reported that it has 60 million paying subscribers, while Apple Music is catching up with nearly half that.

Tidal—which is also in a dispute with Kanye West over money he says he’s owed—has been without a chief executive since March of this year, when then CEO Jeff Toig quietly left the company. Toig previously served a short stint at the beleaguered SoundCloud as its chief business officer.

Read more: Spotify’s Plan To Win Over Anxious Artists–And Win The Streaming War

The Hyperloop will allow us to move further away from the center of cities as commuting times get faster, they say. It will support subways, buses, and light rails! It will reduce congestion! It will be as affordable as a Greyhound! You’ll even be able to catch a ride more quickly than you would the subway (especially, one figures, the New York City subway).

“We have plenty of mini-platforms within each station to make sure everyone can can comfortably board and exit their pod,” the team building the high-speed vacuum tube transit system at Hyperloop One, wrote in an Ask Me Anything question and answer session on Reddit. The team—now in competition with the Boring Company, founded by the technology’s initial designer Elon Musk—staged its first, 192-mph pod test this month in Nevada.

What will it actually be like to ride the Hyperloop? Well, you won’t be jolted back in your seat when it takes off. And boarding and deplaning will involve a depressurization process akin to the way airlocks in space work, the group says. But what about in an emergency situation? The system would (hopefully!) ferry people to the closest station or a safe point along the way as long as they have power (not to worry, there will be redundancies!). Pods will also be programmed to be collision-avoidant and the crew says it’s thinking about ways to mitigate the effects of earthquakes. Certainly, they are keeping their eyes on the prize: “We are always interested in better ways to get good tacos faster.”

The team did not say if that will require constructing a Hyperloop over the Mexican border.

Read more: Breathless coverage of Elon Musk is exactly how fake news begins

As Snap stares down its second earnings report, its stock price is hovering somewhere around $13, nearly half of Snap’s share price during its IPO back in March. With its lockup period lifted, Snap’s early investors are now allowed to sell off their stock, and come August 14, its employees will be free to do so as well.

In five short months, the lukewarm response to Snap’s much-hyped IPO has turned the company into something of a cautionary tale for startups eager to go public. (Even Morgan Stanley, which helped take Snap public, downgraded its stock last month.) Will Snap’s earnings report on Thursday change that? Or will it reflect the biggest issue raised by its Q1 earnings results and post-IPO performance—that Facebook could be a serious threat to Snap’s bottom line?

Last quarter, Snap gained 8 million daily active users, bringing its total count to 166 million daily active users. But Instagram Stories—a knockoff of Snapchat’s Story feature—had clocked 250 million daily active users as of June. That makes sense: Instagram had a built-in user base of more than 500 million users when it launched Stories a year ago. For brands and influencers with loyal audiences on Instagram, it’s a no-brainer: Instagram Stories is more intuitive than Snapchat and allows Instagram users to reach their followers without the hassle of switching apps or luring their audience to another platform.

While Instagram is the biggest offender, Facebook has also infused its other platforms—WhatsApp, Messenger, and Facebook’s flagship app—with features borrowed from Snap. In fact, Facebook is enough of a threat that Snap even considered taking the issue to antitrust regulators, as The Information reported today. Also coming down the pipeline is Stamp, Google’s response to Snapchat’s Discover platform, which is already being tested with publishers. All of this seemingly doesn’t bode well for Snap’s user growth—or retention, presumably.

The Value Of A Snapchatter: Now Up To $1.19

That being said, Snap claimed in its IPO filing that it can generate revenue from existing users in developed areas—which, if true, means Snap doesn’t need to rely on bringing in new users. In other words, if Snap can’t lean on user acquisition the way Facebook can, it needs users with disposable income. (You might recall reports—which Snap denied, of course—that CEO Evan Spiegel said Snap wasn’t interested in expanding to “poor countries like India.”)

To that end, while some advertisers may be shifting to Instagram, the likes of advertising giant WPP have decided to invest more heavily in Snapchat this year; Snap has also upped its ad tech to make Snapchat more appealing to larger advertisers. According to Recode, Snap’s average revenue generated per user is estimated at $1.19 for Q2, which is an increase of 138% from the same quarter last year. That indicates slower year-over-year growth than what Snap recorded during the past two quarters, but it’s something for shareholders to hold onto.

Since its IPO filing, Snap has insisted on calling itself a camera company. But one of its biggest investments continues to be content. Snap recently inked a $100 million two-year deal with Time Warner, which will produce 10 original shows per year. Snap also has deals in place with ABC, NBC, ESPN, and countless other media companies. And earlier today, Axios reported that Snap’s first original show, Good Luck America, boasted five million unique viewers per episode during its second season; in total, the show’s second season drew 29 million unique viewers. Maybe—again—Snap is onto something after all.

Sorry, Netflix: Disney is going over the top.

During a mixed third-quarter earnings call on Tuesday, Disney CEO Bob Iger announced that the company is ending its licensing deal with Netflix and will start offering Disney and Pixar movies on a Disney-branded subscription service starting in 2019. Iger also said that Disney is launching an ESPN OTT service as the company moves aggressively into the direct-to-consumer space.

Making this pivot possible is a $1.58 billion investment by Disney in BAMTech, the streaming company founded by Major League Baseball. Last year, Disney acquired a 33% stake in BAMTech for $1 billion, but its new stake makes Disney the majority owner.

“This acquisition and the launch of our direct-to-consumer services mark an entirely new growth strategy for the company, one that takes advantage of the incredible opportunity that changing technology provides us to leverage the strength of our great brands,” said Iger.

The news captivated analysts on the earnings call and steered conversation away from Disney’s uneven financial report for the third quarter. Disney reported quarterly revenue of $14.2 billion, about $180 million less than Wall Street expected, mainly due to the still-ailing ESPN. But profit was $1.58 per share, three cents more than anticipated in part due to better-than-expected performances from the international parks business, namely Shanghai Disney Resort and Disneyland Paris, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. Company shares fell 3% in after-hours trading.

In the U.S. the new Disney app will be the exclusive, subscription video-on-demand home to upcoming releases such as the Frozen sequel, Toy Story 4, and the live-action version of The Lion King. It will also offer access to Disney’s library of TV shows and movies, as well as new, original Disney shows and movies that will be created for the service.

Notable Exceptions

For now, no Marvel or Lucasfilm movies will be part of the app as Disney determines how best to position them to the consumer. Iger said the company had “talked about” launching separate Marvel and Star Wars apps, but that “we have to be mindful of the volume of product. We want to be careful.”

As for the ESPN-branded, multi-sporting app, it will launch in early 2018 and will include about 10,000 live games from major sporting leagues as well as collegiate sports. So far, there’s no word yet as to whether NFL or NBA games will be on the service. The new app is an “enhanced” version of the current ESPN app, which will continue to allow pay TV subscribers access to ESPN programming.

Iger would not specify how much either of the new services will cost. But he said that these two moves were a “huge priority” for Disney as well as “a strategic shift in the way we distribute our content.” It’s long been anticipated that Disney would follow in the footsteps of media companies like HBO and CBS and begin to offer its content directly to consumers, but the abrupt divorce from Netflix came as a surprise. The 2012 licensing deal between the two companies was seen as a huge coup for Netflix (though Disney benefited as well, and was richly compensated), for which kids programming is a key selling point. Shares for Netflix dropped 4% in after-hours trading.

Related: This Uncanny Disney-Bound Robot Abraham Lincoln Got His Start As An Enemy Combatant

The rap artist launched L.A.-based Casa Verde. which specializes in one of his passions: cannabis-related startups and products.

Airbus subsidiary Transpose has designed a modular system that would completely alter the air travel experience.

Every port-a-potty in the state of Oregon was reserved months ago. In a small town in Kentucky, workers are planning to disable the automated street lights that turn on in the dark. Officials in Wyoming–and 13 other states–are readying for the worst-imaginable traffic jams.

All of this for the sake of two minutes on a summer Monday, when the moon will block out the sun and the sky will darken.

Public safety officials, festival planners, and astronomy enthusiasts across the country are amping up for what’s expected to be the most-viewed total solar eclipse in history on August 21.

“It’s essentially like hosting the Super Bowl without having to build a stadium,” says Brooke Jung, the full-time eclipse marketing and events consultant in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, a town of 31,000 people located 75 miles northwest of Nashville that is expecting among the most visitors–up to 100,000 eclipse enthusiasts from 37 states and 14 countries (and the Vatican)–to flood its gates for the big event.

“We think that BEST place is here with us in #Eclipseville at the Point of Greatest Eclipse!”–its Hopkinsville Eclipse Twitter account proudly stated in May in response to a social media user’s query.

Other locations might beg to differ. Carbondale, Illinois touts that it is nearest to the point of the “longest eclipse,” at two minutes and 42 seconds, and Nashville notes it’s the largest city on the path of the “once-in-a-lifetime celestial event.” Like to be close to the sky? Casper, Wyoming, where AstroCon will be held that weekend, talks up its high elevation and great weather, and people will flood the Great Smoky Mountains for an elevated view of the moon’s shadow rushing across the valley below. If you prefer flat corn fields, check out Nebraska’s “broad horizons.” Science nerds are going to Oregon to attend Atlas Obscura’s celebration of this “rare astronomical event on a gorgeous, secluded farm,” and minor league baseball fans will head to the stadium of the Volacnoes, Salem, Oregon’s minor league baseball team, for what is apparently the first-ever “eclipse delay” in this history of the sport.

What if you want to attend the “most exclusive” eclipse party? If you have $80,000 handy, there’s Big Mountain Heli Tours, which has obtained a first-ever permit from the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs to land six guest to camp near the summit of Oregon’s second tallest peak.

Clearly, any definition of the “best” is ultimately unpredictable and subjective. It will be dependent on local weather conditions that day, as well as factors like good road networks, elevation, the beauty of the surrounding landscape, crowds, and other activities available. In some states, nearby forest fires can be a last-minute visibility issue in summer as well.

Eclipse expert Jay Anderson, who has analyzed historical weather patterns along the totality path, says places in central Oregon, southern Idaho, central Wyoming, and western Nebraska have the best chance of cloud-free skies. Proximity to good highways is a plus, allowing go-getters to drive elsewhere to avoid last-minute cloud cover. In fact, the Federal Highway Administration sent out guidelines to towns near the path of the eclipse to help them prepare for the massive traffic anticipated around the event, suggesting postponing planned construction and partnering with Waze to offer alternate routes.

“Without doubt, some areas expected to be sunny will be cloudy and some areas with a cloudy history will be sunny,” Anderson said in an email, while scouting locations for the 2019 eclipse that will be visible in Peru. (He once learned disappointment the hard way in South Africa, when last-minute clouds, a river, and an international border blocked his path to a great eclipse view.)

Dallas, Oregon Mayor Brian Dalton proudly noted his town made a newspaper’s list of prime viewing spots in Oregon, which is the state expected to attract the most out-of-state visitors overall, with its great weather and host of festivals, like SolarFest, the Moonshadow Festival, and what looks like the Burning Man of the northwest.

“We’re the first [state] to see the eclipse. Our weather is better than any other place, and people seem to like the idea of Oregon,” said Dalton. (Does any of this beat Ozzy Osborne’s Moonstock eclipse festival in Carterville, Illinois? Hard to say).

Others are keeping it low-key. Jackson, Wyoming hasn’t spent time or money promoting itself at all, but this is more of a humblebrag: Jackson, near Grand Teton National Park, is already at its peak tourist capacity in August. (Anderson himself will be watching from there: “It’s a spectacular venue, though not quite the best for weather,” he said.)

“We’re kind of a unique case because we already get huge numbers of people here every summer,” said Wyoming Stargazing founder Samuel Singer, who has attended planning meetings and is hosting a fundraiser that weekend for building a permanent astronomical observatory in town.

Anderson calls the hoopla and marketing around the eclipse a “somewhat pleasant surprise.” He remembers that the last total solar eclipse to touch the contiguous U.S. in 1979 was plagued by “irrational” fears that seeing it would blind people, he said (Note: It is important to wear safety glasses).

“Because the eclipse is ‘monetized,’ the inane comments about viewing safety and only watching on TV have gone by the board,” he says. “To be blunt, money has overcome fear.”

Dalton says the internet has helped. “We talk about something called FOMO–fear of missing out. I see that as a big factor.” What is he most nervous about for the big day? “Quite frankly, what if we gave a party and nobody came?”

When the next Elon Musk SpaceX supply rocket blasts off Thursday for the International Space Station, it will be carrying some extra special cargo—hope in the war on Parkinson’s Disease.

The hope comes in the form of a protein that, when mutated, can cause and accelerate the debilitating damage Parkinson’s wreaks.

Researchers funded by the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, are sending frozen samples of the protein, called LRKK2, in a specialized piece of lab equipment. Once aboard the orbiting space station, the proteins will be thawed and, the hope is, grown into crystals in tiny, test tube-like wells.

These LRRK2 crystals will better reveal the protein’s structure than what scientists can see on earth. The crystals will be returned to terra firma, where researchers will use the data to potentially develop protein inhibitors that target LRKK2.

“The opportunity to crystallize LRKK2 under microgravity conditions could mean faster progress toward breakthroughs that could benefit countless Parkinson’s patients and families,” says Deborah Brooks, cofounder and vice chair of Fox’s foundation.

The Promise Of Space Research

The project is just one of myriad biomedical experiments taking advantage of how living things, and the chemical compounds inside of them, operate in the low gravity of space.

In space, medically important chemicals, from proteins formed in the body to potential new drugs, develop into larger and better organized forms.

“They’re then brought back to earth so the researchers can better understand the structure of either the drug they’re making or the protein they’re targeting,” says Michael Roberts, deputy chief scientist at the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, which runs the International Space Station National Lab.

The in-space experiments can help answer important scientific questions about complex biological processes and the causes of various diseases.

“I think we can safely say that this really, truly is a new frontier in medicine,” says Kris Kimel, chairman and cofounder of SpaceTango, a Lexington, Ky., startup that runs automated lab facilities on the space station.

Major pharmaceutical companies like Eli Lilly, Novartis, and Merck have also been working with CASIS to take advantage of microgravity research. The work may one day lead to space-based manufacturing of drugs, or even new therapies that can be performed on patients flown into space.

In June, CASIS announced plans to bring futuristic research tools called organs on chips to the space station. Those are tiny, microchip-like devices embedded with living cells that will react in space as if the full organ was there.

For instance, lung cells might be exposed to physical forces like breathing. Scientists are betting that bringing these chips into limited gravity will make it easier for them to form 3D structures, rather than the more two-dimensional ones that form on earth.

Lab Mice Take Orbit

The space station also hosts rodent lab facilities, where low gravity’s effect on the body—including mineral loss and muscle atrophy—can be studied in mice. That could help develop remedies for future astronauts facing similar effects or for earthbound humans, including the elderly, dealing with similar symptoms.

NASA and CASIS are working to boost the space station’s capacity for rodent experiments, and part of that involves enabling more automated systems to monitor the mice and keep them stocked with food and water, Roberts says.

One limitation of space research is that the academic and commercial scientists who design experiments don’t leave earth, meaning any research that needs human help must compete for astronaut time.

That’s also where SpaceTango’s TangoLab system can be of help. The company works with scientists to adapt their experiments to standardized modules, which can be installed in a low-maintenance lab unit that SpaceX delivered to the space station in August 2016.

SpaceTango CEO Twyman Clements says it’s similar to loading memory into a desktop computer. The company’s first for-hire experiments, launched in February, include an Airbus-led study exploring how a strain of methane-producing bacteria behaves in space, and a University of Kentucky study involving medicinal plant biochemistry.

“To the astronaut, basically, the operations are the same no matter what the experiment is,” says Clements. “We’re able to remotely control and monitor everything from our ground station here in Lexington.”

Boosting experimental capacity and efficiency is also important to the pharmaceutical industry, which must conduct multiple tests of potential drugs. Until recently, opportunities to conduct in-space experiments were few and far between, since space launches were so rare.

“If you got an experiment up during the shuttle days, you got to run one cycle of experiments and maybe five or eight years later, you got to go up and run it again,” says Kyle Keeney, executive director of the Exomedicine Institute, which promotes space-based research in collaboration with SpaceTango. “The scientific method has really been challenged, because we haven’t, until now, had the ability to quickly, and efficiently, and in a cost-effective way, replicate experiments.”

Medical research is even being conducted separate from the ISS. SpacePharma, a startup with offices in Palo Alto, Israel, and Switzerland, launched a fully automated, satellite-based lab in February.

Founder and CEO Yossi Yamin says the machine has already conducted three experiments in space, including one studying the rate of enzyme reactions, and one assembling protein structures in ways not seen on earth. SpacePharma plans to launch a redesigned satellite next year with room for up to 160 experiments.

If you’re a longtime Gmail user who has the service meticulously fine-tuned, you may have felt a mix of intrigue and skepticism when Google announced its next-gen email interface, Inbox, nearly three years ago. You might have even tried it out for a while before moving back to the comfortable environs of Gmail.

That’s exactly what happened to me. I was a textbook Gmail power user, with a deeply lived-in setup so customized it felt like my own personal productivity cave. It was complex as can be, with layers upon layers of labels, filters, and Labs-added features. I’d created a bit of a monster, to be sure—but email itself was an untameable beast, I told myself, and sometimes you have to fight fire with fire.

When Inbox came along in 2014, I was enchanted by its clean and modern interface and the clever ways it promised to make email easier. My initial affair with Inbox lasted a mere six weeks before I went running back into Gmail’s arms—but then, months later, I decided to give it another go.

And you know what? That second try stuck, and I haven’t looked back since. Inbox has genuinely transformed the way I think about email. It’s made me more productive and less frustrated than ever—and it just might be able to do the same for you.

Coming from a committed Gmail user’s perspective, I’ve learned a few things about what it takes to successfully embrace Inbox and make the most of its assets. If you just open the Inbox app or website and jump in without proper preparation, you’re almost certain to get caught up in the clutter and fail to appreciate the service’s strengths—and that’d be a waste of both your time and Inbox’s potential.

Here’s what you need to do to give Inbox a fair shake and fully experience its organizational advantages:

1. Give Yourself A Fresh Start

When you open Inbox for the first time (or the first time in a long while), it’s bound to look like a mind-boggling mess. You’ll see clusters of messages organized in weird ways—maybe even mixed in with ancient reminders from other Google apps—and all your usual systems for email management will be upside down or MIA.

Don’t panic. Inbox offers its own system for email management, and if you truly want to see how it can make you more productive, you’re going to have to clear out the dust from your past and let the service begin with a clean slate.

Go through your inbox and—brace yourself!—prepare to get rid of everything. Having all that stuff in there isn’t doing you any good, and filing it away properly with Inbox’s organizational structure will create the foundation you need for Inbox to start working for you.

For any items that no longer require your attention or any action, click the checkmark to their right from the web interface or swipe them to the right from the mobile apps to mark them as done. This is the equivalent of Gmail’s archive function and will simply remove a message or reminder from your inbox view. You’ll still be able to find it by searching or by opening the “Done” section in the left-of-screen menu.

For any items that still demand your attention, ask yourself the following question: Am I going to deal with this right now? If so, do it: Respond or perform whatever action is needed, and then mark the item as done.

If you aren’t going to deal with an item immediately, that’s perfectly fine, too. And that’s where Inbox’s most powerful and efficiency-enhancing feature comes into play.

Rather than letting the item sit endlessly in your inbox, think about when you’re actually going to have the time or inclination to take care of it. Then hit the clock icon to the item’s right from the web interface, or swipe the item to the left in the mobile app to snooze it. It’ll reappear and grab your attention at the date and time you set instead of creating constant clutter and continuously distracting you from more pressing matters.

Once you’ve got your inbox cleared out, it’s time to wrap your mind around the Inbox email way.

2. Adjust Your Workflow And Let Go Of Old Habits

The first time I tried Inbox, I worked hard to make it fit into the email management parameters I’d created for myself in Gmail. I wanted to keep important messages on top of my inbox, damn it—how else would they catch my eye?—and I wanted to keep sorting and marking everything as I’d painstakingly done for so long.

It was a struggle, because I was clinging onto a complicated system that didn’t make sense for this new environment. I realized that on my second foray into Inbox and decided then to leave my old methods at the door. And guess what happened? Inbox’s approach made my email setup simpler, which made me much more efficient at managing email.

Here’s the secret: I don’t devote all that effort to fretting over how things are marked or ordered in my inbox anymore—because I don’t leave things in my inbox anymore. Every time I open Inbox, I make it my goal to deal with every item that’s there in one way or another. If something doesn’t require any sort of action (which, when you stop and think about it, is probably true for the vast majority of the emails you receive), I immediately mark it as done. If something requires a quick reply that I can pound out in a minute or less, I do it right then and mark the message as done.

And if an email requires some sort of action that I know I won’t be able to handle right away—be it a lengthy response or something connected to a future date—I snooze the message and set it to return when I am likely to be able to deal with it, just like I recommended you do during your initial cleanup.

Once you adapt to this snooze-centric mentality, your inbox stops being so overwhelming. You never have a gigantic buildup of tasks to master; instead, items appear little by little at appropriate times. And if you’re ever too busy to process ’em, all you’ve gotta do is hit snooze again.

As for labels and filters, Inbox automatically sorts your mail into a handful of categories known as bundles. These tend to be a pretty effective way of grouping like messages together—and they come with some useful perks.

First, you can set any bundle to appear only on occasion—so, for instance, promotions and social-media-related emails could show up in clusters each day while bills, invoices, and auto-pay receipts could pester you just once per week. That can help keep non-urgent noise out of your way most of the time and then let you deal with it efficiently in a single focused moment.

You can do the same thing with your own custom bundles—and, in fact, your old Gmail labels will be present and functional as bundles by default (you can find them and customize how they behave by looking in Inbox’s left-of-screen menu). Your filter-created behaviors will be there, too, just translated into a simplified Inbox-style form.

3. Expand Your View Of What An Inbox Can Be

In addition to regular email, Inbox incorporates numerous types of items into what ultimately serves as a personal productivity command center. Most significant is the service’s seamless integration with Google’s cross-platform reminders system. You can set and then snooze reminders from right within Inbox—and any reminders you set from Google Keep, Google Calendar, Google Assistant, or any Google search or voice command prompt in your desktop browser or Android device will also show up in your inbox when the appropriate time arrives.

Take advantage of this, and you’ll begin to see Inbox as a living to-do list—a centralized place where you find and manage all the tasks that require your attention. Some of them might be connected to emails while others might not.

Inbox will even save you time by digging up and surfacing relevant actions related to your tasks. When you receive a shipping confirmation message, for instance, Inbox will offer a direct link to track your delivery from right within the main inbox view—so you don’t have to waste time opening the message and scanning all of its superfluous text to get that accomplished. The system will similarly provide inbox-visible links to business directions, phone numbers, and flight check-ins when they’re relevant to the contents of an email or reminder.

And speaking of flights, Inbox automatically compiles any travel-related confirmations you receive and uses them to create interactive trip bundles. These bundles allow you to see—and optionally share with others—a simple visual overview of all your plans for every upcoming and past trip, from flights to car rentals and hotel reservations, in a single organized spot.

4. Snag A Couple Of Critical Supplements

“This all sounds great,” you might be thinking, “but Inbox doesn’t do that one thing I need . . . ”

It’s true: For all of its assets, Inbox is still missing a few basic features Gmail users may expect—like support for rich signatures and the ability to receive desktop notifications.

Luckily, you don’t have to look far to find a fix. First, a free Chrome extension called Gmelius for Inbox handily fills many of Inbox’s gaps. It lets you import your existing Gmail signatures, add an unread message counter into the website’s header and/or favicon, and perform several useful interface-related tweaks.

If desktop notifications are what you’re after, meanwhile, Checker Plus for Gmail is the add-on you want. It allows you to create custom notifications for any or all Inbox messages. The pop-ups can even provide short previews of a message’s body and give you the ability to mark it as done right then and there.

And with that, my fellow productivity seekers, the stage is set. Dive in and give Inbox an honest-to-goodness try with this transition plan and without all the baggage. If you’re anything like me, you might be pleasantly surprised at what you discover.

The current and former employees are considering a class action suit against the search giant, the Guardian reports. The group alleges Google has a “culture that is hostile to women” that has made them struggle to advance their careers at the company. A lawyer representing the women say they have earned less at Google than men, despite having comparable positions and equal qualifications. News of the possible suit by the women comes just a day after Google fired an employee for writing an anti-diversity memo that claimed, among other things, that women have a high level of neuroticism compared to men, which the author alleged, is a reason for the lower number of women in high-stress jobs.

Wearing a blue fleece jacket, running shorts, and sneakers, her hair in a ponytail, Anne Wojcicki is recounting her evening out the night before. She and a couple of friends had gone to see U2 at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara (she’s friendly with the band), and Wojcicki had forgotten not only her friends’ tickets but her own access badge, too. So, she says, “We just busted our way in.”

Wojcicki, sitting in a glass conference room at the Mountain View, California, office of 23andMe, the company she cofounded in 2006, seems not to appreciate the irony of her story. Just four years earlier she paid a heavy price for trying to bulldoze her way through obstacles: In November 2013, the FDA gave 23andMe a forceful slap-down, barring the company from selling its revolutionary DNA spit test, which had stirred passionate interest and generated headlines for promising to democratize genetic testing and yield data-driven cures for disease. (Fast Company had even run a cover story calling her “The Most Daring CEO in America.”) The FDA declared her company’s service an “unapproved medical device,” a crippling blow.

While 23andMe could still sell its ancestry product, Wojcicki and her investors—including Google cofounder Sergey Brin (Wojcicki’s then-husband, who has personally invested in the company), Google itself (where Anne’s sister Susan was employee No. 18 and is now CEO of YouTube), and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner—hadn’t stuck their necks out and put up $118 million to build a genealogy service. 23andMe’s unique value proposition, and its founders’ mission, was to empower individuals with actionable genetic health information. Suddenly all that potential was in doubt.

How 23andMe turned that uncertainty around—and, in fact, expanded its brand—is a tale of perseverance, adaptability, and what in days gone by might have been called gumption. Less than a year after the FDA’s rebuke, for instance, Wojcicki signed a lease on a new, larger office space, even though it wasn’t clear at that time if the company would survive. A glass hive with a rooftop garden and free lunch and snacks for the nearly 300 employees, the space sports reminders of what the company has already overcome. A green couch sits in a common seating area, one of a crop of hand-me-downs from Wojcicki’s first apartment in New York. “We’ve been really frugal,” she says. “We used to pride ourselves on these $19 Ikea chairs that would break if you weighed over 220 pounds. We would go visit competitors in the early days and say, ‘Oh, they’ve got fancy chairs—they’re burning cash.’ ”

Today, 23andMe is back on track and, as Wojcicki puts it, “I still want more.” In April, the company received FDA consent to restore some of its health reports, notably those that assess a customer’s genetic risk of developing Parkinson’s and late-onset Alzheimer’s. Beyond this “major accomplishment,” as Wojcicki describes it, the company has also forged large-scale partnerships with businesses such as Genentech, Procter & Gamble, and Target; launched an in-house drug-development program; and raised $115 million in a Series E round, elevating its valuation to an estimated $1.1 billion.

Related: Inside 23andMe founder Anne Wojcicki’s $99 DNA Revolution

Still, the current version of 23andMe’s product offers only a fraction of the 254 reports it featured in 2013. And while the company now boasts what Wojcicki calls “a great, very supportive relationship” with the FDA, getting the next set of approvals—for reports on cancer risk and drug response—is hardly assured. Meanwhile, competitors such as Ancestry and Helix have suggested they may start offering their own health reports (Ancestry has filed for an IPO), and uncertainty over genetic privacy issues continues to loom over the sector.

Yet considering all the drama and setbacks, Wojcicki might be forgiven a bit of selective enthusiasm. Building a cult brand within the staid, highly regulated health industry is unusual; sustaining users’ and investors’ interest through years of controversy ratchets up the challenge further. How Wojcicki has managed 23andMe’s comeback, and what she has planned next, is a playbook for disruption. As she recalls, when she first heard about the FDA clampdown, “I was like, ‘Hey, what can we do in six weeks [to fix this]?’ I learned pretty quickly, like, nothing. I’ve learned that things take longer than you expect.”

Wojcicki received a BS in biology from Yale before going to work as a biotech analyst with a New York hedge fund in the late ’90s, experiences that helped her appreciate not only the enormous public-health opportunities that would be created by the Human Genome Project, but also the inefficiencies of a healthcare system where it seemed everybody but the consumer got to call the shots. This is what motivated her to start 23andMe. When the company began offering its Personal Genome Service (PGS), in 2007, there was no precedent. Genetic screening for a panel of inheritable conditions was routinely offered by doctors to would-be parents, to assess their likelihood of passing on harmful mutations to their offspring. And Myriad Genetics had a doctor-administered test with a list price of more than $3,000 that detected genetic mutations associated with increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer, leading some women (famously, actress Angelina Jolie) to seek mastectomies and/or ovary removal. These tests had to be prescribed by doctors and were often interpreted by genetic counselors.

23andMe was doing something quite different, leveraging technical advances in genotyping, and drastically falling prices, to offer extensive DNA analysis directly to consumers. Analysts and reporters covering the company frequently described 23andMe’s business model of bypassing the medical establishment as hubris, a case of brash Silicon Valley confronting sluggish convention. Wojcicki pushes back at any suggestion that the company was inclined to sidestep regulators. When 23andMe launched its first health report to consumers, she notes, it had CLIA (Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments) approval, the usual standard for diagnostic tests that are handled through a single-lab facility. Wojcicki says she didn’t consider 23andMe’s test to fall under the FDA’s purview at first, in part because they weren’t diagnosing diseases, just reporting risks. “An APOE mutation isn’t diagnosing you with Alzheimer’s,” she says. “It’s a risk factor.” But as doctors, geneticists, and state regulators started to question the reliability and appropriateness of 23andMe’s tests, the company saw where things were headed and in 2008 started meeting regularly with the FDA about a possible path to approval by the agency. “We had some humility,” says Wojcicki. “We did show up.”

There seemed to be little sense of urgency on the FDA’s part, until June 2010—shortly after the 23andMe kit started selling on Amazon—when the FDA sent warning letters to the company, along with direct-to-consumer genomics competitors Navigenics, deCode, Knome, and Illumina. (Another company, Pathway, had received a letter in May, four days before it planned to start selling its test in Walgreens.) “You should take prompt action to respond to this letter,” wrote Alberto Gutierrez, the director of the FDA’s office of in vitro diagnostic device evaluation and safety. According to Gutierrez, 23andMe’s Personal Genome Service didn’t meet the criteria for a single-lab test, and because consumers might make important medical decisions based on the information it contained, it was a diagnostic “device” under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.

The company found itself in new territory. While it was allowed to keep selling the test, it faced fresh scrutiny. For the next two and a half years, representatives from 23andMe and the FDA had “14 face-to-face and teleconference meetings, hundreds of email exchanges, and dozens of written communications,” according to the FDA. 23andMe submitted its first application for FDA clearance in July 2012—unsuccessfully—and followed it with another submission at the beginning of September. Into 2013, the record shows extensive back and forth as 23andMe attempted to respond to FDA feedback and requests for additional evidence.

Then, in May 2013, 23andMe abruptly went quiet, which didn’t sit well with the FDA. A company spokesperson explains that “the delays on our part really were related to miscommunication and lack of understanding the process.” This quiet stretch with regulators coincided with a noisier public posture, punctuated by the launch of new 23andMe TV ads. This expanded branding effort seemed to trip some sort of invisible wire at the FDA. After hearing nothing official from 23andMe for six months, the FDA sent a heated shut-down letter scolding 23andMe for failing to submit evidence that its reports could be trusted. “We have been diligently working to help you comply with regulatory requirements,” this new letter from Gutierrez read. “FDA has not received any communication from 23andMe since May. Instead, we have become aware that you have initiated new marketing campaigns, including television commercials that, together with an increasing list of indications, show that you plan to expand the PGS’s uses and consumer base without obtaining marketing authorization from FDA.”

Wojcicki turns reflective when recalling the letter. “Without a doubt, we didn’t have the right team in place or the experience in how to get regulated,” says Wojcicki. “More and more, I’ve learned how far off we were.” 23andMe was forced to stop selling its health reports immediately.

“Change what you can; manage what you can’t,” reads the tagline for a 23andMe ad campaign from around this time, advice that Wojcicki and Andy Page, a former president of Gilt Groupe who came on as 23andMe president just months before the 2013 letter arrived, took to heart. “It was a huge wind out of our sails,” says a former employee who was there during the crisis.

In the weeks after receiving the letter, 23andMe issued press releases declaring its intention to continue marketing parts of its service that the FDA didn’t explicitly forbid—information about ancestry and “raw genetic data without interpretation”—and pledging to keep working with the FDA to restore the full range of health tests.

To that end, Wojcicki hired a regulatory affairs expert, Kathy Hibbs, an attorney who had been working at Genomic Health, a cancer genomics company. Hibbs had been introduced to Wojcicki by a mutual friend and only agreed to meet as a favor. “It didn’t occur to me that they’d recruit me,” she says, “and it didn’t occur to me that I’d be interested.” But she felt that the company’s interaction with the FDA “had the potential to establish the standards for similar products in the future. That’s a powerful thing, and it’s an actual advantage.” The FDA’s warning letter “was pretty provocative,” she admits, but “I don’t think they were trying to kill the company.”

In the meantime, the company had no choice but to shift its marketing to focus on its ancestry product. The FDA’s warning letter gave the company impetus to explore the more whimsical side of its business, such as finding relatives you never knew about. This relatively low-cost consumer DNA test turned out to be a shockingly effective way to create a genetic database the likes of which no other public or private entity has ever seen. Selling the $99 ancestry reports alone, the company added more than half a million new customers between December 2013 and June 2015, when it announced its 1 millionth genotyped customer. Today, the company has collected DNA from more than 2 million people.

Thanks to this unexpected appeal, 23andMe now controls the world’s largest and most diverse collection of human genotypes (600,000-plus unique genetic markers per individual) paired with self-reported phenotypic information (hundreds of data points per average individual on traits ranging from lactose intolerance to male pattern baldness to a family history of cancer). More than 80% of 23andMe customers—even those who just purchase the ancestry product—opt in to its research program, allowing the company to share its anonymized data with academic and industry partners. The information, in turn, has allowed scientists to run gene-association studies—trawling through huge amounts of data to find mutations that are strongly linked to particular traits or health conditions. Plus, because 23andMe does an exceptional job at keeping customers engaged well beyond getting their test results—the company pushes frequent updates on genetic research, a combination of serious medical research as well as cocktail-party-friendly studies on the genetics of cilantro aversion or the tendency to be a “morning person”—it can prompt them to fill out an endless string of surveys. “The core element of our company is this partnership with the customer,” says Wojcicki.

If a drug company wants to study Parkinson’s, for example, it can quickly identify some 15,000 people with the condition through 23andMe—or nearly 300,000 with depression or high blood pressure—and ask them to complete additional surveys, recruit them to participate in clinical trials or additional kinds of tests, or perhaps, one day, contact them about a new treatment.

Researchers working with 23andMe’s data have already started to publish breakthrough findings. A project with the Michael J. Fox Foundation has identified novel biomarkers for Parkinson’s disease. One with Pfizer detected 15 new regions of the human genome linked to a higher risk of serious depression. Genentech paid a reported $10 million up front (with a potential $50 million more for hitting key milestones) to access genomic data from 23andMe’s Parkinson’s community. These sorts of successes have attracted other partners. Procter & Gamble is using genetic insights gleaned from 23andMe to help inform its marketing of products ranging from over-the-counter sleep aids to skin creams, steering people whose genetic profile suggests they’d be unresponsive to retinol, for example, to alternative antiaging products. “We can go in the direction of personalized skin care,” says Frauke Neuser, a principal scientist at P&G’s Olay brand.

If selling test kits to consumers represents 23andMe’s central business, and forging data-sharing partnerships with companies is its primary line extension, then the company’s in-house therapeutics-development division could be considered its moonshot. Creating a drug may be the utmost embodiment of Wojcicki’s mission to transmute data into real improvements in public health. “It’s our responsibility to help people figure out how to prevent developing a disease, or to find a cure for it,” she says. “In science, the best way to try to drive change is to lead by example. If I really believe—and I do—that starting with human genetic data will make the drug discovery process faster and more effective, then the best way to prove that is to do it.”

Richard Scheller always saw the potential for drug development in 23andMe’s database. The award-winning biochemist, who had spent 14 years leading research strategy, drug discovery, business development, and early-stage drug-development activities at Genentech, had played a key role in Genentech’s investment in 23andMe’s 2007 Series A. Personally, he says, “up until I started, the database wasn’t large enough to be really exciting for me. But it got there, and now with the FDA approvals and more sophisticated marketing, it’s growing incredibly fast.”

The walls are blindingly white at 23andMe’s research lab in South San Francisco, and the centrifuges, mass spectrometers, and laboratory refrigerators still gleam like new. Scheller, dressed in a checkered flannel shirt and drooping gray jeans, leads a tour of the facility, sipping Diet Coke from a cup. For the past two years he has been overseeing a team that has grown to more than 30 scientists, hoping to use 23andMe’s database to alter the economics of bringing new drugs successfully to market. On average, a new drug costs more than a billion dollars to develop. This is because for every one that works, 10 don’t. Drugs with a basis in human genetics, though, have a success rate one-and-a-half-fold to twofold higher, says Scheller. “If we can be even twice as good as the industry average, we would be in pretty good shape.”

Scheller is currently focusing on several conditions, including cardiovascular and liver disease, cancer, skin diseases, and immunological disorders. “We want to bias ourselves to something that’s going to work,” he says. That means leaving the development of neurological drugs—Scheller’s specialty—to partners. “The most important thing for a young company is to be successful, and diseases of the brain are hard. That’s not a place to start.”

If the company happens upon a drug compound that works, 23andMe would likely sell or license the marketing rights to a partner. “What pharma companies do really well is running clinical trials and marketing,” says Wojcicki. “Those are really complicated and expensive things to do. Where we can potentially be really good is on the discovery side.” Her goal is to get a new drug to the point where it’s proven effective in humans.

Even in the rosiest scenario, it will be years before Scheller’s team sees any big commercial reward for its efforts. In the meantime, 23andMe expects to continue working with the FDA to expand its menu of direct-to-consumer health tests. The company is on much better terms now with the agency regulating it. “I think they’re really proud of the work they did,” says Hibbs of the FDA. “It gives them the ability to embrace innovation.” FDA spokesperson Tara Goodin says via email that “since 2013, 23andMe has diligently collaborated with the FDA to create a model for offering a genetic health risk test directly to consumers that mitigates risks associated with how a consumer interprets and uses the test results.” Of course, the fact that everyone’s playing nicely now doesn’t mean that future approvals the company is seeking—for cancer risk and drug response, potentially the most actionable information for consumers—will be any easier to win.

One of the reports that Wojcicki badly wants back is for mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, which are highly predictive for breast and ovarian cancer. The tests are not only potentially lifesaving but lucrative: The No. 1 provider of BRCA testing, Myriad Genetics, earns some $632 million annually from its services. But Wojcicki will face headwinds—in part because of her own decisions. 23andMe has chosen to forgo using so-called next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology for now, since it is expensive and results can be hard to interpret. Unlike Myriad’s NGS test, 23andMe’s is designed to screen only for the three most common BRCA variants found among Ashkenazi Jews, among whom the incidence of BRCA mutations is about 1 in 40, versus about 1 in 400 in the general population.

“When 23andMe customers got a positive BRCA result, it was a positive,” says Jill Hagenkord, who led a next-generation sequencing effort at 23andMe from 2014 to 2016 and is now chief medical officer at Color Genomics—whose $249 doctor-ordered test uses NGS to screen for several hereditary cancer risk factors. But when it was negative? “There’s a concern about people who think they got a BRCA test but really didn’t,” Hagenkord says.

Opting not to use NGS will also limit the types of drug discovery that the company will be able to do, says Scott Hebbring, a research scientist at the Center for Human Genetics at Marshfield Clinic Research Institute in Wisconsin. “Having just the common variants from genotyping,” he says, “can make it harder to find variations with large effects that could be rare but potentially the most interesting for understanding disease.”

23andMe also faces privacy fears, which have only increased since Wojcicki launched her company a decade ago. “We’re living in a time when we can no longer be completely sanguine about the safety of any of the data we share with the world,” says Misha Angrist, an associate professor in the Social Science Research Institute at Duke University. “We’ve seen too many reports of Fortune 500 companies, to say nothing of hospitals, getting hacked.”

The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (GINA), which protects individuals from genetic discrimination in health insurance and employment, was “a good start” on regulating the legitimate uses of genetic data, says Hebbring. “But it’s by no means comprehensive.” It doesn’t apply to military personnel or employees of companies with fewer than 15 workers, and GINA will not protect consumers with known genetic conditions from being discriminated against for disability insurance, long-term-care insurance, and life insurance. (In those industries, carriers are expressing new concerns about consumers who game the system by buying long-term-care coverage only when they discover—but don’t disclose—an increased genetic risk for Alz­heimer’s.) If the Affordable Care Act is repealed, its explicit prohibition against discrimination for preexisting conditions, including ones revealed through genetic testing, could be weakened in significant ways. The reality, or even just the perception, that your DNA could be used against you could have a chilling effect on people’s willingness to get genetic testing for any purpose.

All of this makes it crucial for 23andMe to position itself as an approachable and accessible brand. “I think there’s a whole world of people who don’t get any healthcare because it’s too cumbersome and expensive,” Wojcicki says. That’s why she “loves” Walmart’s $59 nurse practitioner visit and CVS’s MinuteClinic. The desire to connect with consumers in the real world, outside the healthcare bubble, is what pushed her to get mainstream retailers—including CVS, Sam’s Club, and Target—to start carrying 23andMe’s health-and-ancestry test over the past year and start selling on Amazon again. It also helped motivate her to capture the popular imagination through partnerships that wouldn’t have been imaginable when the company started out, like the recent marketing campaign with Universal Pictures around the release of Despicable Me 3, featuring an animated short in which the character Gru discovers a long-lost brother using 23andMe’s DNA Relatives tool.

“We’re definitely a mission-driven company,” Wojcicki says. “There’s a lot of skepticism about that, but we really want to drive positive change in healthcare.” Many would-be disrupters in Silicon Valley talk about changing the world. But doing so takes both skill and stamina. “In some ways, what happened with the FDA has forced me to learn the lesson of patience,” says Wojcicki. “Everything is in steps.”

The tool allows people to view old versions of websites so they can see how they looked in the past. But users in India are now receiving a message saying that the country’s Department of Telecommunications has restricted the site, reports the BBC. Right now there is no word on why India decided to block the Wayback Machine. An Internet Archive employee told Medianama, “Obviously, we are disappointed and concerned by this situation and are very eager to understand why it’s happening and see full access restored.”

It’s not easy following a wise-ass robot and one-eyed spaceship captain. But Jam City CEO and MySpace cofounder Chris DeWolfe held his own as he thanked a packed audience of enthusiastic fans and industry folks who turned up at Hollywood’s Avalon Theater in June for a staged reading with the Futurama creators and the cast of its classic episode, “Proposition Infinity.”

The event launched the June release of the Futurama: Worlds of Tomorrow mobile game from Jam City and subsidiary TinyCo—its fourth venture with 20th Century Fox and the first mobile game to adapt a TV show no longer on the air. Instead of simply licensing a current intellectual property to cross-promote, this game utilizes the original creators, writers, and voice-over cast from the 1999-2013 animated Fox series to create new storylines within the gameplay.

A non-current property might seem an odd choice for a new game. But it plays to a strategy that has transformed Jam City into a $370 million business: Listen to users. A Futurama game was actually Jam City’s top customer request. A social media marketing effort that uses original animation featuring Stephen Hawking, George Takei, Bill Nye, Mark Hamill, and Neil deGrasse Tyson has already racked up tens of millions of downloads and microtransaction dollars.

“I became sensitive to user experience at MySpace,” DeWolfe says. “Tapping the pop culture zeitgeist signaled it was going to be successful. Futurama now lives on in the game. For fans, it’s the only place you’ll be able to see new storylines from the original creators.”

Since launching Jam City (formerly SGN) in Los Angeles in 2010, the mobile gaming company has navigated a consolidating industry to expand through acquisitions, Hollywood partnerships, innovative proprietary technology and data mining, and original game development. It now employs 500 staffers in six studios in California and Buenos Aires, and its games have been downloaded more than 800 million times and played by more than 50 million active monthly users worldwide. Last year (per the latest figures), six of Jam City’s 10 games ranked as iOS/Google Play top grossers: Cookie Jam (Facebook’s 2014 Game of the Year), Panda Pop, Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff, Juice Jam, Marvel Avengers Academy, and Genies and Gems. The company plans to triple the number of new game launches to some half dozen this year.

With 100% annual growth, compounded over the last five years, the firm anticipates nearly a half billion dollars in revenue over the next 12 months, and DeWolfe is considering taking Jam City public in the next two years.

“We’ve designed the company to eventually reach predictable revenues and EBITDA [earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization],” Dewolfe says. “Aside from an influx of cash, a public offering cements a monetary value for the company and provides a currency for future acquisitions.”

Jam City’s business approach—one marked by a focused product line, calculated expansion, user experience over quick revenue growth, and inclusive corporate culture—borrows from DeWolfe’s traditional and digital business training and lessons learned from MySpace.

The Lessons Of MySpace

DeWolfe’s tenure at MySpace afforded him valuable lessons for building Jam City. After earning an MBA from the University of Southern California in 1997, he worked in the nascent cloud storage arena before cofounding MySpace in 2003. He sold it two years later to News Corp. for $580 million. It earned $700 million at its peak and remained the most visited site until 2008. Differing opinions on how to run MySpace led to DeWolfe amicably departing in 2009. Around this time, the site’s traffic steadily declined. Today MySpace is owned by Time, Inc.

The experience of running a digital startup and assimilating with a traditional media conglomerate taught DeWolfe the importance of remaining focused on a few key features and prioritizing user experience before early revenues.

At MySpace, he says, “we tried to do everything all at once. It was the number-one music destination. We built out streaming video, comedy, a movie and TV service, email and instant messaging—we had 12 different teams working on 12 different verticals and it got to be too much. We should have spent 90% of our resources on core social experience.” (In addition to operations, like page-load time.)

As for integrating an interactive digital startup that answered to users with a traditional media conglomerate that answered to shareholders, DeWolfe says, “News Corp. focused more on revenue and placed undue pressure on us to create profits instead of improving the user experience. We didn’t change it for a long time. We went from a growth company to a mature company when we weren’t ready; we were still growing.”

But in business, past errors provide critical information. “There’s something about learning from mistakes to figure out your focus, know how to create a smart business plan, pay attention to user experience, and when to make a company profitable,” DeWolfe says. “We operate our games as a service that we continually improve.”

And Jam City never loses sight of its core audience. “A lot of companies have failed, because they’ve gotten out of their sweet spot,” he says. “The games we develop are typically within a similar genre, demographic, and mind-set—mostly female-focused, evergreen-type games—and have time-honored game mechanics [playing methods]. Like-minded demos makes them easier to cross-promote throughout our network.”

Jam City prototypes and consumer-tests new games for up to two years before launching. Afterward, the company continues to update the games’ play modes, social interactivity, character storylines, and opportunities to purchase virtual goods, DeWolfe explains, “so you don’t have this decay occur where you build a game, it’s a hit like a movie, and then you have to look for your next revenue stream. It’s not like the TV or film industry. We’re thinking about what’s going to be cool in 2019 and how to update current products, as opposed to jumping on what was hot last year.”

Happier Gamers Through Analytics

Deep investments in technological innovation, data science, and audience intelligence have helped Jam City forge a competitive advantage by streamlining game development and enhancing user experience.

Early on, before such technology became ubiquitous across the mobile gaming industry, Jam City developed proprietary software to continue games where they left off across four platforms. The software not only gave it a leg up on competitors, but also made it possible to publish games simultaneously on those platforms without having to redevelop them for each one, which effectively shaved six months of development time per game, had they been built separately per platform. Today, that software is farmed out to Unity, but in-house programmers continue to upgrade physics engines to handle more complex movement, gaming mechanics, and narratives, while machine learning optimizes gameplay by tracking playing patterns.

Last year, Wolfe hired two doctorates—in chemical engineering computer-aided design and experimental psychology—to grow the company’s consumer research and machine learning/artificial intelligence divisions to optimize gameplay per user playing patterns, game interaction, and purchasing behavior.

Bringing a Jam City game to market is both a creative and data-driven process. During development, Jam City developers create a “slice” of a game and use AI to test consumer engagement and retention, then analyze player behaviors with a goal of making—and keeping—those games more appealing. Fine-tuning continues after launch.

“Each game has its own economy, with merchandising, sales and events, marketing, customer acquisition, lifetime value of customers,” DeWolfe says. “We can constantly tweak and make them better, or test their performance in different economies. If too many people are dropping out of games or tutorials, or not moving onto next levels fast enough, we change that so it remains enticing.”

Individual game titles can grow into billion-dollar businesses. “We are building mobile franchises,” he says. “Our games are designed to be played for 10 years or longer, and we can continue to add more content based on new insights. Our original games are developed to grow into iconic brands with worldwide recognition and appeal.”

A Culture Of Inclusion

Motivating employees through an inclusive corporate culture and philanthropy is another strategy rooted in DeWolfe’s MBA days and honed at MySpace.

“It’s much more of a ‘we’ thing,” DeWolfe says. “I work with awesome cofounders with very different strengths. We try to make a creative space for artists, game designers, engineers, musicians, and producers to work in harmony.”

Jam City employees participate in team-building activities with Habitat for Humanity, Los Angeles Mission, and Los Angeles River clean-ups. For the launch of its latest game, Snoopy Pop, Jam City donated $100,000 to Canine Companions for Independence, a favorite charity of the family of Snoopy creator Charles M. Schulz (and a natural fit for Jam City’s dog-friendly office). “We want our employees to feel proud of the company they work for,” DeWolfe says.

DeWolfe tries to match that culture when considering acquisitions. “We only acquire companies with similar cultural values and game mechanics that fit with our other IP, and try to partner with the CEO of the other company,” he says. “We’ve pulled out of deals after negative focus group feedback on IP or not being able to agree culturally. You can’t try to force synergies where none exist.”

The country has been ramping up its missile development and tests since Kim Jong-un took over.

“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” You’ve heard that trite career adage before, and probably rolled your eyes because you don’t know anyone who’s well-connected enough in your field to hook you up with that dream job.

But while nepotism is real and elite institutions do open more doors, you might not be quite as screwed as you think. According to J. Kelly Hoey, author of Build Your Dream Network: Forging Powerful Relationships in a Hyper-Connected World, there are still a few things you can do to make your crappy network less crappy. It takes patience and consistency–but not a ton of effort.

Stop Sending “Looking For A Job” Emails

Sometimes what seems to you like a problem with your network is really an issue of your own objectives, Hoey points out. The most common “knee-jerk reaction is, ‘I don’t have a network,'” she says, and “the second is, ‘My network doesn’t know anyone.'”

But you’re much more likely to think those things when all you do is hit up your network with blanket requests, like, “I’m looking for a new marketing job, any leads?”

On the other hand, “sending an email to someone saying, ‘I’m switching careers and I’m highly interested in a junior marketing position at Ford Motor Company and see you’re connected to someone there’ is going to be highly productive,” Hoey explains, adding that she got an email the week before last saying, “Do you know anyone in the auto industry?”

“I was like, ‘Did you look at LinkedIn? Did you follow the auto companies to see who in your network might be worth connecting to?”

Doing this kind of basic research, says Hoey, gives people in your network “something to target” so that they can think of something similar in the highly likely event that they can’t help you with exactly what you’re looking for. Being excruciatingly specific won’t narrow your options; it can actually widen them.

Keep Tabs On Your College Friends (And Their Friends)

Hoey is aware, however, that making better networking requests won’t instantaneously enlarge or improve your network. But you can’t really make any type of request if you aren’t up on what your network is up to.

In other words, hit that “follow” button–on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, you name it. Hoey says that people tend to think of networking as an active undertaking, but most of it is passive.

Following people on social media may feel like the “empty calories” of networking, but it’s actually the reverse: “Being and staying connected to people through social platforms” takes very little effort, but it’s a crucial prerequisite “so you can leverage the data they’re putting in there” when it’s time to get your network’s help with something, says Hoey.

After all, your most influential contact is rarely “the person right in front of you,” says Hoey–they’re the “direct connections all your connections have.” The hidden power of “loose connections” has been a truism of network theorists for years, and it’s something that LinkedIn research backs up. By silently keeping tabs on your friends, you’re putting a down payment on future opportunities to be put in touch with their friends.

Always Say “Happy Birthday”

It’s possible to take this passive approach to keeping in touch with people, too. Many professionals look at networking “in such an immediate way,” says Hoey, that “they overlook the importance of maintaining and growing relationships with their peers.”

One Fast Company contributor recently described his habit of sending a quarterly email to his professional network with a few life updates. A mere four emails a year to maintain your network isn’t too shabby, but staying in touch can be even less time-intensive than that. When Facebook reminds you it’s that person’s birthday, Hoey says, don’t ignore it; the one-line birthday wish you share once a year is enough to stay “on the periphery” of their network–and according to that “loose connections” theory, the periphery is where it counts.

Hoey spoke not long ago with a senior partner at a prestigious New York law firm who’d served in the early ’90s on Harvard Law Review“with someone he described as the person who was clearly going to go far.” But after graduating and passing the bar, the two didn’t stay in touch. Around 2008, the partner reached back out to his former law school classmate–to congratulate him on being elected president.  In response he received a thoughtfully worded form letter signed, “Barack Obama.”

The point, says Hoey, is to keep an eye on what your friends and acquaintances do, starting even before you enter the workforce. If someone seems smart and interesting now, they’re likely going on to do interesting things later, so don’t wait until they’ve achieved something big before getting back in touch. Think more in terms of “Happy 30th, Barack!” than “Congratulations, Mr. President!”

Do Something Nice For Someone

Some people think joining professional organizations, nonprofit boards, and industry groups are smart networking moves. But Hoey says that’s only true when you commit to actually contributing to them. Volunteer, and not just once. Offer to head up a specific initiative you’re interested in, and see it through for the long haul. You can’t just add your name to a membership roster and expect an organization to deliver up dozens of powerful new contacts to you.

Hoey adds that it’s possible to be helpful in really small ways as well. “If you saw social media on this other person or discover that they’ve got a blog, just promoting somebody else’s stuff is a really great way to keep a relationship going”–and it takes no time. But the larger task of improving a lackluster network does. “There’s not a quick fix,” says Hoey. Small gestures, actions, and “cyberstalking in a good way” can add up, but you’ve got to keep at it.

People only really feel their networks have failed them when they’ve gone out with an ambitious request and come back empty-handed. But it’s those times when you don’t have a career crisis you need help solving that really count, Hoey explains. It’s not as hard as you think. “Just be a decent human being in your interactions with other people. Rinse and repeat.”

They say if you want to understand politics, all you need to do is follow the money. That’s sometimes easier said than done in our post-Citizens United America, but at least one tributary of donor cash can be tracked through to a uniquely modern phenomenon: an ever-growing mass of political memes.

Memes—those sharable images laced with offbeat humor—are now poised to take on an even more prominent role in our political discourse due to the growing number of wealthy donors funding such viral social content, according to the New York Times. This shift toward ever more bite-size, simplified messages threatens to dumb down our elections. But how will platforms like Facebook and Twitter adapt to their expanding role as the battleground for political ideas—not to mention electoral outcomes?

The meme-ification of politics may be relatively young, but early evidence from last year’s U.S. election makes a solid case for its effectiveness. From the “dank memes” that helped boost Bernie Sanders’s unlikely grassroots campaign to the Pepe the Frog 4chan-inspired alt-right shitposting on behalf of making America great again, 2016 was the year memes truly took hold of U.S. politics. And obviously the Trump campaign’s (often unofficial) preference for organic, meme-based messaging over traditional television and radio advertising turned out to be a winning strategy.

Of course, memes alone did not decide the 2016 election. But together with our ever-hardening ideological social media bubbles, the viral spread of misinformation (or “fake news”), and partisan Twitter bots, the viral mechanics of social media certainly played a role in influencing perceptions and participation at the polls last year. Recognizing this trend, organizations like the Open Society Foundations and Civic Ventures are funneling money to popular left-wing meme pages that boast millions of followers apiece.

Biden: These memes are just an illusory escape from the public’s feelings of utter powerlessness and uncertainty right now

Obama: Joe… pic.twitter.com/ozIoctMfpg

— lord crunkington III (@postcrunk) November 14, 2016

Memes can make us laugh, scratch our heads, or validate our existing beliefs, but they’re not really the stuff of nuance or the sort of deeper, more analytical thinking that politics demands of an informed citizenry. And increasingly, Facebook is the modern newsstand. As it becomes saturated with memes and short videos about politics, what becomes of the longer, more in-depth reporting being done by journalists at the national level—not to mention the floundering local newspapers for whom there’s no BuzzFeed or Vice type of online outlet to swoop in and pick up the slack? Just as many have long bemoaned the outsize power of soundbite-based, concise negative TV ads, further boiling political discourse down into even more bite-size, simplistic messages on the internet threatens to dumb down politics even further.

The burgeoning industry of partisan news websites and Facebook pages (which often peddle memes, although not exclusively) is becoming an ever more potent and lucrative force in political media, as outlined recently by BuzzFeed. But far from elevating the tone of our national discourse, social media appears to be driving Americans further apart, with these Facebook pages working to “feed partisan fear and anger and richly reward that partisan fear and anger in the form of Facebook engagement and ad revenue.” Most of the top-performing Facebook posts from partisan outlets are photos and videos, according to BuzzFeed.

It’s natural to assume that Twitter and Facebook could tweak their algorithms and do something about the problem. But it’s a double-edged sword: Clamp down too strongly on what type of content can be shared on the platform and you’ll be accused of censorship, take a more permissive stance and all kinds of offensive and violent content will proliferate with the chance to do real harm.

I am so proud to be one of the Deplorables #Trump2016pic.twitter.com/IFD1hfC60w

— Roger Stone (@RogerJStoneJr) September 10, 2016

Since the election, Facebook has had some success at stemming the tide of fake news, but less so when it comes to clickbait, which continues to dominate the lists of most-shared articles on the platform. (And it’s been trying to crack down on memes since at least 2013.)

Similarly viral, oversimplified outrage has unfolded countless times on Twitter, often in the form of harassment campaigns against women, minorities, and just about anybody with whom the mob disagrees. Twitter has spent its post-election months trying to fix its glaring harassment problem by cracking down on serial abusers and downplaying questionable tweets in search results and in people’s mentions.

That leads us to a bigger question: How will social platforms adapt to their role as the virtual newsstand for increasingly partisan, often less nuanced chunks of information? Facebook didn’t respond to a request for comment, but recent developments suggest that the social giant may be willing to respond if things get too counterproductive.

Its recent crackdowns on fake news and clickbait have frustrated some conservative partisan news publishers who BuzzFeed reports are “obsessed with Facebook’s algorithm changes and with avoiding getting caught up in the social network’s stepped-up initiative to reduce clickbait and misinformation.” Last summer, Facebook did take some measures to dial down the prevalence of meme pages specifically, sparking calls for a revolt by so-called memelords. Indeed, political donors now pouring cash behind social news and meme creation run the risk of coming up short on their investment with a simple tweak of an algorithm.

For the rest of us, the consequences of this ever-shifting social media information ecosystem have yet to be determined. Perhaps we’re headed somewhere better in the long run, but it is hard to imagine much good springing up from the intersection of money, outrage, and snackable media. Although, if things get too out of hand, perhaps President Zuckerberg will have some fresh ideas.