The Dow recorded gains for its 19th-straight Tuesday, pushed higher by shares of Home Depot after the home improvement retailer reported rising sales. Apple CEO Tim Cook, meanwhile, was grilled by a U.S. Senate committee investigating its tax-avoidance strategies.

The Dow rose 52 points, with 18 of its 30 components gaining ground; the S&P 500 gained 2; and the Nasdaq was up 5. Advancers led decliners by six to five on the NYSE and nine to eight on the Nasdaq. The prices of Treasuries strengthened. Gold futures lost $6.50 to close at $1,377.60 an ounce, and the price of crude oil fell 75 cents to settle at $96.18 a barrel.

In Earnings News

- Despite unseasonably cold weather, Home Depot reported same-store sales rose 4.3% during its fiscal first quarter, while overall sales increased 7.4% to $19.1 billion. Net income was $1.2 billion, or 83 cents a share, up from $1 billion, or 68 cents a share, in the year-ago quarter. Sales of materials for interior projects rose, while purchases of garden-related projects were likely deferred until later. Home Depot's shares (HD) rose 2.54%.

- Shares of Best Buy Co. Inc. (BBY) fell 4.36% after the electronics retailer reported a 1.3% drop in same-store sales. Best Buy reported a net loss of $81 million in its fiscal first quarter, compared with net income of $158 million in the year-ago period. Weighing down the quarter, the company said, was the timing of the Super Bowl, a shorter reporting period, and weak European sales. The company's cost-cutting continued, with $175 million of overhead eliminated during the quarter.

- Cruise-operator Carnival Corp. issued a profit warning today, saying that its full-year revenue would fall 2% to 3% from last year, a downgrade from its previous estimate that its revenue would be flat for the year. The downward revision was due to higher cancelations after a series of cruise mishaps, such as stranded vessels. Carnival's shares (CCL) dropped 4.28%.

In Other Business News

- Shareholders of JPMorgan Chase & Co. rejected a proposal that would have stripped CEO and Chairman Jamie Dimon of one of those roles. Dimon has been under scrutiny since a trader cost the firm $6 billion in the so-called "London Whale" trade last year, raising questions about risk oversight at the firm. JPMorgan's shares (JPM) gained 1.4%.

- A Senate tax panel investigating Apple Inc.'s corporate tax-avoidance strategies found that for the past four years, the company legally avoided paying income taxes to any government—U.S. or otherwise—on up to $74 billion. Among other strategies, the company set up subsidiaries and "ghost" companies in Ireland but controlled them from the U.S., a loophole that allowed them to avoid taxes in both countries. Apple paid taxes on U.S.-derived income, however, with the company paying $6 billion in taxes to the U.S. in 2012. The Senate panel's findings will likely be used in an examination of corporate tax law and the incentives and disincentives corporations have for repatriating foreign-held cash. Apple CEO Tim Cook testified before Congress today in support of corporate tax reform and in defense of Apple's tax strategies. Apple's shares (AAPL) fell 0.74%.

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The world's first test-tube burger will be available to eat in London for the reasonable price of $325,000. That's not the price to buy the burger, according to a report in the New York Times; it's how much it cost to manufacture it. And "manufacture" seems to be the right word. Dr. Mark Post, working in the Netherlands, used a few cells from a cow's neck to create strips of beef muscle cells in a culture. It took about 20,000 strips of the muscle cells to make the burger. (If you find this sort of thing unappetizing—and I sure do—I apologize that Daily Advantage comes out right before dinnertime. If it helps, a cake story is next.) But it does represent a major breakthrough in lab-generated food, one that might take a long time to catch on but which might become necessary to feed a burgeoning global population. Right now, it's prohibitively expensive to create lab meat, but eventually, the theory goes, it will be cheaper because there are fewer inputs needed to create a burger. Scientists don't need to transform thousands of pounds of feed and thousands of gallons of water into a whole cow; they can concentrate on creating only the muscle in cultures. I imagine a marketing campaign along the lines of Folgers Crystals' "We switched your regular coffee with Folgers Crystals and you didn't notice," except this campaign might result in more lawsuits.

Here's a more appetizing story, depending on how you look at it: USA Today reports that birthday-cake flavor is showing up in more and more foods. Just in the past few years, 17 new products have been introduced that tout the flavor that brings back the nostalgia of youth or, more accurately, the memory of last night when I ate half a cake by myself. There are cake-flavored Oreos, cake-flavored blended beverages, cake-flavored toothpaste, and cake-flavored vodka. There's even cake-flavored ice cream, which I can attest to, having had a local food truck version in Austin a week ago. It was ice cream, cake, and frosting blended in a cup and drinkable like a shake. (Because it was blended, I'm guessing that shakes out a lot of the calories in a complicated process that researchers call "wishful thinking.") This is the kind of breakthrough our scientists should be working on, not lab meat.

Would you eat laboratory-created meat? (Or laboratory-created cake flavor, for that matter?) Leave your thoughts at today's online version.

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