sciencehabit writes: OSIRIS-REx is ready to get the goods. On 20 October, after several years of patient study of its enigmatic target, NASA's $800 million spacecraft will finally stretch out its robotic arm, swoop to the surface of the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, and sweep up some dust and pebbles. The encounter, 334 million kilometers from Earth, will last about 10 seconds. If it is successful, OSIRIS-REx could steal away with up to 1 kilogram of carbon-rich material from the dawn of the Solar System for return to Earth in 2023. Since OSIRIS-REx (short for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer) arrived in 2018, Bennu has yielded surprises, not all of them welcome. The 500-meter-wide asteroid was not smooth, as expected, but studded with more than 200 large boulders that could upset the sampling maneuver. And every so often, the asteroid ejected coin-size pebbles, probably propelled by meteoroid impacts or solar heating. The boulder hazard, in particular, forced the team to target an area just 16 meters across for sampling, 10 times smaller than planned. "Bennu has not made things easy for us," says Mike Moreau, the mission's deputy project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Despite the logistical challenge, the boulders contain a prize: veins of carbonate minerals thicker than your hands, the team reports in one of six studies published today in Science and Science Advances. The minerals, which precipitate out of hot water, popped out of data gathered during a close flyby of light-colored boulders near the target site, called Nightingale. Researchers believe the veins grew in channels of fluid circulating within Bennu's parent body, a larger planetesimal thought to have formed beyond Jupiter's orbit soon after the dawn of the Solar System 4.56 billion years ago, before being smashed apart in the asteroid belt within the last billion years. Heat from the decay of radioactive elements in its interior presumably drove the churning, and the presence of so much carbonate "suggests large-scale fluid flow, possibly over the entire parent body," says Hannah Kaplan, a planetary scientist at Goddard who led the work. This ancient water world is consistent with the idea that objects like Bennu delivered much of Earth's water when they struck the planet billions of years ago, says Dante Lauretta, the mission's principal investigator and a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona. The veins also suggest watery bodies like Bennu were a cauldron for the organic chemistry that generated the amino acids and other unusual prebiotic compounds found in carbon-rich meteorites.

shirappu writes: AI technology is getting better and better at improving old video footage by adding new frames to improve smoothness and adding color to black and white footage (a great explainer for the techniques can be found here). Now, YouTube channel DutchSteamMachine is applying the same techniques to the moon landing in 1969. The AI-restored footage stabilizes the shaky old footage, adds frames, and motion smooths the whole thing to essentially bring the footage into the present. Though it can be difficult to improve these videos because high-quality source footage is a necessity, it's still a good example of how improved these technologies are becoming with the development of AI support. The actual improved video of the moon landing can be found here.

Scientists have shown shocking the tongue -- combined with a carefully designed sound program -- can reduce symptoms of tinnitus, not just while patients are being treated, but up to 1 year later. Science Magazine reports: In the team's experiment, 326 people with tinnitus sat for up to 1 hour at a time with a small plastic paddle on their tongue. Tiny electrodes in the paddle delivered an electrical current designed to broadly excite the brain, getting activity going through a number of interconnected regions. The electrical stimulation feels a little like pop rocks candy fizzing in your mouth, [says Hubert Lim, a biomedical engineer at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities]. Subjects also wore headphones that delivered a more targeted hit to the brain's auditory system. Each person heard a rapidly changing series of pure tones at different frequencies, against a background noise that sounds "kind of like electronic music," Lim says. The goal of the two together was to distract the brain by heightening its sensitivity, forcing it to suppress the activity that causes tinnitus. "The brain can only pay attention to so many things," Lim says.

Over the 12 weeks of treatment, the patients' tinnitus symptoms improved dramatically. More than 80% of those who complied with the prescribed regimen saw an improvement. And they saw an average drop of about 14 points on a tinnitus severity score of one to 100, the researchers report today in Science Translational Medicine. When the team followed up after 12 months, 80% of the participants still had lower tinnitus scores, with average drops of 12.7 and 14.5 points.

An earlier universe existed before the Big Bang and can still be observed today, Sir Roger Penrose has said, as he received the Nobel Prize for Physics. From a report: Sir Roger, 89, who won the honour for his seminal work proving that black holes exist, said he had found six 'warm' points in the sky (dubbed 'Hawking Points') which are around eight times the diameter of the Moon. They are named after Prof Stephen Hawking, who theorised that black holes 'leak' radiation and eventually evaporate away entirely. The timescale for the complete evaporation of a black hole is huge, possibly longer than the age of our current universe, making them impossible to detect. However, Sir Roger believes that 'dead' black holes from earlier universes or 'aeons' are observable now. If true, it would prove Hawking's theories were correct.

Sir Roger shared the World Prize in physics with Prof Hawking in 1988 for their work on black holes. Speaking from his home in Oxford, Sir Roger said: "I claim that there is observation of Hawking radiation. The Big Bang was not the beginning. There was something before the Big Bang and that something is what we will have in our future. We have a universe that expands and expands, and all mass decays away, and in this crazy theory of mine, that remote future becomes the Big Bang of another aeon. So our Big Bang began with something which was the remote future of a previous aeon and there would have been similar black holes evaporating away, via Hawking evaporation, and they would produce these points in the sky, that I call Hawking Points. We are seeing them. These points are about eight times the diameter of the Moon and are slightly warmed up regions. There is pretty good evidence for at least six of these points." Sir Roger has recently published his theory of 'Hawking Points' in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Spurred by Brexit, London is backing companies that will build satellites and haul them into orbit. From a report: Cornwall, in England's far southwest, is known for antique fishing villages and snug, cliff-lined beaches. Soon it may be the scene of something very different: a small but growing space industry. One day in a year or two, a modified Boeing 747 is expected to lift off from the long runway at the region's airport, head out over the Atlantic Ocean and soar into the stratosphere. There, a rocket will drop from below a wing, fire its engines and ferry a load of small satellites into orbit, while the plane returns to the airport. After six years of planning and fund-raising, construction of a bare-bones spaceport, budgeted at about 22 million pounds ($28 million), is beginning this month at the airport in Newquay. The anchor tenant is expected to be Virgin Orbit, a part of Richard Branson's Virgin universe. Its selling point: Putting satellites into orbit via aircraft can be done faster and with less infrastructure than earthbound rockets. It plans to bring its 747 (called the Cosmic Girl) and other gear being tested in the Mojave Desert to Britain with the help of $9.5 million from the U.K. Space Agency.

"At the beginning, people laughed at us," said Melissa Thorpe, head of engagement for Spaceport Cornwall, the developer. "It took a lot of work to convince a lot of people." Among the better arguments: The spaceport, which is owned by the local government, could eventually provide 150 good jobs in what, despite its charm, is a region dependent on low-paid, seasonal work from tourism. Britain is doubling down on the always risky space business after, some would say, years of neglect. Besides Cornwall, the government is putting money behind several other potential launch sites, including one on the remote north coast of Scotland, which is being tailored for an environmentally friendly rocket to be manufactured nearby. This is all new for a country that does not have a deep history of rocketry or launching satellites into space. The case for spaceports in Britain is far from proven. In fact, some analysts say there are already too many such facilities, including in the United States.

Two scientists have been awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing the tools to edit DNA. Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna are the first two women to share the prize, which honours their work on the technology of genome editing. From a report: Their discovery, known as Crispr-Cas9 "genetic scissors", is a way of making specific and precise changes to the DNA contained in living cells. They will split the prize money of 10 million krona ($1,110,400). The women's technology has been transformative for basic science research and it could also be used to treat, or even cure, inherited illnesses. Prof Charpentier, from the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens in Berlin, said it was an emotional moment when she learned about the award. "When it happens, you're very surprised, and you think it's not real. But obviously it's real," she said.

Raisey-raison writes from a report via The New York Times: The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three astrophysicists for their work on black holes, regions of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing -- no particles or even electromagnetic radiation such as light -- can escape. They are Roger Penrose, an Englishman, Reinhard Genzel, a German, and Andrea Ghez, an American. Dr. Penrose proved that "black holes will form whenever the conditions are right," said Brown University physicist Sylvester Gates, incoming president of the American Physical Society. "It is almost an unstoppable process. That really was an astounding result."

The New York Times adds: "Working independently, Dr. Genzel and Dr. Ghez, and their teams, have spent the last decades tracking stars and dust clouds whizzing around the center of our galaxy with telescopes in Chile and Hawaii, trying to see if that dark dusty realm does indeed harbor a black hole." For what it's worth, Dr. Penrose was awarded half of the approximately $1.1 million prize and the second half was split between Dr. Genzel and Dr. Ghez. "Dr. Ghez is only the fourth woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, following Marie Curie in 1903, Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1963 and Donna Strickland in 2018," the report notes.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: For despite having evolved facial expressions that tug on the heartstrings of owners, researchers have found that unlike humans, dogs do not have brain regions that respond specifically to faces. "It's amazing dogs do so well when it comes to reading emotions and identify from faces, despite the fact that they seem not to have a brain designed for having a focus on [them]," said Dr Attila Andics, co-author of the study from Eotvos Lorand University, Hungary. Writing in the Journal of Neuroscience, Andics and colleagues report how they scanned the brains of 20 family dogs, including labradors and border collies, and 30 humans with each shown six sequences of 48 videos of either the front or the back of a human or dog head.

The team found particular regions of the dog's brain showed differing activity depending on the species shown, with a greater response to dog videos. However, there was no difference in any region when dogs were shown a human or dog face compared with the back of its head. By contrast, regions of the human brain showed different activity depending whether a face or the back of a head was shown, with faces generally generating a stronger response. A small subset of these regions also showed a difference between species, in general showing a stronger response to humans. Andics said the further analysis showed the dog brain was primarily focused on whether the animal was looking at a dog or a human, whereas the human brain was mainly focused on whether there was a face.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An independent panel that assesses the safety of NASA activities has raised serious questions about the space agency's plan to test flight software for its Moon missions. During a Thursday meeting of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, one of its members, former NASA Flight Director Paul Hill, outlined the panel's concerns after speaking with managers for NASA's first three Artemis missions. This includes a test flight of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft for Artemis I, and then human flights on the Artemis II and III missions. Hill said the safety panel was apprehensive about the lack of "end-to-end" testing of the software and hardware used during these missions, from launch through landing. Such comprehensive testing ensures that the flight software is compatible across different vehicles and in a number of different environments, including the turbulence of launch and maneuvers in space.

"The panel has great concern about the end-to-end integrated test capability plans, especially for flight software," Hill said. "There is no end-to-end integrated avionics and software test capability. Instead, multiple and separate labs, emulators, and simulations are being used to test subsets of the software." The safety panel also was struggling to understand why, apparently, NASA had not learned its lessons from the recent failed test flight of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, Hill said. (Boeing is also the primary contractor for the Space Launch System rocket's core stage). Prior to a test flight of the Starliner crew capsule in December 2019, Boeing did not run integrated, end-to-end tests for the mission that was supposed to dock with the International Space Station. Instead of running a software test that encompassed the roughly 48-hour period from launch through docking to the station, Boeing broke the test into chunks. As a result, the spacecraft was nearly lost on two occasions and did not complete its primary objective of reaching the orbiting laboratory.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CleanTechnica: After analyzing the most recent data from two of America's largest electricity markets -- ERCOT in Texas and PJM in the Northeast -- the Rocky Mountain Institute has come to a startling conclusion. Renewables are muscling in on natural gas as the preferred choice for new electricity generation. In fact, according to RMI, what happened to coal is now happening to gas. What is needed, the organization argues, is a move away from the monopoly markets that have been the norm in the utility industry for more than 100 years and toward more open competition. Because when renewables compete head to head with thermal generation, they win hands down 95% of the time.

The data doesn't lie. RMI looked at the interconnection queues for both ERCOT and PJM and found over the past two years there has been a dramatic shift away from building new gas fired generating plants and toward more renewable energy projects. Interconnection queues track new generation projects proposed to be added to regional grid. That information provides a leading indicator of market trends for new power plants. Not all projects in these queues are ultimately built, but the mix of resources in the queue represents the investments the market is prioritizing, according to RMI. [...] RMI finds that since 2018, the queue for clean energy projects has more than doubled while the queue for gas projects has been cut in half. In all, more than $30 billion worth of gas projects have been canceled or abandoned. Currently, the capacity of wind, solar, and storage projects slated for construction in ERCOT and PJM is ten times greater than for new gas projects. "Though COVID-19 may be contributing to some recent decline in planned gas additions, it's not the only driver," says RMI. "The trend has been building for years and investors more broadly are now waking up to the implications. For example, just five years ago in ERCOT, the interconnection queue contained an even split between proposed gas and renewables generation capacity. However, gas capacity in the queue started falling steadily in 2015, well before the COVID-19 pandemic and associated economic downturn. Meanwhile, renewable energy and storage projects in the queue have continued to grow even during the pandemic."

"Therefore, it is likely that a more fundamental driver is at play -- raw economics, driven by the continually falling costs of clean energy and the associated risks of investment in new gas-fired capacity."

At least 14m tonnes of plastic pieces less than 5mm wide are likely sitting at the bottom of the world's oceans, according to an estimate based on new research. From a report: Analysis of ocean sediments from as deep as 3km suggests there could be more than 30 times as much plastic at the bottom of the world's ocean than there is floating at the surface. Australia's government science agency, CSIRO, gathered and analysed cores of the ocean floor taken at six remote sites about 300km off the country's southern coast in the Great Australian Bight. Researchers looked at 51 samples and found that after excluding the weight of the water, each gram of sediment contained an average of 1.26 microplastic pieces. Microplastics are 5mm or less in diameter and are mostly the result of larger plastic items breaking apart into ever smaller pieces. Stemming the tide of plastic entering the world's waterways and ocean has emerged as a major international challenge. Dr Denise Hardesty, a principal research scientist at CSIRO and a co-author of the research published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, told the Guardian that finding microplastic in such a remote location and at such depths "points to the ubiquity of plastics, no matter where you are in the world."

Raisey-raison writes: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded jointly to Dr. Harvey J. Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles M. Rice on Monday for the discovery of the hepatitis C virus, a breakthrough the Nobel committee said had "made possible blood tests and new medicines that have saved millions of lives." "For the first time in history, the disease can now be cured, raising hopes of eradicating hepatitis C virus from the world population," the committee said in a statement. They announced the prize at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. About 71 million people worldwide live with a chronic infection of the hepatitis C virus, a blood-borne pathogen that can cause severe liver inflammation, or hepatitis, and is typically transmitted through shared or reused needles and syringes, infected blood transfusions and sexual practices that lead to blood exposure. Tests and treatments "all start with being able to recognize the virus exists," said Craig Cameron, chair of the department of microbiology and immunology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a hepatitis C virus researcher.

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: Scientists were able to, for the first time, measure radiation levels on the lunar surface, reports UPI, and nine days ago they published their results: that the radiation levels on the moon are 200 times stronger than on earth — and 2.6 times higher than those on the International Space Station. One of the scientists behind the study calls that exposure level "considerable." On the moon there's radiation from galactic cosmic rays, from solar particle events, and also a third component from the interaction of that radiation with the lunar soil.

"We humans are not really made to withstand space radiation," study co-author Robert Wimmer-Schweingruber, a researcher at Kiel University in Germany, tells UPI. "However, astronauts can and should shield themselves as far as possible during longer stays on the moon, for example by covering their habitat with a thick layer of lunar soil."

Or, as Business Insider puts it, "Scientists say a lunar base should be built underground to protect astronauts." Wimmer-Schweingruber tells them that "If you think about people staying on the moon for extended periods of time — say, on a scientific research station for a year or two — then these levels start getting problematic. Covering your habitat with sufficient amounts of lunar dirt should do the trick.... Ideally you'd like to be under as much material as is equivalent to Earth's atmosphere," Wimmer-Schweingruber said, adding that "an optimal depth is 30 inches of lunar soil."

A software company supporting hundreds of clinical trials — including coronavirus vaccine trials — has been hit by a ransomware attack that "has slowed some of those trials over the past two weeks," reports the New York Times.

Employees "discovered that they were locked out of their data by ransomware..." eResearchTechnology (ERT) said clinical trial patients were never at risk, but customers said the attack forced trial researchers to track their patients with pen and paper. Among those hit were IQVIA, the contract research organization helping manage AstraZeneca's Covid vaccine trial, and Bristol Myers Squibb, the drugmaker leading a consortium of companies to develop a quick test for the virus. ERT has not said how many clinical trials were affected, but its software is used in drug trials across Europe, Asia and North America. It was used in three-quarters of trials that led to drug approvals by the Food and Drug Administration last year, according to its website.

On Friday, Drew Bustos, ERT's vice president of marketing, confirmed that ransomware had seized its systems on September 20. As a precaution, Mr. Bustos said, the company took its systems offline that day, called in outside cybersecurity experts and notified the Federal Bureau of Investigation. "Nobody feels great about these experiences, but this has been contained," Mr. Bustos said. He added that ERT was starting to bring its systems back online on Friday and planned to bring remaining systems online over the coming days...

One of ERT's clients, IQVIA, said it had been able to limit problems because it had backed up its data. Bristol Myers Squibb also said the impact of the attack had been limited, but other ERT customers had to move their clinical trials to move to pen and paper.
The Times notes it's just one of "more than a thousand ransomware attacks on American cities, counties and hospitals over the past 18 months." Other interesting details from the article:

• ERT's vice president of marketing "declined to say whether the company paid its extortionists, as so many companies hit by ransomware now do."

• The attack follows what NBC News calls "one of the largest medical cyberattacks in United States history," taking down the computer systems of Universal Health Services at over 400 locations.

• "In May, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security warned that Chinese government spies were actively trying to steal American clinical research through cybertheft... More than a dozen countries have redeployed military and intelligence hackers to glean what they can about other nations' responses, according to security researchers."

• Two companies working on a coronavirus vaccine — Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson — emphasized to the Times that they weren't affected by ERT's issues, with a Pfizer spokesperson stressing they're not even using ERT's software.

"A doctor notorious for claiming hydroxychloroquine is a 'cure' for COVID-19 has denounced White House doctors for not giving President Donald Trump the drug to treat his infection..." reports Newsweek.

"Other unsubstantiated claims from Immanuel include declarations that fasting can cure those affected by 'witchcraft,' that having sex with demons while dreaming can cause gynecological problems and that certain medications contain the DNA of extraterrestrial aliens." Dr. Stella Immanuel, who gained fame in July after Trump retweeted a video showing her touting the malaria drug, expressed outrage in a series of tweets on Friday, condemning the medical decisions of "bozo doctors" who surrounded the president after he tested positive for COVID-19. "Instead of giving the president of the United States a known safe drug," Immanuel tweeted. "They gave him some experimental antibody stupidness. This is so dumb. Please potus family you guys wake up. Give him HCQ, Zpack & zinc asap." "Whoever told the president to stop taking HCQ should be punched in the face," she said in an earlier tweet. "This did not have to happened. I am so upset. This is our president for crying out loud. No one need to get sick or pcr positive."

Leonard Schleifer, CEO of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, insisted that taking his company's experimental treatment, made of potentially virus-neutralizing antibodies, could see the president's condition improve within one week. Although the treatment is widely viewed as having potential, some medical experts have expressed less confidence in its effectiveness. Conley issued a second memorandum late Friday night, revealing that "in consultation with specialists, we have decided to initiate Remdesivir therapy" for Trump, referring to the antiviral drug that gained an emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) over the summer after studies showed it could reduce the length of time a person is ill with COVID-19.
Newsweek reminds its readers that early in the pandemic Trump did take a two-week course of hydroxychloroquine "as a preventative measure, hoping it would prevent his infection..."

"The first image of a black hole, captured in 2019, has revealed more support for Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity," reports CNN, adding that the new finding suggests his theory is now 500 times harder to beat. [W]hile light can't escape the inside of a black hole, it's possible for light to make a getaway in a region around the event horizon, or point of no return. This in-between space can look like a shadow. Because black holes have such immense gravity, which curves space-time, it can actually act like magnifier that makes the black hole's shadow appear larger than it is. The research team measured this distortion and found that the size of this black hole's shadow aligns with the theory of relativity — or matter warping space-time to create gravity...

"This is really just the beginning. We have now shown that it is possible to use an image of a black hole to test the theory of gravity," said Lia Medeiros, study coauthor and postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey, in a statement. "This test will be even more powerful once we image the black hole in the center of our own galaxy and in future EHT observations with additional telescopes that are being added to the array...."

"For the first time we have a different gauge by which we can do a test that's 500 times better, and that gauge is the shadow size of a black hole," said Feryal Özel, study coauthor and University of Arizona astrophysics professor. "When we obtain an image of the black hole at the center of our own galaxy, then we can constrain deviations from general relativity even further."

"To teach the next generation of computer scientists the basics of Python programming, Microsoft recently announced a partnership with NASA to create a series of lessons based on space exploration efforts," reports TechRepublic: Overall, the project includes three different NASA-inspired lessons... The Introduction to Python for Space Exploration lesson will provide students with "an introduction to the types of space exploration problems that Python and data science can influence." Made up of eight units in total, this module also details the upcoming Artemis lunar exploration mission.

In another learning path, students will learn to design an AI model capable of classifying different types of space rocks depicted in random photos, according to Microsoft. However, the company recommends a "basic understanding of Python for Data Science" as a prerequisite for this particular lesson. The last of the three learning paths serves as an introduction to machine learning and demonstrates ways these technologies can help assist with space exploration operations.

Students are presented real-world NASA challenges, particularly rocket launch delays, and learn how the agency can leverage machine learning to resolve the issues... Microsoft also announced partnerships with Wonder Woman 1984 and Smithsonian Learning Labs to curate five additional programming lessons for students.

NASA's first new space potty in decades -- a $23 million titanium toilet better suited for women -- is getting a not-so-dry run at the International Space Station before eventually flying to the moon. The Associated Press reports: Barely 100 pounds (45 kilograms) and just 28 inches (71 centimeters) tall, the new toilet is roughly half as big as the two Russian-built ones at the space station. It's more camper-size to fit into the NASA Orion capsules that will carry astronauts to the moon in a few years. Station residents will test it out for a few months. If the shakedown goes well, the toilet will be open for regular business. The old toilets cater more toward men. To better accommodate women, NASA tilted the seat on the new toilet and made it taller. The new shape should help astronauts position themselves better for No. 2, said Johnson Space Center's Melissa McKinley, the project manager. "Cleaning up a mess is a big deal. We don't want any misses or escapes," she said.

As for No. 1, the funnels also have been redesigned. Women can use the elongated and scooped-out funnels to urinate while sitting on the commode to poop at the same time, McKinley said. Until now, it's been one or the other for female astronauts, she noted. Like earlier space commodes, air suction, rather than water and gravity, removes the waste. Urine collected by the new toilet will be routed into NASA's long-standing recycling system to produce water for drinking and cooking. Titanium and other tough alloys were chosen for the new toilet to withstand all the acid in the urine pretreatment.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: This work, done by two researchers at Binghamton University (Umur Aybars Ciftci and Lijun Yin) and one at Intel (Ilke Demir), was published in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Learning this past July. In an article titled, "FakeCatcher: Detection of Synthetic Portrait Videos using Biological Signals," the authors describe software they created that takes advantage of the fact that real videos of people contain physiological signals that are not visible to the eye. In particular, video of a person's face contains subtle shifts in color that result from pulses in blood circulation. You might imagine that these changes would be too minute to detect merely from a video, but viewing videos that have been enhanced to exaggerate these color shifts will quickly disabuse you of that notion. This phenomenon forms the basis of a technique called photoplethysmography, or PPG for short, which can be used, for example, to monitor newborns without having to attach anything to a their very sensitive skin.

Deep fakes don't lack such circulation-induced shifts in color, but they don't recreate them with high fidelity. The researchers at SUNY and Intel found that "biological signals are not coherently preserved in different synthetic facial parts" and that "synthetic content does not contain frames with stable PPG." Translation: Deep fakes can't convincingly mimic how your pulse shows up in your face. The inconsistencies in PPG signals found in deep fakes provided these researchers with the basis for a deep-learning system of their own, dubbed FakeCatcher, which can categorize videos of a person's face as either real or fake with greater than 90 percent accuracy. And these same three researchers followed this study with another demonstrating that this approach can be applied not only to revealing that a video is fake, but also to show what software was used to create it. In a newer paper (PDF), researchers showed that they "can distinguish with greater than 90 percent accuracy whether the video was real, or which of four different deep-fake generators was used to create a bogus video," the report adds.

Twitter told Motherboard that it will suspend people who openly hope Trump dies from the coronavirus, which he recently tested positive for and, as a result, was moved to Walter Reed hospital "out of an abundance of caution." Twitter referred to an "abusive behavior" rule that's been on the books since April. From the report: "Content that wishes, hopes or expresses a desire for death, serious bodily harm or fatal disease against an individual is against our rules," Twitter said in a statement. This rule will apparently apply to people who wish death on Trump, who is the single most powerful person in the world.

As Motherboard has previously reported, Facebook has different rules for speech that is focused on celebrities and public figures. Facebook says it "distinguish[es] between public figures and private individuals because we want to allow discussion, which often includes critical commentary of people who are featured in the news or who have a large public audience. For public figures, we remove attacks that are severe as well as certain attacks where the public figure is directly tagged in the post or comment." What this means is that it's OK to post on Facebook that you hope Trump dies, so long as you do not tag him in the post or "purposefully expose" him to "calls for death, serious disease, epidemic disease, or disability." Twitter makes no such distinction between public and private figures. With that said, Twitter said that it "won't take enforcement action on every tweet. We're prioritizing the removal of content when it has a clear call to action that could potentially cause real-world harm."