Author: peterjang73

Inside a Berlin neuroscience lab one day last year, Subject 1 sat on a chair with their arms up and their bare toes pointed down. Hiding behind them, with full access to the soles of their feet, was Subject 2, waiting with fingers curled. At a moment of their choosing, Subject 2 was instructed to take the open shot: Tickle the hell out of their partner.

In order to capture the moment, a high-speed GoPro was pointed at Subject 1’s face and body. Another at their feet. A microphone hung nearby. As planned, Subject 1 couldn’t help but laugh. The fact that they couldn’t help it is what has drawn Michael Brecht, leader of the research group from Humboldt University, to the neuroscience of tickling and play. It’s funny, but it’s also deeply mysterious—and understudied. “It’s been a bit of a stepchild of scientific investigation,” Brecht says. After all, brain and behavior research typically skew toward gloom, topics like depression, pain, and fear. “But,” he says, “I think there are also more deep prejudices against play—it’s something for children.”

The prevailing wisdom holds that laughter is a social behavior among certain mammals. It’s a way of disarming others, easing social tensions, and bonding. Chimps do it. Dogs and dolphins too. Rats are the usual subjects in tickling studies. If you flip ’em over and go to town on their bellies, they’ll squeak at a pitch more than twice as high as the limit of human ears. But there are plenty of lingering mysteries about tickling, whether among rats or people. The biggest one of all: why we can’t tickle ourselves.

“If you read the ancient Greeks, Aristotle was wondering about ticklishness. Also Socrates, Galileo Galilei, and Francis Bacon,” says Konstantina Kilteni, a cognitive neuroscientist who studies touch and tickling at Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet, and who is not involved in Brecht’s work. We don’t know why touch can be ticklish, nor what happens in the brain. We don’t know why some people—or some body parts—are more ticklish than others. “These questions are very old,” she continues, “and after almost 2,000 years, we still really don’t have the answer.”

Part of the trouble is that it’s hard to collect objective measures of how humans respond to tickling and correlate them with perceived ticklishness. That’s why Brecht’s group lured 12 people into a study that—albeit with a small sample size—was designed to observe the phenomenon with non-Aristotelian toys like GoPros and mics. The footage his team collected would help them unpack what happens when people get tickled, and what changes when they tickle themselves. Writing in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B in September, the team reports observations on reaction times, laughter, and breathing, and for the first time in a human study, they show that tickling oneself while being tickled suppresses ticklishness. “It’s rare. Studies typically don’t do that,” says Kilteni. “It really contributes to the state of the art.”

Tickling, says Brecht, is “a very strange kind of touch and reaction to touch.” He is fascinated by how fundamental these complex behaviors are. In a 1897 paper called “The Psychology of Tickling, Laughing, and the Comic,” the authors noted that all people generally have the same ticklish spots. Feet rank the highest. Armpits, necks, and chins follow. We instinctively tickle and play as kids, and though some of that predilection toward play fades with age, we always understand this mysterious language. Brecht believes it’s a form of social signaling in the context of play fighting: “You signal with your giggles that it’s okay to touch, when normally would be inappropriate to touch.” (Your laugh-signals can even come before the touch. Think of a kid about to get tickled by a parent: “They giggle like hell before you actually get there.”)

Hi, everyone. So now Elon wants to buy Twitter, allegedly to help him build X, “the everything” app. Sweet of him to name it after his kid.

The Plain View

For a couple days in late September, no one seemed clear on who owned Bruce Willis. The British newspaper The Telegraph claimed that the actor, who has retired because he suffers from aphasia, had digitally reincarnated his career by selling performance rights to a company called Deepcake, which used artificial intelligence technology to map Willis’ face onto another actor. Not long after, representatives of Willis said that the star of Die Hard had done no such thing and had no relationship with Deepcake, even though the company’s website had a complimentary quote from the star.

The episode raises a lot of questions, not least the meaning of identity at a time when one’s image can be so easily faked. So I went to the source and spoke to Deepcake’s founders. The two-year-old startup from the former Soviet state of Georgia is the project of Ukrainian-born CEO Maria Chmir, a marketing executive, and head of machine learning Alex Notchenko, who has a doctorate in AI. Chmir told me that the company never claimed to own Willis’ future rights, but had a previous and mutually satisfying arrangement where Deepcake digitized his appearance in a 2021 ad for Megafon, a Russian cell network. The Willis ad is part of Deepcake’s game plan to serve customers who want to digitally clone humans. “We are one of the first on the market to be commercially successful in the field of legal deepfakes,” says Chmir. “But we don’t like this word. These are sort of replicas, or digital twins.” (I wondered why, if she wasn’t fond of the word, she named her company on a variation of it, but whatever.)

How good is that technology? Let’s go to the tape. In the Megafon commercial, a person who is unmistakably Willis, even if you know it really is not, is among two hostages tied to a ship mast, next to a digital clock ticking down seconds before a bomb goes off. While the figure has Willis’ face, it doesn’t quite convey his trademark insouciance. And for some reason, this Willis has a different voice—a gruff bark that speaks Russian. Still, it looks like Willis—digitized and generated, Chmir says, by algorithms trained on 34,000 images from his earlier films.

Chmir says that Willis was deepfaked because he wasn’t available to travel, but the process makes economic sense as well. While leasing an actor’s rights might be about 30 percent less than the usual appearance fee, she says, still bigger savings come from the lower costs of filming a cheap actor-double instead of a superstar, who requires first-class travel, a big trailer, and ridiculous demands in contract riders.

But Deepcake isn’t just faking superstars. They recently did a job for an agricultural firm that wanted to make educational videos starring its in-house expert, a busy person not comfortable in front of a camera. With the subject’s permission, Deepcake converted video of an understudy in an exact duplicate. “We also cloned the voice for full similarity, of course,” Chmir says.

NASA’s Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s largest moon will touch down on a terrain of dunes and shattered, icy bedrock, according to a new analysis of radar imagery from the Cassini spacecraft.

Launching in 2027, Dragonfly is a rotorcraft that will arrive in 2034 and explore Titan from the air. Its range will be far greater than that of a wheeled rover, with Dragonfly capable of covering around 10 miles (16 kilometers) in each half-hour flight, according to NASA. Over the span of its two-year mission it will explore an area hundreds of miles or kilometers across. However, before taking to the sky on its own, Dragonfly must first arrive on Titan under a parachute, soft-landing on frozen terrain that is hidden from easy viewing by the dense hydrocarbon smog that fills the moon’s atmosphere.

Dragonfly’s landing site will be the Shangri-La dune field, close to the 50-mile-wide (80 kilometers) crater, Selk. This region was imaged by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft during its mission to Saturn between 2004 and 2017, and a team of scientists led by planetary scientist Léa Bonnefoy of Cornell University has taken a new look at that data to produce the most accurate assessment of Dragonfly’s proposed landing site so far.

“Dragonfly … is going to a scientifically remarkable area,” Bonnefoy said in a statement (opens in new tab). “Dragonfly will land in an equatorial, dry region of Titan. It rains liquid methane sometimes, but it is more like a desert on Earth where you have dunes, some little mountains and an impact crater.”

Related: Soar over the desert in footage from drone practicing for mission to Saturn’s strangest moon

Selk is an interesting location. Estimated to be geologically young, perhaps a couple hundred million years old, the impact that carved it out would have melted the local ice, prompting interactions between the fresh liquid water and organic molecules present in the hydrocarbon soup on Titan’s surface. Astrobiologists are particularly interested in the prebiotic chemistry — chemistry involving carbon-rich molecules but not mediated by living things — that would have resulted.

Yet Cassini’s radar images of the area are limited, with the resolution at best being 1,000 feet (300 meters) per pixel. “There are probably a lot of small rivers and landscapes that we couldn’t see,” Bonnefoy said. 

Scientists know that such rivers do exist on Titan, thanks to the European Space Agency’s Huygens lander, which piggybacked on board Cassini before parachuting down to the surface of Titan in January 2005. These rivers, however, are not full of liquid water — the temperature of minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 179 degrees Celsius) is far too cold for that. Instead, liquid methane and ethane rain from the frigid sky and wash off the water-ice bedrock and into river tributaries that feed large lakes.

What Cassini’s imagery did provide, however, is multiple viewing angles. Each time it flew past Titan — it enjoyed 127 close approaches of the moon during its mission — it viewed landmarks in the region of Dragonfly’s landing site from different angles, ranging from inclinations of 5 degrees to 72 degrees. 

By analyzing how the terrain produced different-shaped shadows based on the viewing angle, Bonnefoy’s team were able to determine the topography of the region within the limits of the image resolution, finding no major show-stopping obstacles that Dragonfly would need to avoid. 

The scientists also calculated the height of the rim of Selk crater, finding it to vary from less than 650 feet (200 m) tall in some parts up to 2,000 feet (600 m), which is higher than expected, indicating a less eroded crater rim.

The research was published Aug. 30 in The Planetary Science Journal (opens in new tab).

Follow Keith Cooper on Twitter @21stCenturySETI. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. 

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.

Why do I still carry a wallet? My iPhone does just about anything a traditional wallet can do. Most (if not all) of my purchases are via Apple Pay or QR code, my phone holds all of my pictures, and most of my receipts also go to my email. Basically the only I keep my wallet around is to carry my ID. Once my state starts supporting Apple’s digital ID feature, however, things will change between me and my wallet.

Since iOS 15.4, Apple has supported adding a driver’s license or other state ID to your iPhone’s digital wallet. That doesn’t mean you’ve been needlessly carrying your ID around since then—states have been slow to roll out the feature, and most haven’t yet signed on at all. As of this writing, only two states actively allow you to add your ID to your iPhone, while 10 more (plus Puerto Rico) have confirmed plans to offer the option eventually, on a loose timeline of “soon.”

Here’s the full list as it stands in October 2022:

• Arizona (March 2022)
• Maryland (May 2022)
• Colorado (coming soon)
• Connecticut (coming soon)
• Georgia (coming soon)
• Hawaii (coming soon)
• Iowa (coming soon)
• Kentucky (coming soon)
• Mississippi (coming soon)
• Ohio (coming soon)
• Oklahoma (coming soon)
• Puerto Rico (coming soon)
• Utah (coming soon)

If you live in Arizona and Maryland, be warned: You can’t simply hand a cop your iPhone when you get pulled over. There are specific, limited use cases for this feature. Right now, that means identifying yourself at the airport. Apple worked with the TSA to make this happen, and it currently works at the following airports:

• Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport (BWI)
• Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA)
• Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport (PHX)

Soon, though, participating apps will be able to check your digital ID for age authentication, so you won’t need to worry about presenting your driver’s license the next time you order booze. Apple has confirmed Uber Eats and Turo as among the first apps to support the option, though the feature doesn’t seem to be live as of yet. Seeing as the feature is technically a part of iOS 16, however, it’s likely it will arrive in the near future.

How to add a digital ID to your iPhone

If you do live in a supported state, setting up the feature is simple. Open Wallet, then, tap the (+) in the top right, then choose “Driver’s License or State ID.” Choose your state, then choose whether to add the ID to your iPhone 8 or newer, as well as your Apple Watch Series 4 or newer. Either way, you’ll need to scan your ID with your iPhone’s camera, then scan your face to prove your identity. Once complete, send all information to your state to confirm.

The next time you fly from a participating airport, you can unlock your iPhone and place it next to the ID scanner. You’ll see your digital ID appear, complete with all information you will be sharing with the TSA if you approve (name, date of birth, sex, ID number, state, issue and expiration dates, real ID status, and ID photo).

[MacRumors]

NASA’s Juno spacecraft took images of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa during a recent flyby. One of the photos—released this week by NASA—offers an intimate view of Europa’s surface features.

Juno has orbited the gas giant Jupiter since 2016, but only recently has NASA diverted the spacecraft’s attention to the planet’s moons. Europa is of particular scientific interest because scientists believe a salty ocean lies beneath the moon’s frozen surface.

If such an ocean is there—something the upcoming Europa Clipper mission will investigate using surface-penetrating radar—it could host ingredients for life, if not life itself.

The recent image was taken during Juno’s flyby on September 29, during which the spacecraft came within about 220 miles of the moon’s surface. The image covers a roughly 11,600-square-mile swath of Europa, a region dominated with grooves and ridges in the ice. It’s a black-and-white photo taken from about 256 miles above the surface and is the highest-resolution image taken of a specific portion of the moon.

The new pic builds on the first images released from the flyby. Darker splotches on the ice could indicate something beneath the moon’s crust erupting onto the surface, according to a recent NASA release. White flecks dotting the image are signatures of high-energy particles from the radiation in the moon’s surrounding environment.

“These features are so intriguing,” said Heidi Becker, the lead co-investigator for the camera used to take the image, in the release. “Understanding how they formed – and how they connect to Europa’s history – informs us about internal and external processes shaping the icy crust.”

Though Juno began its focus on Jupiter, its investigation has expanded to that of four Galilean satellites and the gas giant’s rings—not so easily seen, but recently captured in images by the Webb Space Telescope.

Juno flew by Ganymede (the largest moon in the solar system) in June 2021, and in 2023 Io will get its own flyby. Juno is significantly expanding its observational targets and will be supplanted in the early 2030s by NASA’s Europa Clipper, which will investigate Europa’s ability to foster life with state-of-the-art instruments.

Europa’s surface may look pretty hostile in black and white and from 200 miles up, but beneath the ice, it could be an entirely different story.

More: Check Out Juno’s First Up-Close Images of Icy Europa

Chinese government officials thanked Elon Musk over the weekend for his ideas about Taiwan which were shared in a new interview with the Financial Times. Musk said that Taiwan, which is currently independent as a self-governing democracy, should be controlled by China, something that hasn’t happened since 1949.

“My recommendation…  would be to figure out a special administrative zone for Taiwan that is reasonably palatable, probably won’t make everyone happy. And it’s possible, and I think probably, in fact, that they could have an arrangement that’s more lenient than Hong Kong,” Musk is quoted as saying in the Financial Times.

Musk, who’s simply not very bright, was quick to note that any arrangement should be “more lenient than Hong Kong” probably because the world saw in 2019 what it means when the Chinese government comes to throw its weight around. Hong Kong, which was previously autonomous like Taiwan until Beijing started to exert control in the city, used to have a thriving movie scene, as just one example. Today, the government of China now decides what movies people can watch in Hong Kong.

But Musk’s idea of a special administrative zone was celebrated by Chinese officials like Qin Gang, the Chinese ambassador to the U.S.

“I would like to thank @elonmusk for his call for peace across the Taiwan Strait and his idea about establishing a special administrative zone for Taiwan. Actually, Peaceful reunification and One Country, Two Systems are our basic principles for resolving the Taiwan question and the best approach to realizing national reunification,” the ambassador tweeted.

China’s Foreign Minstry also acknowledged Musk’s comments over the weekend, echoing the billionaire’s idea that Taiwan was part of China and should be governed at least in part by the Chinese Communist Party.

“The Taiwan question is China’s internal affair. China’s position on resolving the Taiwan question is consistent and clear. We remain committed to the basic principle of peaceful reunification and One Country, Two Systems and aim to work with the greatest sincerity and effort to achieve peaceful reunification,” spokesperson Mao Ning said, according to an official readout of her press conference.

“At the same time, we will resolutely defeat attempts to pursue the ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist agenda, push back interference by external forces, and safeguard our sovereignty and territorial integrity,” she continued.

While Chinese always lead with the idea that “peaceful reunification” is the priority, Beijing has not been shy about saying it will use force to take Taiwan.

Why would Musk offer up the freedoms of the 23 million people in Taiwan on a platter? It likely all comes down to money. As plenty of people have noted, Musk’s company Tesla opened a huge factory in Shanghai in 2018. And while Tesla is struggling in the U.S., it’s business is reportedly thriving in China. The people of Taiwan have taken notice and aren’t too happy with Musk, to say the least.

“Taiwan sells many products, but our freedom and democracy are not for sale,” Hsiao Bi-khim, Taiwan’s ambassador to the U.S., tweeted over the weekend.

“Any lasting proposal for our future must be determined peacefully, free from coercion, and respectful of the democratic wishes of the people of Taiwan,” Hsiao continued.