In August, Patrick Hillman, chief communications officer of blockchain ecosystem Binance, knew something was off when he was scrolling through his full inbox and found six messages from clients about recent video calls with investors in which he had allegedly participated. "Thanks for the investment opportunity," one of them said. "I have some concerns about your investment advice," another wrote. Others complained the video quality wasn't very good, and one even asked outright: "Can you confirm the Zoom call we had on Thursday was you?" With a sinking feeling in his stomach, Hillman realized that someone had deepfaked his image and voice well enough to hold 20-minute "investment" Zoom calls trying to convince his company's clients to turn over their Bitcoin for scammy investments.

In August, Patrick Hillman, chief communications officer of blockchain ecosystem Binance, knew something was off when he was scrolling through his full inbox and found six messages from clients about recent video calls with investors in which he had allegedly participated. "Thanks for the investment opportunity," one of them said. "I have some concerns about your investment advice," another wrote. Others complained the video quality wasn't very good, and one even asked outright: "Can you confirm the Zoom call we had on Thursday was you?" With a sinking feeling in his stomach, Hillman realized that someone had deepfaked his image and voice well enough to hold 20-minute "investment" Zoom calls trying to convince his company's clients to turn over their Bitcoin for scammy investments.

Fortnite Battle Royale has added a message to its mobile app telling kids not to play in school. The game was released on mobile just a few weeks ago but some teachers say it's distracting their students. One teacher posted on the game's Reddit thread, asking the game's developers if they could "mess with" his students. The message "Mr Hillman says stop playing in class" now features on a loading screen in the app. In a now deleted Reddit post Mr Hillman wrote: "First, I love your game. My friends from college and I play pretty much every night. "One problem, since mobile came out my students won't stop playing in class.

There's no human instinct more basic than speech, and yet, for many people, talking can be taxing. Unfortunately, many behaviorally-based voice disorders are not well understood. In particular, patients with muscle tension dysphonia (MTD) often experience deteriorating voice quality and vocal fatigue ("tired voice") in the absence of any clear vocal cord damage or other medical problems, which makes the condition both hard to diagnose and hard to treat. But a team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) believes that better understanding of conditions like MTD is possible through machine learning. Using accelerometer data collected from a wearable device developed by researchers at the MGH Voice Center, researchers demonstrated that they can detect differences between subjects with MTD and matched controls.

The most sophisticated, widely adopted, and important tool for looking at living brain activity actually does no such thing. Called functional magnetic resonance imaging, what it really does is scan for the magnetic signatures of oxygen-rich blood. Blood indicates that the brain is doing something, but it's not a direct measure of brain activity. Which is to say, there's room for error. That's why neuroscientists use special statistics to filter out noise in their fMRIs, verifying that the shaded blobs they see pulsing across their computer screens actually relate to blood flowing through the brain.