TikTok is a fun, silly place. To scroll through it is to take in a sensational amount of people dancing and lip-syncing. There’s a video of Cameron Diaz’s wine drinking challenge, a very polite kid named Grey, and a clip from Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” that you’ll hear way too much. There are even frogs. It’s addictive and ridiculous.

But the platform has been in the news lately for reasons relating to privacy and security, an issue that came to a head when President Trump issued an executive order on August 6 that outlaws transactions with TikTok’s parent company. (Read TikTok’s response here and an analysis of the head-scratching presidential decision here.) The drama stems from a fact that separates TikTok from other similar social media apps like Instagram: ByteDance, the company’s parent, is Chinese.

A path forward may be found through American ownership for the app, and on August 2 Microsoft announced they might buy TikTok. Conversations about the potential acquisition are already taking place, but we won’t know more until September 15.

What you’re hearing in the news may compel you to wonder—is the app safe to use? And if you are already using it, is there anything you should keep in mind?

The short answer is that it’s probably completely fine and harmless for most people to be on TikTok, as long as they keep in mind that, just as with other social media apps, it hoovers up data.

Platforms like TikTok and Instagram collect personal information from users with different levels of transparency, points out Shuman Ghosemajumder, the global head of artificial intelligence at F5, an internet infrastructure and security company. The first level is information that you’re clearly aware you’re sharing with them. This includes the email or account you used to sign up for the app, and of course the content you actively share on the platform.

“When you’re taking a video of yourself, and uploading that to TikTok, everybody knows that TikTok is taking that data and storing it on their servers, and performing various types of analysis on it,” Ghosemajumder says.

The next level is data you may not be aware an app is collecting—such as details like your IP address and information about your device and its operating system. TikTok says in its privacy policy (and you should read it if you’re curious) that it is also “scanning and analyzing” the messages you send over the platform.

Finally, the third category of data collection is the nefarious, criminal kind which experts scrutinize apps to find. But Ghosemajumder says it’s extremely difficult for an app that operates at the scale of TikTok to be able to hide from the forensics researchers who would love to expose that kind of behavior. Has TikTok done that? Ghosemajumder says he knows of no evidence that it has.

There was a blip in that department, though—in June, it surfaced that TikTok had access to the clipboards of users running the next version of Apple’s operating system, iOS 14. That means that if you had recently copied and pasted anything sensitive, TikTok could have seen that. “The reason that TikTok claimed to be doing that was to detect users who were using the clipboard to spam comments,” Ghosemajumder says. Cutting and pasting is a common way to distribute spam. In fact, anytime you’ve noticed that the paste function isn’t working in a field on a website, that’s because the merchant is trying to fight fraud. It would make sense for TikTok to do this too, but since the issue was exposed, the platform stopped the practice.

Let common sense be your guide if you’re using an app like TikTok—and of course, start by not sharing anything you don’t want people to see. If you don’t want thousands of people to watch you dancing in your living room with your family, then don’t upload a video that shows just that. Ultimately, Ghosemajumder doesn’t see much daylight between TikTok and its competitors. “There’s no fundamental difference in using TikTok versus using [apps like] Facebook or Instagram,” Ghosemajumder reflects.

James Andrew Lewis, who directs the technology policy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, agrees. “Right now there’s no risk in using TikTok—it’s pretty harmless,” Lewis says. “The information on it is not valuable to an intelligence agency, the PII [personally identifying information] is nothing special, and there’s no evidence that TikTok has been used as a vehicle for delivering malicious code.”

As for the fact that the parent company is Chinese, Andrés Arrieta, director of consumer privacy engineering at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, points out that “a lot of the political discourse is more about xenophobia than actually privacy or security concerns.” Although, he adds, “if the Chinese government is your worry, then yes, it’s a worry.” For context, Human Rights Watch’s 2020 report on China has this to say about the country’s repressive tactics and global reach: “Government censorship now extends far beyond its borders; its mix of typically financial incentives and intimidation are manipulating discourse about China around the world.” An important reminder: The best way for anyone to communicate who does not want a government or company potentially snooping on what they say is through a platform that offers end-to-end encryption, such as WhatsApp, Signal, or iMessage.

“The concern here is, the Chinese could censor [content on TikTok]—right now they haven’t,” Lewis says. “Or they could put short propaganda videos on TikTok—right now they haven’t.”

Another common concern is that Beijing could lean on ByteDance to try to get American users’ data on the platform. But there is “no evidence that that has happened,” Lewis says. Interestingly, TikTok’s servers aren’t in China—they’re in Singapore and Virginia. And TikTok does not exist as an app within China itself.

“No one trusts China, and for good reason—China is engaged in a huge espionage campaign,” Lewis adds. And even though he says it’s wise for the United States government not to trust China (thus, the Pentagon doesn’t want members of the military to have the app, especially on their official work devices) individual users need not worry about using TikTok: “There is zero risk,” he says.

So, feel free to scroll through frog videos and people lip-syncing all you want. “If the Chinese can get intelligence advantage out of that,” Lewis reflects, “it would be an amazement to me.”

Update on August 13:

On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that TikTok had been collecting a unique numerical device identifier, known as the MAC address, with its Android users, but stopped doing so in November, 2019. It did so for over a year, the Journal stated.

The MAC addresses can be used not only for advertising purposes but also for fraud detection, Ghosemajumder notes.

“The current TikTok app does not collect MAC addresses,” a TikTok spokesperson said in an email to Popular Science. “We encourage our users to download the most current version of TikTok.”

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Google’s new camera, called Clips, is a small, intriguing device that feels experimental. It’s a camera, but it has no screen to compose or view images. It comes with a case that has a clip, but it’s not designed to be worn on your clothing. Most interestingly, it uses artificial intelligence to take photography out of your hands so it can capture moments on its own.

Google intends this roughly 2-inch by 2-inch camera to be used by specific audiences—parents or pet-owners—who are interested in capturing a certain kind of scene: the candid moments when a child (or dog) does something cute that may happen too quickly for you to pull out your smartphone and open an app. Another reason for parents to use it is to avoid gathering more shots that feel posed. It’s meant for candids.

If you don’t meet that criteria—if you’re a person with no kids, and no pets, who loves taking pictures with the smartphone in your pocket—this $249 camera is not for you. Or, if you are a parent, but want to completely control your photos and videos the normal way, this camera is not for you, either.

But people who are eager to try to collect candid moments, and who don’t find the idea of an AI-powered camera creepy, may be interested in exploring with this innovative little piece of tech.

How it works

Google designed Clips, which they define simply as a “smart camera,” to be used purposefully. A parent could place it at a vantage point they think will be fun, in a room where their kids are playing. It has a three-hour battery life, and a camera lens made out of Gorilla Glass, for toughness. You turn it on by rotating the lens counterclockwise. It has no microphone, so can’t record sound. And it doesn’t stream to the cloud—you only can see what it shoots by wirelessly connecting it with you phone, and reviewing the results there.

It produces tiny little movies, like Apple’s Live Photos feature on iPhones. They are not technically videos; the Clips camera shoots still photos at 15 frames per second to create the segments. Like many smartphones, the Clips camera is 12 megapixels.

Onboard the Clips device, it uses machine learning algorithms to help capture scenes. Those algorithms include face detection, and recognizing familiar people. “It cares the most about faces,” Juston Payne, the device’s product manager at Google, said at a press event. “Once it learns that there’s a face that you see frequently, it’ll try to get nice photos of those faces.”

And they want it to also recognize facial expressions. That involved “training it to know what happiness looks like,” Payne said.

The Google team also trained it to recognize what not to shoot—like when a child’s hand is over the lens, or if it is tossed in a dark purse.

After you’re done using the camera, the only way to see the images it has collected is by connecting the camera with your phone, which you do through its own app, also called Google Clips. In that app, you can save a clip (which sends it to your photo library) or delete it. You can also edit the footage while you’re viewing it in the app, but you have to do that before you save or delete it, otherwise it disappears from the Clips app. In short, the Clips app is a transitory place that just lets you edit, view, and manage those clips. The little moments you view in the Clips app are actually streaming from the camera itself, and not truly saved on your phone until you want them to be.

And all the machine learning is happening on the device itself—the system doesn’t learn what clips you liked, or didn’t like, from your actions in the Clips app. Its packs 16 gigabytes of onboard storage, which Payne says can hold around 1,400 clips.

Were they concerned it could seem creepy? Yes, Payne conceded. But they said that they addressed that by making it obvious what it is. “It looks like a camera,” he said. A blinking light on the front signals that it is on. Besides, unlike a cloud camera meant to monitor your home, this device is not connected to the internet.

What it’s like to use

Google is serious when they say that this camera is meant for parents and pet-owners. Since I am not a parent, nor do I own pets, I didn’t have a good way to use it as it was intended.

So like any good, childless journalist, I FedExed the camera to my sister, who has, objectively speaking, the two best kids in the world. She used it around her house, and of the clips it captured of my nephews, there is one I especially like of one them chasing the other. Here’s a still from that clip:

I love the photos of my nephews that I have on my phone already that were shot the traditional way, and I love taking more of them, even if they are sometimes posed. So I don’t necessarily need clips shot by a little external camera, but that funny moment is nice to have.

In short, that’s the best way to think of this device: an experimental camera created with one kind of user in mind, best purchased by someone with kids, or a dog they just can’t enough of, and willing to try, just for fun, using an AI-powered camera in a new way—and open to sifting through whatever kinds of clips it produces with its silicon brain.

“This product is only possible because of the way that silicon has advanced,” Payne said, noting that it was only in the past year or so that they could squeeze the technology down into a device this size. Going forward, we’re likely to get more assistance from the artificial intelligence packed into our apps and gadgets.

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Flying squirrels are adorable little mammals that weigh less than half a pound. It also turns out that the three flying squirrel species that dwell in North America—called New World flying squirrels—glow fluorescent pink under ultraviolet light. And the researchers who discovered the phenomenon still don’t know exactly why.

The investigation into these fluorescent flying critters began with a serendipitous discovery: Jonathan Martin, an associate professor of forestry at Northland College in Wisconsin, was coming back from a hike at night, and shone a UV light at the flying squirrels he heard on his bird feeder. “Then I saw this blaze of pink,” he recalls, via email. “It was simply beautiful.” (He was already interested in the topic of fluorescence in nature, and had read a study about fluorescent frogs.)

That eventually triggered more formal research by Allie Kohler, who was an undergraduate at Northland at the time and is now a masters student at Texas A&M University, studying wildlife. She began by looking at specimens at the Science Museum of Minnesota.

“I was able to go there quickly, and look through their museum specimens, and every single one that I saw that was a flying squirrel did fluoresce hot pink,” she recalls. The researchers also checked out critters at the Field Museum in Chicago, which did the same thing. These flying squirrels (actually they’re gliders, not flyers) come in three different species, all in the genus of Glaucomys, and are active at night and a dawn or dusk, making them “nocturnal-crepuscular,” according to a paper in the Journal of Mammalogy reporting their results.

They also checked out regular squirrels that are active during the day, like the Sciurus carolinensis, or Eastern gray squirrel. Those rodents do not glow under UV light.

On these flying squirrels, the fluorescent effect is stronger on the critters’ underside. The researchers speculate a few reasons why it might be present on their bodies. Among their hypotheses: it could help them communicate in some way, avoid predators, or might come in handy in snow-covered terrain.

Fluorescence, by the way, is when a substance emits longer wavelength light after getting hit by shorter wavelength light—in this case, ultraviolet light is hitting the squirrels and being sent back out as the pink hue that humans can see. Other life forms fluoresce too, like some parrots.

To capture the images photographically, the researchers trained an ultraviolet flashlight at them, and shot using a Canon EOS 50D camera. They also had to add a yellow filter to the camera to soak up background blue wavelengths of light that were coming out of the UV flashlight, to make the fluorescent color more visible.

Kohler says that research has shown that flying squirrels’ eye lenses are capable of allowing ultraviolet light to pass through, but it’s unclear what, if anything, the squirrels see. “The real question is,” she says, “is their brain processing this information?”

More photos, below.

RELATED: Spooky animal x-rays are exactly as cool as you’d imagine

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It’s that time of year—summer is over, kids have gone back to school, and tech reporters and Apple followers turn their eyes to Cupertino, California, to track the iPhone news coming out of the Steve Jobs Theater.

The event just concluded and Apple released three new iPhones, all with different forms of the “iPhone 11” name, plus a new iPad and a next-gen Apple Watch with a display that stays on all the time. Here’s what we know about the iPhones.

iPhone 11

The newest line is called the iPhone 11, which is easy enough to remember. (Thanks for that, Tim.) You can pick from six different colors, and the display is 6.1 inches across. On the back are two cameras—one wide angle and another “ultra wide,” which takes in 120 degrees of view. Apple also boasts that the portrait mode works on pets, so you can give a picture of your cat a nice blurry background.

Another new feature is Night Mode. This is very similar to Google’s Night Sight on its Pixel phones. Night Mode on iPhones comes on automatically and is designed to improve photos taken in low light. It will also boast improved video-taking features; holding down the shutter button in picture mode will automatically take a short video, for example.

The front-facing or selfie camera will fit more people into the frame if you hold your phone horizontally. Plus, you can take slow-mo videos with that front camera. Do we really need that? Not sure.

The new chip powering these phones is called the A13.

The battery in the iPhone 11 should last an hour longer than the battery in the XR. Like its predecessor, it will also have wireless charging.

It will start at $699. That’s relatively cheap!

iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max

But wait, there’s another new phone. It’s called the iPhone 11 Pro. It has three cameras, is made of steel, and comes in colors like gold and space grey.

The iPhone 11 Pro will have two sizes: a screen that’s 5.8 inches across and another that’s 6.5 inches. The bigger one is called the iPhone 11 Pro Max.

As for the new chip in these phones, we heard about how fast it is and how it’s leveraging machine learning, a common strategy in modern flagship smartphones. The A13 Bionic has 8.5 billion transistors in it—the tiny “gates” that electrons pass through to make the whole thing tick. (Curious about transistors and chip size? Check out our Moore’s Law explainer.)

As for those cameras, one is a wide camera, the other is ultra wide, and the third is a telephoto camera. With this setup, you’ll be able to optically zoom up to four times, which is a lot for a smartphone camera.

And then there’s Deep Fusion. That’s the name of the new way that Apple is processing images on iPhone 11 Pros. It’s a “fusion” because it mashes together nine images to create the best possible picture.

Apple also says that the video capture, and editing experience, are better than before, too.

The Pro models will start at $999, and $1,099 for the Max. Older phones will also stay on sale for less money.

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The cockpit of a British Airways Boeing 747-400 is a beautifully complex place where a handful of analog gauges live side-by-side with digital displays.

Among the vast array of system switches and controls in the worn flight deck, some parts are easier to understand than others. Four Rolls Royce engines power the giant 747 aircraft, hanging off wings that span about 211 feet—and in the center of the cockpit are four ivory-colored thrust levers, one for each engine.

I’m a journalist, not a pilot, but I’m sitting in the captain’s seat on the left side of the flight deck. Mark Vanhoenacker, a senior first officer with British Airways, author of air-travel books, and a columnist for the Financial Times, is in the seat to my right.

“It’s as basic as it can be,” Vanhoenacker says casually, then pushes those four thrust levers forward with one hand. A moment later he moves them back where they were. “Push them forward, you go faster; pull them back, you go slower.”

Our airliner’s parked at a gate at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City, and the engines are off, so of course, we don’t change speed. Earlier that morning, the vessel had flown in from London’s Heathrow, typically a seven-hour-plus flight. Later that day, it will cruise back.

I’m there to talk to Vanhoenacker about his latest book, How to Land a Plane, but also—let’s be honest—to just spend some time in the cockpit with a seasoned aviator who showed me some of its cavernous interior during an interview in late May. To be in a 747 meant the chance to see the nerve center of an iconic aircraft up close—a plane that’s the basis for Air Force One, that people love flying in and staring at, and that helped make air travel more affordable—as airlines fly them less and less. (Vanhoenacker doesn’t fly the 747 now; other pilots steered the plane in from London that day.)

Sitting in the cockpit, some of the flight controls are easy to grok, even for a person who’s never ferried hundreds of passengers through the skies. Both seats have a control column in front of them, with a wheel, on top. Pull the wheel and the column back towards you, and the plane’s nose pitches up. Push it forward, the reverse happens. Turn the wheel to the left, and the plane banks left. A pair of pedals at each of our feet control the rudder.

A single small lever, with fading green paint and a miniature wheel on the end, raises and lowers the enormous aircraft’s landing gear. (Get it—a lever with a little wheel on it controls the wheels?) Another lever with a handle shaped like a wing controls the craft’s flaps and slats, which allow the plane to generate more lift and thus fly more slowly. Upon it is simply written “FLAP.”

We each have a monitor in front of us—the primary flight display—that indicates in colors such as green, purple, and blue crucial information like the aircraft’s airspeed and altitude. Not far from those screens are three classic-looking gauges that duplicate that information in analog form. They’re a form of redundancy, which is the name of the game in aviation.

“This is almost literally what you’d see on a Cessna,” Vanhoenacker says, pointing at those gauges.

But this is no Cessna. For one, it seats 275 people, measures about 232 feet from tip to tail, and cruises at 85 percent of the speed of sound. For another, the flight deck boasts a small bunk room that sleeps two, plus a lavatory, so the crew don’t need to leave the cockpit for a bathroom break.

This particular 747 first flew in 1999. In 2019, it’s not ancient—but it sure does look old, in a capable, dad-bod kind of way.

Let’s land this baby

Vanhoenacker’s latest book, How to Land A Plane, is a good choice for anyone who’s fantasized about suddenly having to get an aircraft safely down on the ground; the book will tell you some of what you need to know.

“Spoiler alert,” Vanhoenacker says before we get on the plane. “You cannot learn to land a plane by reading a book, but hopefully it’s a fun way of thinking about what pilots think about all the time.”

And indeed it is: The slim volume walks you through some of the basics of flight and landing, from how to recognize a cluster of instruments known as the “six pack” to knowing what purpose the PAPI lights near the runway serve.

How to Land a Plane follows Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot, which The New York Times said “makes jet travel seem uncanny and intriguing all over again.”

“I was thinking that there is that poetic side of flying,” he says, “and then there’s also a really, really technical side, and very, very mechanical side.” This new book is all about that practical side.

And on the subject of landings, keep in mind that there’s a good chance that every landing you’ve ever experienced on a commercial flight has been executed by a pilot actually landing that plane by using the flight controls (unless you regularly fly in and out of an airport frequently socked in by fog, like in London or Delhi). In a world of autopilot, artificial intelligence, and self-driving cars, some might assume that planes are constantly landing themselves. And while they can, it’s rare that they do.

The main reasons an airliner will land itself is if the runway is enveloped in fog or flying snow so thick that a pilot can’t see the tarmac. And setting that process up is a pain. “When we get a weather forecast that reports that kind of fog, there are groans in the fight deck, because it’s a lot more work to land it automatically,” Vanhoenacker says. It’s rare to do that—he estimates it happens just once a year for him. And airliners don’t ever take off automatically, either; the pilot always flies it off the runway.

The autopilot does, however, allow pilots to program the route into the aircraft in advance, so that the plane automatically makes the turns it needs during the cruise phase of the flight. That type of assistance frees up cognitive bandwidth for pilots, who need to consider other factors, like what to do if a passenger gets sick or if they need to land elsewhere. In essence, it allows the crew to focus on the “overall management of the flight,” Vanhoenacker says—the mundane yet essential stuff like making radio calls or picking a new route.

An aircraft for “thin” routes

Vanhoenacker flies the 787 Dreamliner, a more modern and fuel-efficient airliner, now. His new aircraft is advanced enough that the pilot can use a cursor on a screen to tell the plane where to go. “On the navigation display, you can see it’s painting where the storms are, and you can point and click to a position away from the storm” to direct the plane there, he says. “The 747 does not do that.”

When you switch the autopilot off, a quick and repetitive siren-like thrum plays to alert the pilots.

Airlines like British Airways and Lufthansa still operate 747s, but the giant four-engine planes are on the decline. From a financial perspective, carriers may prefer more fuel-efficient two-engine craft like the Airbus A350 and the 787, which are also smaller than huge planes like A380. (Boeing still makes the most modern version of the 747, the 747-800, but the orders they have on hand are for the freighter version.)

A rule of thumb for fuel consumption on a 747 is that it will burn about 11 tons of fuel per hour. The 787 burns about half that in the same period but still carries more than 50 percent of the passenger load of the 747. “Most airlines are laser focused on managing fuel consumption,” says Andrew Buchanan, a vice president at Oliver Wyman, a firm that consults for airlines. That, and Buchanan notes that aircraft like the Dreamliner are good for what he describes as “long thin routes”—an epically long journey that skips the traditional hubs and doesn’t carry as many people as an Airbus A380 would. Example: Air New Zealand operates a long flight between Chicago and Auckland on a Dreamliner.

In other words, the aviation landscape has changed since Barry Lopez, in his classic 1995 essay titled “Flight” for Harper’s magazine, wrote: “The Boeing 747 is the one airplane every national airline strives to include in its fleet, to confirm its place in modern commerce, and it’s tempting to see it as the ultimate embodiment of what our age stands for.”

Fly-by-wire

Another major difference between a 747-400 and the Dreamliner is that the latter is what’s known a fly-by-wire aircraft. In the 747-400, when the pilot moves the controls, actual physical cables convey that motion to the rest of the plane, so the surfaces on the wings, like ailerons, can move appropriately. On a fly-by-wire plane, those instructions are passed electronically—that’s the “wire”—along to the rest of the plane. In brief, on the Dreamliner and others planes, computing power sits between the pilot and the actual motion of the aircraft. On our 747, it’s mechanical. (Boeing 747-800s are fly-by-wire.)

Being back in a 747 is enough to trigger some serious nostalgia for Vanhoenacker, who flew them for about 11 years. “We’re sitting on the flight deck of this totally iconic, beautiful aircraft that changed the world,” he reflects; it’s a plane famous enough to have flown its way into the lyrics of songs by the likes of Joni Mitchell and played a key role in the film Inception.

“I will never sit in this seat again in my life,” he adds, as our time in the cockpit draws to a close, unless he happens to show another curious journalist like me around. “It’s sad, isn’t it?”

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