For the small team of U.S. Navy and Air Force commandos in northern Somalia on June 1, 2007, it must have seemed like history repeating itself. While hunting Islamic terrorists in the town of Bargal, the commandos had been pinned down by gunfire. Fourteen years earlier, a similar situation had resulted in the deaths of 18 U.S. servicemembers in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital — a tragedy that’s the subject of the book and movie Black Hawk Down.

But the commandos in 2007 had a few high-tech advantages over their predecessors.

To escape Bargal, the commandos called in some surprising assistance: the...

A new photograph-analyzing tool quantifies changes made by digital airbrushers in the fashion and lifestyle industry, where image alteration has become the psychologically destructive norm.

"Publishers have legitimate reasons to alter photographs to create fantasy and sell products, but they've gone a little too far," said image forensics specialist Hany Farid of Dartmouth University. "You can't ignore the body of literature showing negative consequences to being inundated with these images."

In a Nov. 28 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study, Farid and doctoral student Eric...