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"We're all familiar with the term "muscle memory." Once you've learned to do something--serve a tennis ball, play a difficult piece of piano music, or draw a lifelike human hand--your body seems to intuitively "know" how to reproduce that action. But researchers at Johns Hopkins university have recently discovered that our ability to perform a physical athletic or creative task isn't entirely about what the body has learned to do right. Instead, we owe our success to the hundred times we've tried to master a skill and failed."

"All it takes is a single selfie. From that static image, an algorithm can quickly create a moving, lifelike avatar: a video not recorded, but fabricated from whole cloth by software. With more time, Pinscreen, the Los Angeles start-up behind the technology, believes its renderings will become so accurate they will defy reality. "You won't be able to tell," said Hao Li, a leading researcher on computer-generated video at USC who founded Pinscreen in 2015. "With further deep-learning advancements, especially on mobile devices, we'll be able to produce completely photoreal avatars in real time.""