Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Tuesday March 19th. I'm Alex Oscela for the Wall Street Journal.

Coming up on today's show, Data Slooths take a lot of time to find images published in scientific

papers that may be fake or deceptive.

Now, new tools are here to help.

W.S.J. reporter Niedi Suburaman tells us how technology could help. W.S.J reporter Nidi Suburaman tells us how technology could help clean up the scientific

record.

And then, as Tik-Tock is battling a potential ban in the U.S. it's also facing business challenges, including slowing user growth.

We'll find out what it means for Tik-Tocks at sales from W.S.J. reporter Megan Browski.

But first, images are an important part of scientific papers.

They can help show that a new cancer treatment works or what a new species looks like.

Sometimes, either by accident or on purpose,

images can be copied from elsewhere or simply be misleading.

W.S.J. Science reporter Niedie Subaraman

tells us how new high-tech tools can help address this problem.

Nidi, can you give us an example of image manipulation?

So one of the papers that an image expert flagged recently in a complaint was rife with images that looked like they've

been copied from elsewhere.

There were experimental images of like cancer tissue, of different types of cancers that looked the same.

There were photographs of these cells that a company that sold biomedical supplies had on their website that appeared in the paper as well.

And all of these looked shockingly similar with no explanation.

It makes you question whether the paper is solid, whether the conclusions

hold up and any of the papers that came after it that built on the insights there hold up in turn.

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