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The company claims that over 1.5 billion matches have been created in the 20 countries where the feature is available.The service is opt-in within the main Facebook app, with a separate profile created that’s shared with prospective matches. Its main feature, called Secret Crush, allows users to discover if they have any secret admirers among their Facebook friends.Read moreUsers select up to nine Facebook friends that they would want to date, and those selected receive an anonymous notification telling them that they have been chosen. if that person also adds their secret admirer to their Secret Crush list the pair will be matched together, revealing both names.As well as Facebook friends, users are able to select their Instagram followers as potential secret crushes.Users can also choose to let other people see similar interests by adding events and groups to their dating profile. During the coronavirus pandemic, when real-life dates are scarce due to social distancing, Facebook is rolling out a video call feature so users can attend virtual dates.“Starting the call will send an invitation, and once they accept , they will join your video call and you can get to know each other better. Your first name and Dating profile photo will be displayed when starting the call”, Facebook said in its announcement. Facebook will not suggest current Facebook friends as potential matches or notify them that a user has joined its Dating service.“This is going to be for building real, long-term relationships – not just for hookups”, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said when Dating was launched. Facebook Dating is rolling out to Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Croatia, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Sweden, Slovenia, Slovakia, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Facebook has recently taken steps to unify its services with regards to its subsidiary Instagram and its VR platform. Faceobok is also demanding that owners of its Oculus virtual reality headset will be required to link their Facebook account, making it compulsory for all new buyers and linking full functionality of the headset to pairing Facebook accounts.“We will take steps to allow you to keep using content you have purchased, though we expect some games and apps may no longer work”, the company said in August.

Nasa is preparing to grab a piece of asteroid and bring it back to Earth.The dramatic manoeuvre will be the culmination of two years that a Nasa spacecraft has spent orbiting and examining an asteroid known as Bennu, hundreds of millions of miles away.The Osiris-Rex mission will see the spacecraft drop onto the asteroid, scoop up a piece of rubble, and stash it away so that it can be brought back down to Earth.The drama will unfold on Tuesday as the US has its first go at collecting asteroid samples for return to Earth, a feat accomplished only by Japan so far.Nasa is looking to bring back at least two ounces (60 grams) worth of asteroid Bennu, the biggest such haul from beyond the moon.The van-sized spacecraft is aiming for the relatively flat middle of a tennis court-sized crater named Nightingale – a spot comparable to a few parking places here on Earth. Boulders as big as buildings loom over the targeted touchdown zone.Read more”So for some perspective, the next time you park your car in front of your house or in front of a coffee shop and walk inside, think about the challenge of navigating Osiris-Rex into one of these spots from 200 million miles away,” Nasa’s deputy project manager Mike Moreau said.Once it drops out of its half-mile-high (0.75 km-high) orbit around Bennu, the spacecraft will take a deliberate four hours to make it all the way down, to just above the surface.Then the action cranks up when Osiris-Rex’s 11-foot (3.4-metre) arm reaches out and touches Bennu.Contact should last five to 10 seconds, just long enough to shoot out pressurised nitrogen gas and suck up the churned dirt and gravel.Programmed in advance, the spacecraft will operate autonomously during the unprecedented touch-and-go manoeuvre. With an 18-minute lag in radio communication each way, ground controllers for spacecraft builder Lockheed Martin near Denver cannot intervene.If the first attempt does not work, Osiris-Rex can try again. Any collected samples will not reach Earth until 2023.While Nasa has brought back comet dust and solar wind particles, it has never attempted to sample one of the nearly one million known asteroids lurking in our solar system until now.Japan, meanwhile, expects to get samples from asteroid Ryugu in December – in the milligrams at most – 10 years after bringing back specks from asteroid Itokawa.Bennu is an asteroid picker’s paradise. The big, black, roundish, carbon-rich space rock – taller than New York’s Empire State Building – was around when our solar system was forming 4.5 billion years ago.Scientists consider it a time capsule full of pristine building blocks that could help explain how life formed on Earth and possibly elsewhere.The mission’s principal scientist, Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona, said: “This is all about understanding our origins.”Additional reporting by AP

Nasa will hold a major event to announce an “exciting new discovery” about the Moon, it has said.The space agency did not reveal details about the discovery but suggested that it “contributes to Nasa’s efforts to learn about the Moon in support of deep space exploration”.It also said that the discovery had come from the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or Sofia.Sofia is a modified Boeing 747 that flies in the high the atmosphere, allowing a built-in, 9-foot telescope to get a view of our solar system and the broader universe.Because it goes above 99 per cent of the water vapour in the atmosphere, which normally obscures our view of space, the flying observatory is able to “pick up phenomenon impossible to see with visible light”, Nasa noted in its announcement.Read moreNasa’s notice of the event made heavy reference to the Artemis programme, which hopes to send the first woman and next man to the Moon in 2024, with the hope of using it as a base to launch missions to Mars from the 2030s. They will be the first people to set foot on the Moon since 1972.The briefing will also be attended by Jacob Bleacher, chief exploration scientist for the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate at Nasa’s Headquarters, further suggesting that the discovery is at least applicable to the space agency’s plans to travel to – and live on – the Moon.As well as Dr Bleacher, the event will be attended by Paul Hertz, astrophysics division director at NASA Headquarters; Casey Honniball, postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center; and Naseem Rangwala, project scientist for the SOFIA mission.The event will take place at noon eastern time, or 5pm in the UK, on Monday, 26 October, Nasa said.