Month: December 2019

Enlarge / Restorers of the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage remove surpeints and reveal the original of "Adoration of the Mystic Lamb" altarpiece by Van Eyck brothers. (credit: John Thys/AFP/Getty Images)

X-rays are a well-established tool to help analyze and restore valuable paintings, because their higher frequency means they pass right through paintings without harming them. X-ray imaging can reveal anything that has been painted over a canvas, or where the artist may have altered his (or her) original vision. But the technique has its limitations, and that's where machine learning can prove useful. Two papers this fall illustrated the use of AI to solve specific problems in art analysis and conservation: one to reconstruct an underpainting in greater detail, and the other to make it easier to image two-sided painted panels.

Picasso's The Old Guitarist is one of the best known works from the artist's so-called "Blue Period." Two decades ago, x-ray and infrared analysis revealed that he had re-used an older canvas (a common practice for struggling artists of the period). There was another painting underneath, of a seated woman, that matched a sketch Picasso had included in a letter to a friend. But the x-ray and infrared images couldn't provide sufficient detail to get a sense of what the original painting really looked like, especially the choice of colors.

In a paper posted to the physics arXiv in September, Anthony Bourached and George Cann of the University College London described how they employed machine learning to reconstruct a full-color image of Picasso's original underpainting—specifically, a technique called neural style transfer, originally developed a few years ago by researchers at the University of Tübingen in Germany. Per Technology Review:

Enlarge / This image may provide a clue to our top space mission of the decade. (credit: SpaceX)

As we approach the end of the 2010s, it's been fun to contemplate the coolest, most daring, and most significant feats of spaceflight during the last decade. Such an exercise leads inexorably to a simple conclusion—humans from around the world have done a lot of amazing things in space over the last 10 years.

For simplicity's sake, I had originally hoped to write about the five most important missions. But soon, I realized that this was far too limiting. Truthfully, even picking 10 of the biggest and best accomplishments during the last decade has proven incredibly challenging. We've had to leave out some really awesome things on this list, not to mention ultimately cheating (as this list goes to 11). It was so hard. If you read through the "honorable mentions" at the end of this list, there are literally dozens of incredible space feats. It makes me feel better about our species.

This is a subjective list, of course. I asked my followers on Twitter for suggestions on the "coolest" or "most exciting" or "best" space missions this decade and got 175 replies. I spoke with several NASA and academic leaders for their input and got plenty more insight. But at the end of the day, this is my list of the things that I'd rank as the most inspiring and significant achievements. Address your hate mail accordingly.

Enlarge / Donald Trump. (credit: NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP via Getty Images)

The Trump White House is rumored to be working on a beefed-up open access mandate. The potential executive order would require all scientific papers that are based on federally funded research to be made available online free of charge as soon as they are published. That would supersede a 2013 rule issued by the Obama White House that required federally funded papers to become freely available one year after publication.

The White House hasn't actually announced the new policy yet, but the rumors were enough to get the attention of scientific publishers. Last Wednesday more than 100 publishing organizations signed a letter calling on the Trump administration to scrap the proposal.

The letter warned that an open access mandate would "jeopardize the intellectual property of American organizations engaged in the creation of high-quality peer-reviewed journals and research articles." Without the ability to charge the public for articles, scientific journals would have to pass those costs on to researchers or taxpayers, the letter warns.