How To Reveal Two Great Art Works In One

 

1. Take a famous painting like Patch of Grass by Van Gogh.

Figure 1. (a) Vincent van Gogh, Patch of Grass, Paris, Apr−June 1887, oil on canvas, 30 cm × 40 cm. The red frame indicates the field of view in images b and c (rotated 90° counter-clockwise). (b) X-ray radiation transmission radiograph (XRR), paint sample location indicated in the blue frame (Figure 4). (c) Infrared reflectograph (IRR).

2. Add a little synchrotron radiation induced X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (zap it with an intense X-ray bundle for two days).

X-Ray Fluorescence Spectrography works on the principle that a strong X-Ray pulse affects each atom in the target in different ways allowing scientists to track specific chemicals on different layers. Graph: Amptek.Com

3. Use that information to track every type of atom (and pigment type) in the canvas (e.g. mercury or lead, common ingredients in paint in Van Gogh’s time). And…

4. Presto! You can reveal older works that have been painted over. (In this case, the portrait of a woman that looks like a rough sketch for the artist’s (more) famous Potato Eaters painting.)

 

University of Antwerp/Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron Researchers used X-rays from a particle accelerator to reconstruct the portrait of a woman Vincent van Gogh had painted over before composing his landscape "Patch of Grass," completed in 1887. Conventional X-rays used in previous analyses had produced only rough outlines of the portrait. The image, unveiled in a scientific journal published this week, bears a striking resemblance to a series of somber portraits the artist produced in the Dutch town of Nuenen, where he composed “The Potato Eaters,” completed in 1885 and regarded as his first major work.

An international research team, including members from Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands) and the University of Antwerp (Belgium), has successfully applied this technique for the first time, and it’s not surprising that they chose Van Gogh:

Sunset over Trinity College Dublin, by Ken Chow.

Wired News has announced the winners of its latest photo competition (as voted by readers) and a photo of Trinity College Dublin ended up in the mix.

US readers might be excited to know that Dublin is in a constant state of transcendental magnificence.

Except at dawn.

At dawn its beauty is even more other-worldly.

Bee Watch II: What, no honey?!

 

There may be no UK honey on store shelves this holiday season if scientists don't find a solution to the varroa parasite, warns expert. Photo: Daily Express

There may be no native honey on UK store shelves this holiday season if scientists don’t find a solution to the effects of the varroa mite (see yesterday’s post).

That’s the stark warning from Stuart Bailey, director of the Honey Association, as reported in The Daily Express today.

The pollinating services of bees are estimated to be worth £165million a year to the UK economy. Stuart Bailey, director of the Honey Association, said: “There will be no English honey on the shelves of supermarkets at Christmas though there will be some from abroad. Consumers will not get English honey unless they buy it from local bee keepers but they too will sell out quite quickly.

Meanwhile, in Scotland, the crisis surrounding bee populations has inspired the creation of a special bee-friendly garden in the University of Stirling, the BBC reports. The Bumblebee Conservation Trust is also involved in the project:  

Bot Surfing

 

The bots are in silver.

Vintage tv lovers might be tempted by a Lost In Space reproduction (pictured above) available on eBAY for a wallet-chilling $21,500. Auction ends August 4th.

Bee Watch I: Fungus Footbaths

 

Varroa parasite in action on a honey bee.

Welcome to Bee Watch, a series of updates on Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) –the name given to the sudden and dramatic decline in bee populations since the mid-noughties.

Why does CCD matter?

If the bees go, we go. Bees pollinate about a third of the food we eat, but more than that: they also sting bad people and scare the pants off small children. CCD is preventing large numbers of bees from performing these tasks efficiently.

CCD (US Dept of Agriculture Fact Sheet) has been blamed on everything from mobile phones to pesticides, but no one has definitively uncovered its root causes yet.

Bee Watch will bring you the latest research news on CCD and related bee-news.

Researchers in the University of Warwick, England, are investigating ways of killing the varroa mite –the small parasite believed to be a factor in CCD– using a natural fungus and some novel dispersion methods, including fungal foot baths for bees, the idea being that when bees enter the hive, their legs will pick up (and distribute) the fungus that kills the little parasite.