Georgia O’Keefe was an American artist whose career spanned six decades and more than 800 paintings. Artnet reports that her painting, Jimson Weed, was sold in 2014 for more than $44 million — a record for a female artist.
But the vibrant colors of the Southwest landscapes and New York skylines in her paintings have been deteriorating, and the Associated Press reports that researchers are hoping some 21st-century technology can help them find out why.
Partly funded by a grant from the National Endowment for Humanities, art preservationists plan to use 3D imaging to assess destructive chemical buildups in paintings by O’Keefe and eventually in collections from other artists in museums around the globe.
Rather than clip a postage-stamp-sized sample from the painting for analysis, researchers want to use high-grade images from various sources of light to assess chemical reactions that occur as paintings get older. Dale Kronkright of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe said the project began in 2011. “It now gives us a way to analyze the entire painting without taking any destructive samples whatsoever,” Kronkright said. “That’s a really big deal.”
Small blisters caused by soap can form when the fats in the original oil paints interact with the drying agents contained in many of the canvases used by 20th-century artists. Thousands of them can alter the colors of the painting, making it appear darker. “They’re a little bit bigger than human hair, and you can see them with the naked eye,” Kronkright said.
O’Keefe’s work presents a unique opportunity to study the chemical reactions in oil paintings, as the techniques and materials she used over her career are well-documented. Art preservationists still don’t know why the soap formation speeds up at certain times, although things like temperature and humidity changes are likely culprits.
The scientific studies will take place in Santa Fe and Chicago over a two-year period. Conservationists will likely study paintings under various environmental conditions, including non-visible light frequencies, to assess what triggers the soap-causing reactions and how to stop or slow them.
“Left unchecked, they will continue to grow, both grow in number and grow in size — and in damaging effect,” said Kronkright.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.