Company reveals technology capable of increasing picture resolution 16-fold, effectively restoring lost data - but results still an educated guess

Google's neural networks have achieved the dream of CSI viewers everywhere: the company has revealed a new AI system capable of "enhancing" an eight-pixel square image, increasing the resolution 16-fold and effectively restoring lost data.

The neural network could be used to increase the resolution of blurred or pixelated faces, in a way previously thought impossible; a similar system was demonstrated for enhancing images of bedrooms, again creating a 32x32 pixel image from an 8x8 one.

Google's researchers describe the neural network as "hallucinating" the extra information. The system was trained by being shown innumerable images of faces, so that it learns typical facial features. A second portion of the system, meanwhile, focuses on comparing 8x8 pixel images with all the possible 32x32 pixel images they could be shrunken versions of.

As individuals, our DNA offers insight into things like our personalities, our health and where we come from. But taken together, all those individual portraits can add up to paint a detailed history of humankind.

A study published this week in Nature Communications led by the DNA testing company Ancestry.com presents exactly this kind of bird's eye view. Last month, Ancestry surpassed 3 million customers in its DNA databases. That's an awful lot of DNA, and now the company has set its sites on figuring out exactly what it might learn from all of it.

In the new study, Ancestry's scientists set out to build a picture of how North America's population moved across the country over the past few hundred years. Using genotype data from over 700,000 individuals who have purchased the company's DNA kits, scientists created a network of genetically-identified relationships and then used network analysis techniques to identify clusters of individuals.

A certain amount of worrying is a normal part of life, especially these days with barely a moment passing without some disconcerting headline landing in your news feed. But for some people, their worrying reaches pathological levels. They just can't stop wondering "What if ...?". It becomes distressing and feels out of control. In the formal jargon, they would likely be diagnosed with Generalised Anxiety Disorder, but excessive worrying is also a part of other conditions like panic disorder. There are many factors that contribute to anxiety problems in general, but a new review in Biological Psychology homes in on the cognitive and emotional factors that specifically contribute to prolonged bouts of worry. Its take-home points make an interesting read for anyone who considers themselves a worrier, and for therapists, the review highlights some approaches to help anxious clients get a hold of their excessive worrying.

The review authors, Graham Davey and Frances Meeten at the University of Sussex and the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, explain that what gets many pathological worriers worrying in the first place is that they seem to be highly vigilant to any sources of threat and danger, and if there's any ambiguity about whether a situation is threatening or not, they will tend to interpret it as being dangerous. If they haven't yet heard from their daughter today, for instance, the problem worrier will not only notice this fact, they will also contemplate that it's because she's in trouble, rather than simply busy.

Imagine you've reached the fine age of 77 and you hear news of a school reunion. You're going to have the chance to meet up with several of your former classmates who you haven't seen since you were fourteen-years-old. They'll look a lot different, of course, but what about their personality? Will they be broadly the same as they were back then?

Past research that's looked at trait changes from adolescence to mid-life has shown there tends to be a moderate amount of stability, so too research that's looked at changes from mid-life into old age. Put these two sets of data together and you might expect to see at least some personality stability across an entire lifespan. Your classmates probably won't have changed completely.

An international team led by researchers at Nagoya University, along with US and Swiss colleagues, has identified a new type of solar event and dated it to the year 5480 BC; they did this by measuring carbon-14 levels in tree rings, which reflect the effects of cosmic radiation on the atmosphere at the time. They have also proposed causes of this event, thereby extending knowledge of how the sun behaves.

When the activity of the sun changes, it has direct effects on the earth. For example, when the sun is relatively inactive, the amount of a type of carbon called carbon-14 increases in the earth's atmosphere. Because carbon in the air is absorbed by trees, carbon-14 levels in tree rings actually reflect solar activity and unusual solar events in the past. The team took advantage of such a phenomenon by analyzing a specimen from a bristlecone pine tree, a species that can live for thousands of years, to look back deep into the history of the sun.

"We measured the ¹⁴C levels in the pine sample at three different laboratories in Japan, the US, and Switzerland, to ensure the reliability of our results," A. J. Timothy Jull of the University of Arizona says. "We found a change in ¹⁴C that was more abrupt than any found previously, except for cosmic ray events in AD 775 and AD 994, and our use of annual data rather than data for each decade allowed us to pinpoint exactly when this occurred."

Bright, flaring meteors are sometimes accompanied by faint noises. What's strange about these popping, sizzling, rustling, and hissing sounds are that they reportedly occur almost instantly to earthly onlookers. This makes little sense, as meteors are as far as sixty miles away from viewers on the ground, so any sound they make should take several minutes be heard. What's going on? Do meteors somehow defy the laws of physics?

Researcher Richard Spalding and several of his colleagues at Sandia National Laboratories recently set out to study this strange phenomenon, and in a study just published to the journal Scientific Reports, they announce that the sounds are likely created through light.

Meteor fireballs sometimes pulse with light many times brighter than the full Moon, and these blasts can briefly heat the surfaces of objects many miles away. Such sudden temperature changes can actually create sound.

"We suggest that each pulse of light can heat the surfaces of natural dielectric transducers," Spalding and his colleagues write. "The surfaces rapidly warm and conduct heat into the nearby air, generating pressure waves. A succession of light-pulse-produced pressure waves can then manifest as sound to a nearby observer."

An unusual meteorite found in Algeria in 2012 has given scientists information about volcanic activity on Mars, and it's not like anything we've ever seen on Earth.

Analysis of the 6.9-ounce meteorite, labeled Northwest Africa (NWA) 7635 by an international team of scientists, has helped determine that sometime in its 4.5 billion-year history, Mars had a single volcano that erupted continuously for more than 2 billion years.

"We've never seen anything like that on Earth," says Marc Caffee, professor of physics and astronomy at Purdue University and a member of the research team.

The research was published this week in the journal Science Advances.

So far, more than 100 meteorites in collections around the world have been identified as Martian meteorites. "Even though we've never had astronauts walk on Mars, we still have pieces of the Martian surface to study, thanks to these meteorites," Caffee says.

Most Martian meteorites are found either in Antarctica or North Africa. "Between Antarctica and other deserts we add more than 1,000 meteorites per year, but only a few of those are interesting, including those originating from Mars and the moon," Caffee says. "The standard ones are sent to the Smithsonian, but the unusual ones are sent to NASA and the community of scientists is informed in case they want to request samples."

A giant black hole ripped apart a nearby star and then continued to feed off its remains for close to a decade, according to research led by the University of New Hampshire. This black hole meal is more than 10 times longer than any other previous episode of a star's death.

"We have witnessed a star's spectacular and prolonged demise," said Dacheng Lin, a research scientist at UNH's Space Science Center and the study's lead author. "Dozens of these so-called tidal disruption events have been detected since the 1990s, but none that remained bright for nearly as long as this one."

Using data from a trio of orbiting X-ray telescopes, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Swift Satellite as well as ESA's XMM-Newton, researchers found evidence of a massive "tidal disruption event" (TDE). Tidal forces, due to the intense gravity from the black hole, can destroy an object -- such as a star -- that wanders too close. During a TDE, some of the stellar debris is flung outward at high speeds, while the rest falls toward the black hole. As it travels inward, and is ingested by the black hole, the material heats up to millions of degrees and generates a distinct X-ray flare.

An exotic binary star system 380 light-years away has been identified as an elusive white dwarf pulsar -- the first of its kind ever to be discovered in the universe -- thanks to research by the University of Warwick.

Professors Tom Marsh and Boris Gänsicke of the University of Warwick's Astrophysics Group, with Dr David Buckley from the South African Astronomical Observatory, have identified the star AR Scorpii (AR Sco) as the first white dwarf version of a pulsar -- objects found in the 1960s and associated with very different objects called neutron stars.

The white dwarf pulsar has eluded astronomers for over half a century.

AR Sco contains a rapidly spinning, burnt-out stellar remnant called a white dwarf, which lashes its neighbour -- a red dwarf -- with powerful beams of electrical particles and radiation, causing the entire system to brighten and fade dramatically twice every two minutes. The latest research establishes that the lash of energy from AR Sco is a focused 'beam', emitting concentrated radiation in a single direction -- much like a particle accelerator -- something which is totally unique in the known universe.

Ever worried your conversations might be boring? Well help could be at hand from a watch that gives a warning buzz if you've started droning on.

Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have created a device worn on the wrist that uses artificial intelligence to read the tone of conversations. The wristband of the device is loaded with sensors that capture physiological data such as heart rate, blood pressure, blood flow, temperature and movement.

The MIT team combined that information with audio recordings to analyse a conversation's pitch, energy levels and vocabulary in the development of an algorithm that assesses the tone with an 83% accuracy level.

It understands happy, sad or neutral tones and some versions could tell you if you're boring others by collecting negative signs such as pauses, fidgeting and putting a hand to one's face.

The device could be linked to smartphones that would then vibrate if a conversation was going downhill, researchers said. The prototype focuses on the wearer, but later versions could also analyse audio from all sides of a conversation, telling us whether the people we are with are still interested in what we are saying.