When cultural heritage scientists go on the road, one of the
most useful tools they take with them is something developed for
Mars exploration: a hand-held X-ray fluorescence spectrometer.
The Art Institute of Chicago’s Francesca Casadio wrote a snappy
little ode to the machine, which NPR awesomely calls a “science
gun.” When researchers point the admittedly weapon-like device
at a painting or a sculpture, they are able to find out which
elements are present in the artwork. So for example, Casadio has
used the machine to discover that about 1000 years ago, Chinese
artists used a red, mercury-based paint called vermillion to
decorate the lips of a female sculpture. She also discovered
that sometime in the 1800s an over-enthusiastic restorer used a
zinc-based paint to give the sculpture “a new coat of lipstick,”
Casadio told NPR. Hear the whole NPR piece here. I heart the
space connection. Astrochemists needed rugged and portable
equipment to analyze the elemental make-up of the Martian
landscape. The X-ray dev