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How we restored Harvard’s Rothko murals without touching them

In 1989, I was a conservation student at the Courtauld Institute in London. During a class on varnish removal, my professor, Gerry Hedley, demonstrated how shining blue light on a picture with yellowed varnish made it seem as if the varnish had been cleaned away—returning the painting to how it originally had appeared. The demonstration in the classroom was jury-rigged—with a slide projector as the light source and a hand-held blue gel as a filter—but it was successful enough to convince me that one day, projected light could be used to restore the appearance of a painting without actually touching the surface.

This is the touching dedication in Gloria Steinem’s new book

Gloria Steinem’s newest book, My Life on the Road, hit stores on Oct. 27. In it, the 81-year-old feminist icon recalls the people she met and lessons she learned on her travels, and thanks one very important doctor: John Sharpe, who helped make it all possible. Sharpe, says Steinem, helped her obtain an illegal abortion when she was 22, while traveling through the UK to India. His only condition—other than anonymity—was that his young patient go on to achieve what she wanted in life.

The new Google patent for controlling your car without touching a thing

Modern cars are littered with a minefield of knobs and dials to distract drivers as they hurtle down highways. Many drivers are further distracted by looking down at smartphones doubling as GPS devices and stereos, dashboard touchscreens, and children in the backseat. Some nine people are killed in the US each day by distracted drivers, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But this tech idea, just patented by Google, might be a way to keep drivers’ eyes on the road and their hands in control of their cars.