NASA has revealed a stunning mosaic of fake space images used to train its astronomical algorithms – but has hidden within it is a single image of a genuine cosmic marvel. The mosaic below consists of 225 images, 224 of which are fake, created by artificial intelligence (AI). But one shows a real interstellar phenomenon, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. NASA uses computer algorithms to crunch digital images of the real night sky taken by robotic telescopes, in order to find stars and galaxies and measure their properties. This mosaic consists of 225 images, 224 of which are fake. One is real - but can you spot which one?

MUCH OF THE information that is beamed back from space is useless. Pictures taken by satellites orbiting the Earth might take days to download, only to show lots of cloud obscuring the area of interest. The subject matter may also be surrounded by irrelevant information. All this uses up a lot of valuable bandwidth. Processing data in space, before transmission, would reduce clutter, but this can be tricky.

Satellites are best known for helping smartphones map driving routes or televisions deliver programs. But now, data from some of the thousands of satellites orbiting Earth are helping track things like crop conditions on rural farms, illegal deforestation, and increasingly, poverty in the hard-to-reach places around the globe. As much as that data has the potential to provide invaluable information to humanitarian organizations, watchdog groups, and policymakers, there is too much of it to sift through in order to draw insights that could influence important decisions. A team of researchers from Stanford University, however, says it has developed an efficient way. By creating a deep-learning algorithm that can recognize signs of poverty in satellite images – such as condition of roads – the team sorted through a million images to accurately identify economic conditions in five African countries, reported the scientists in the journal Science on Thursday.