Tag: science

Copying the Mona Lisa

did leonardo work with a student to paint the mona lisa stereoscopically?

2 years ago, the Prado Museum in Madrid announced that a painting long thought to be a relatively unremarkable copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was actually painted contemporaneously with the original, likely by a student following the master as he drew and painted the portrait. Infrared reflectography found that the 18th century black overpaint obscured a hilly background almost the same as the original. When the black overpaint and varnish were removed from the Prado’s copy, further infrared and X-ray analysis found underdrawings and alterations from the tracing and all the way through the upper paint levels that matched those in 2004 scans of the Louvre Mona Lisa. That means from the initial sketches to the changes and corrections as painting progressed, the Prado copy followed along at each stage.

Russian mummies

a new source of mummies is always welcome

Unlike other burial sites in Siberia, for example in the permafrost of the Altai Mountains, or those of the Egyptian pharaohs, the purpose did not seem to be to mummify the remains, hence the claim that their preservation until modern times was an accident. The soil in this spot is sandy and not permanently frozen. A combination of the use of copper, which prevented oxidation, and a sinking of the temperature in the 14th century, is behind the good condition of the remains today.

Portus archaeology

On this course you will chart a journey from the Imperial harbor to its connections across the Mediterranean, learning about what the archaeological discoveries uncovered by the Portus Project tell us about the history, landscape, buildings, and the people of this unique place. Although the site lies in ruins, it has some of the best-preserved Roman port buildings in the Mediterranean, and in this course you will learn to interpret these and the finds discovered within them, using primary research data and the virtual tools of the archaeologist.

Openworm

Nice overview about openworm

“This is much more difficult to do in worms so it hasn’t been done as much, and as a consequence there is not as much data present. Scientists are catching up to the last 50 years of understanding neurons in rodents.”

There’s an explosion of data on its way and they’re doing their best to collect as much insight from this work so that they can build these neural behaviors into their model.

“We can also use some clever tricks from computer science to help us fill in some of the gaps. The good news is that this will only get easier as the tools and techniques get better over time.”

Synthetic yeast chromosome

Scientists have synthesized an entire yeast chromosome, the first artificial chromosome for the kingdom of life that includes humans, plants, and fungi. Yeast with the artificial chromosome appeared to be just as happy as their “natural” counterparts, reports the team. The methods developed to create the designer genomic structure could help synthetic biologists better use the single-celled fungi as biological factories for chemicals like biofuels and drugs.

can’t wait for the new yeast strains for brewing.

Living materials

These “living materials” combine the advantages of live cells — which respond to their environment, produce complex biological molecules, and span multiple length scales — with the benefits of nonliving materials, which add functions such as conducting electricity or emitting light.