Artist
DURHAM, N.C. -- A Duke University professor and his graduate student have discovered a universal principle that unites the curious interplay of light and shadow on the surface of your morning coffee with the way gravity magnifies and distorts light from distant galaxies.
With sexual activity among adolescents in the United States resulting in over 750,000 teenage pregnancies each year and reports of up to 25 percent of all female adolescents in the US having sexually transmitted infections, researchers and public health officials are looking for those factors that might increase sexual activity in teens.
Scientists have recovered fossils from a 60-million-year-old South American snake whose length and weight might make today's anacondas and reticulated pythons seem a bit cuter and more cuddly.
In a process comparable to that of an artist who turns a two-dimensional canvas into a three-dimensional work of art, astronomers use the two dimensional images that they capture in their high-powered telescopes to reconstruct the three-dimensional structures of celestial objects. The latest example of this reconstructive artistry is a new model of the Helix Nebula--one of the nearest and brightest of the planetary nebulae, which are the Technicolor clouds of dust and glowing gas produced by exploding stars. Efforts of this sort are providing important new insights into the process that stars like the sun go through just before their fiery deaths.
An eclectic group of artists and scientists that organizers have dubbed the ''dream team'' of imaging and visualization are gathered at New York University this week to begin to create a photographic system capable of capturing and displaying a gigapixel -- one billion pixels -- of visual information in a single image.
A team of Dartmouth researchers has developed a new computational tool to help authenticate works of art, specifically paintings, prints and drawings. Using high resolution digital images of drawings by Bruegel and some of his imitators, as well as a painting by Perugino, the computer scientists captured data about pen or pencil stroke patterns and other elements that represent an artist's style or aesthetic signature. This signature was then used to discover consistencies and inconsistencies within a single piece of artwork or among works by the same artist.
A fleet of spacecraft dispersed throughout the solar system has given the most comprehensive picture to date of how blast waves from solar storms propagate through the solar system and the radiation generated in their wake. The ''Halloween'' solar storms in October-November 2003 launched billions of tons of electrified gas (plasma) that blasted by Earth within a day and past Mars hours later. The most recent reports come from the twin Voyager spacecraft at the fringe of the solar system near an unexplored region where the solar wind becomes turbulent as it crashes into the thin gas between stars.
A painting by Dutch artist Vermeer, long thought to be a forgery, will go under the hammer at Sotheby's today for an estimated ?3 million pounds thanks to the investigative talent of UCL researchers.
Using a series of techniques ranging from polarising light microscopy to infrared x-ray reflectography, a ten-year study led by Ms Libby Sheldon of the Department of the History of Art was able to verify that the 'Young Woman Seated at the Virginals' was painted by the artist.
Working from their university labs in two different corners of the world, U.S. and Australian researchers have created what they call a new class of creative beings, "the semi-living artist" ? a picture-drawing robot in Perth, Australia whose movements are controlled by the brain signals of cultured rat cells in Atlanta. Gripping three colored markers positioned above a white canvas, the robotic drawing arm operates based on the neural activity of a few thousand rat neurons placed in a special petri dish that keeps the cells alive. The dish, a Multi-Electrode Array (MEA), is instrumented with 60 two-way electrodes for communication between the neurons and external electronics. The neural signals are recorded and sent to a computer that translates neural activity into robotic movement.
The case of a talented artist whose paintings evolved as her dementia progressed suggests that language skills are not necessary, and may even inhibit, some types of creativity. The case is reported in the May 27 issue of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
