Why have Murillo's skies turned grey?

Smalt was one of the blue pigments the most commonly used by the artists between the 16th and 18th centuries. Unfortunately, this pigment is unstable and tends to fade with time. Researchers from the new European platform ...

Hair dyeing poised for first major transformation in 150 years

Technological progress may be fast-paced in many fields, but one mundane area has been almost left in the doldrums for the last 150 years: The basic technology for permanently coloring hair. That's the conclusion of an analysis ...

Skin color: Handy tool for teaching evolution

Variations in skin color provide one of the best examples of evolution by natural selection acting on the human body and should be used to teach evolution in schools, according to a Penn State anthropologist.

Impregnating plastics with carbon dioxide

Everyone has heard that carbon dioxide is responsible for global warming. But the gas also has some positive characteristics. Researchers are now impregnating plastics with compressed CO2 in a process that could lead to new ...

Ecologists get fish eye view of sexual signals

Carotenoid pigments are the source of many of the animal kingdom's most vivid colours; flamingos' pink feathers come from eating carotenoid-containing shrimps and algae, and carotenoid colours can be seen among garden birds ...

Improving health with the power of purple

Tomato plants, bearing rich purple fruit, line the inside of Biology Professor Zheng-Hui He's lab in the San Francisco State University Greenhouse. The unusually colored plants are the result of He's research, exploring how ...

Listening to ancient colors

A team of McGill chemists have discovered that a technique known as photoacoustic infrared spectroscopy could be used to identify the composition of pigments used in art work that is decades or even centuries old. Pigments ...

LEDs illuminate eye for ocular disease screening

A new imaging system using six different wavelengths to illuminate the interior of the eyeball (ocular fundus) may pave the way for doctors to easily screen patients for common diseases of the eye, such as age-related macular ...

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