This portrait of two half-naked wrestlers was painted by Vincent Van Gogh when he was an art student in Antwerp. It’s been hiding in plain sight for over 125 years, and its discovery also confirmed another disputed Van Gogh painting.

These two wrestlers were painted around 1885, when Van Gogh was a 32-year-old art student looking to improve his already prodigious but unrecognized skills. He mentions them in a letter to his brother Theo as … Read More → "High-energy radiation reveals a pair of secret Vincent Van Gogh paintings"

NASA wants you to help search for spectacular but overlooked images from the Hubble space telescope.

Hubble has made more than a million observations during its two decades in orbit. Astronomers working with Hubble data have created amazing, iconic images of gaseous nebulae, forming stars, and massive galaxies.

Only a handful of researchers have looked at much of the Hubble archive, which is stored in an online public database. … Read More → "NASA wants you to find Hubble’s next iconic image"

Musikmesse is Europe’s premier annual music trade show, and tech companies were there in force last week to debut their latest kit. Today we separate the great from the good to show what your favourite bands will be using in the future – are we looking at Bjork’s next musical plaything in the AlphaSphere, above?

First, a nod to this year’s big industry announcement: Propellerhead is opening its popular Reason software to developers, which … Read More → "The craziest new cutting-edge musical tech instruments"

Round performance numbers aren’t necessarily important milestones, but they do exude an undeniable aura of accomplishment. This was the case when researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) used their largest pulsed magnet to crack the 100 Tesla mark (roughly 2 million times larger than the Earth’s magnetic field) by generating a 100.75 Tesla magnetic pulse without damaging the magnet.
via … Read More → "LANL pulsed magnet smashes the 100 Tesla magnetic pulse barrier"

The wonders of graphene seem to know no bounds. Not only is it one of the strongest materials known, is both highly conductive and piezoelectric, it can generate electricity from flowing water and now it is being used to make better supercapacitors. Using a DVD writer, a team of UCLA researchers has invented a new process for making high quality graphene electrodes and used these electrodes to … Read More → "DVD writer spins out graphene electrodes for new class of supercapacitor"

Minneapolis-based Stratasys (Nasdaq:SSYS) and Optomec Inc., located in Albuquerque, announced that the companies have successfully completed a joint development project that merges 3D printing and printed electronics to create the world’s first fully printed hybrid structure.

The first project, the development of a “smart wing” for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) model with functional electronics has the potential to change product development in industries including medical device, consumer electronics, automotive and aerospace. A video on stratasys.com discusses the making of hybrid structures.
via Read More → "Revolutionary ‘smart wing’ created for a UAV model using groundbreaking technology"

Launched by Microsoft Research, Moscow State University and UC Berkeley, ChronoZoom has, oh, just about 14 billion years for you to learn about as you travel through time. You didn’t have anything else planned today, did you?

 

Beginning at the Stelliferous Era and ending at the present day, the display is split into … Read More → "Dynamic history of the world wins best procrastination tool ever"

Thermoelectric materials work by converting differences in temperature into electric voltage. If two parts of such a material experience significantly different temperatures, electrons within it will flow from the warmer part to the cooler, creating an electrical current in the process. Using these materials, electricity could be generated by the temperature differences on the inside and outside of jackets,within car engines, or even between the human body and the air around it … just to list a few examples. An international team of scientists have now discovered that an existing material, which behaves like a … Read More → "Liquid-like compound could lead to better thermoelectric devices"

Food delivery isn’t something most people associate with being cool or fun. TacoCopter wants to change that by literally taking taco delivery to new heights with a service that brings customers delicious piping-warm tacos from unmanned drone helicopters.

Ordering tacos from TacoCopter couldn’t be easier. You order tacos using a smartphone app that sends your GPS coordinates to a drone. When … Read More → "Who doesn’t want tasty tacos delivered to them by quadrocopters?"

ISS astronauts were ordered into the space version of an emergency lifeboat last Friday when Mission Control identified an old piece of a Russian communications satellite was projected to come close to the space station. Normal procedure calls for the ISS itself to take evasive maneuvers, but the threat was spotted too late in this case to plot a move.

</ … Read More → "ISS astronauts duck and cover in close call with space trash"