Arts & Entertainment, features and articles | Educational Science

Oct 1, 2019

From Brain Control to Multiverses, 'Rick and Morty' Gets Some Science Right

Hyperintelligent cyborg dogs. Parasitic alien shape-shifters. Portal guns that open gateways between dimensions. A nanoscale amusement park in a living human body, with a pirate-themed ride through the pancreas. The sci-fi world of the popular animated series Rick and Morty is bizarre and fantastic. In episode after episode, rogue scientist...

Oct 10, 2019

Da Vinci's Forgotten Design for the Longest Bridge in the World Proves What a Genius He Was

Leonardo da Vinci was truly a Renaissance man, impressing both his contemporaries and modern observers with his intricate designs that spanned many disciplines. But although he's best known for iconic works such as Mona Lisa and Last Supper, in the early 16th century, da Vinci designed a lesser-known structure: a...

Nov 27, 2019

Did Da Vinci and Rembrandt's Creative Genius Lie in The Way They Saw Themselves?

Famous painters da Vinci and Rembrandt, though from different centuries, had one oddity in common: The way the artists saw themselves in the mirror was likely a bit different than how others saw them, according to new findings. The Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci and the 17th-century Dutch painter Rembrandt...

Dec 6, 2019

Why Baby Yoda Won't Be Coming Home for Christmas

One Star Wars item folks exchanging holiday gifts this year won't find under the wrapping paper is any Baby Yoda merchandise (at least, not officially released Baby Yoda merchandise). And as it turns out, despite the obvious appeal of having Baby Yoda toys on shelves for the holiday shopping season,...

Dec 20, 2019

The Force of 'Star Wars': The Staying Power of a Sci-Fi Icon Explained

Movie-goers didn't know what was waiting for them when Star Wars first opened in theaters on May 25, 1977. This Western in space showed dogfighting spacecraft, vehicles traveling at hyperspeed, and an array of colorful characters — even aliens — all locked in the classic battle of good and evil....

Feb 7, 2020

Stolen painting reappears after 23 years, in the same gallery where it was taken

A famous painting by Austrian Gustav Klimt had been missing for 23 years. Now, it turns out, the painting was hidden in the walls of the gallery from which it was stolen. The 1917 Klimt, known as Portrait of a Lady, was found missing from the Ricci Oddi modern art...

Mar 31, 2020

20 sci-fi movies and TV shows to binge watch on Netflix right now

Strange things are afoot on the planet Earth. In a series of events that could themselves form the plot of a sci-fi nightmare, we find ourselves in the middle of the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic. Residents across the US, like many countries, are being encouraged to work from home and enforce...

Apr 10, 2020

Statue of Liberty blueprints discovered, showing last-minute changes

The Statue of Liberty is famous for her torch-bearing arm, but newly discovered blueprints reveal that this arm was revised to be more slender at the last minute, changing the plans of the French engineer Gustave Eiffel who helped design the statue. Eiffel, of course, is famous for his tower...

Jun 23, 2020

'Time travel' to the 1890s in AI-remastered silent movies that look like HD video

Shot more than a century ago, a scene showing Buffalo Bill as he conducts an interview with an Oglala Lakota leader looks as if it were filmed yesterday. This old film clip was recently remastered using artificial intelligence (AI), and the result lookslike high-definition video. The artist behind this transformation...

Jun 24, 2020

Famous 'immaculate conception' painting is unrecognizable after art restoration failure

A botched restoration has left yet another famous painting unrecognizable. This time, the restoration has left a painting of the Virgin Mary looking more like a kindergartener's lopsided self-portrait. The painting was a copy of The Immaculate Conception of El Escorial, of the Virgin Mary was one of a famous...

Jul 1, 2020

Did Leonardo da Vinci's 'quick eye' help him capture Mona Lisa's fleeting smile?

The famed Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci may have been blessed with the same quick eye that may give top tennis and baseball players an edge. In Leonardo's case, this super-vision may have enabled him to see and capture fleeting moments in his paintings — such as the enigmatic half-smile...

Jul 21, 2020

Picasso painting found hidden beneath his famous 'Still Life'

A hidden drawing by Pablo Picasso has been found beneath one of the artist's abstract paintings, called Still Life. A team from the Art Institute of Chicago was interested in looking more closely at the painting, which is held at the institute, to help understand its complex layers of paint...

Nov 12, 2020

Botched restoration leaves Spanish statue looking like a confused potato head

Is it ... a statue that's melted in the heat? Forky from Toy Story 4? A clay figure crafted by a preschooler? President Donald Trump? In yet another extraordinary restoration-gone-awry, a 20th-century Spanish statue of a smiling woman next to a flock of livestock has turned into a slightly confused-looking...

Nov 23, 2020

Rebuilding Notre Dame will be incredibly hard

Putting out the inferno that tore through the roof of Notre Dame in April 2019 was only the beginning of saving the iconic cathedral. From the precarious spaghetti of burnt scaffolding hanging over the building to the potential for the walls to collapse on themselves, architects and conservation experts had...

Nov 28, 2020

The best Lego sets for alien, sci-fi, space fans and more

Attention, Lego fans! If you love aliens and UFOs, or spaceflight and sci-fi, we've got the perfect sets for you and your kids. From the cutest (or creepiest?) alien minifigures, to alien spaceships, to Star Wars droids and real NASA spacecraft, this gift guide is bursting with fun ... and...