One of the biggest and most challenging restoration projects of the Tate Modern was fixing a damaged painting. Russian artist Vladimir Umanets vandalized a corner of Mark Rothko’s 1958 work titled Black on Maroon in 2012. Restoring the painting to its original state took almost 18 months, and the museum labels the project as one of its most successful attempts at restoration: 

Due to Rothko’s layered technique, the painting’s “surface is really delicate and it turned out that most of the solvent systems that could dissolve and remove the ink could potentially damage the painting as well.” Patricia Smithen, the Tate’s head of conservation, told The Guardian. The video above from the museum shows the art and science that went into restoring the famous work, an eighteen-month-long process that involved some reverse engineering from a canvas donated by the Rothko family.

Black on Maroon seemed like an odd choice for a protest, as a blogger at Art History Abroad wrote the following day: “‘Why Rothko?’. His paintings [are] often criticised by those who don’t favour their abstraction, but rarely deemed politically or socially motivated to a point that they might provoke vandalism.” The presence of Black on Maroon and other Seagram Murals at the Tate, in fact, mark an act of protest by Rothko himself (who committed suicide the day the paintings arrived at the London museum).

Meet Lightograph, photographer Jeremy Cowart’s patent-pending creation. Cowart believes that his creation is the next level of photography. While images captured under the Lightograph concept seem to be moving at first glance, Cowart points out that they are not motion pictures, as the subjects involved are not moving. The only aspect of these images that are moving are the lights in the photos: 

To Cowart's knowledge, his process is unique and has never been done before, at least not with portrait photography. There's no use of CGI or 3D graphics in the process. 'This is truly a new method of art-making and analog photography,' Cowart says, 'Light can now tell multiple stories in a single image. It can show the hero and villain side of a person in the same portrait with a simple shift of light. Humans are multi-faceted. We're constantly changing and evolving.'

There's an inherent dynamism to a Lightograph. In a single Lightograph, the entire mood and emotion in a scene can dramatically shift with changing light. Light changes temperature, direction, and much more. Cowart also says that the process can be used for more than portraiture, with possible applications in commercial, lifestyle, fine art, fashion, beauty, editorial, travel, headshots, automotive, stock, architecture and more.

While the Lightographs are fascinating to look at with portraiture, the process could also have implications for advertising and marketing. Cowart says 'I see it as the future of digital media. So, magazine covers for example. Future issues of any magazine could have Lightographs as their covers […] Imagine driving past a digital billboard and the light changes completely in those three seconds that you drive past it […] Netflix movie posters could be Lightographs that evolve as you sit on your couch and scroll through movie titles.'

Image credit: Jeremy Cowart 

Would you purchase a sculpted block of goat cheese? I would! Daniel Elkayam teamed up with a shepherd and cheesemaker in Jerusalem to create a special collection of goat cheese. The collaboration, called Tatriz El-Habib, was created as part of the matchmaker project, where designers are paired with craftspeople. Designboom has more details: 

The focus of this year’s matchmaker project is food, and the brief for the designers was to tell the story of food makers through design. after being matched with shepherd and cheesemaker efrat giat, elkayam spent time in the yemenite valley in ein karem, where the giat family’s goat farm is located. during this time, they took the goats out to pasture, milked them, made cheese, and, most importantly, absorbed the shared experience.

From this shared experience, the designer learned about the giat family, whose origins are in yemen. there, the family business was based on small handmade factory for jewish traditional embroidery. after immigrating to israel, they settled in ein karem and raised goats for a living. today, efrat raises a herd of 11 goats, produces cheese, and makes jam from the surrounding mountain fruits. in addition, she conducts workshops revealing her unique way of life.

image by Oded Antman

I can’t understand the Internet sometimes. Thanks to big online stars, canned fish is now up in the ranks of being the summer snack of 2021. Once seen as a mediocre pizza topping, canned fish is now hyped online. Nylon’s Sophia June raises a point regarding the food’s rise in popularity. According to June, the popularity of tinned fish is fueled by the demand for shelf-stable foods during the pandemic: 

Caroline Goldfarb and Becca Millstein started Fishwife, a tinned fish company that sells high-quality, sustainably-sourced seafood in shamrock, bubblegum, and cerulean tins with loopy cursive, in what is an aesthetic that falls somewhere between a Glossier store and a Starbucks cup, last year. Goldfarb and Millstein quarantined together and found themselves eating tons of tinned fish during that time: throwing it in salads for protein, eating it straight out of the can, or putting it out for happy hour with natural wine. They got the idea to start the company when they couldn’t find tinned fish at the grocery store that was based in the United States and that marketed itself as being sustainably sourced — something that was important to Goldfarb and Millstein. Other newer tinned fish brands like Scout, Vital Choice, and even Patagonia are also marketed as sustainable. Now, Fishwife sells smoked rainbow trout and wild-caught smoked albacore tuna, with more types of fish planned.

“Tinned fish is the ultimate hot girl food,” says Goldfarb. “There is no food that will make you hotter than tinned fish. Straight up. Do you know a hot girl who doesn’t exist on protein? I don’t.” She adds that in addition to protein, tinned fish also has omega-3s, vitamin B, and calcium, of which a tin of sardines contains more than a glass of milk.

Image credit: Anna Auza

Here’s another dose of cuteness, because why not? Nigerian Dwarf goat Hector didn’t hesitate in befriending a bunch of ginger kitties that kind of look like him-- and the resulting footage from their interaction is adorable! Hector proves that friendships can be made between animals of different species, alright. Daily Paws has more details: 

The kitties are all, "You do you, Kid." They're not prohibiting the diminutive goat from climbing up to where they're resting all nice and cozy. But they're also not helping him either 'cause, you know, cats. Whereas most dogs would offer a muzzle lift of the little goat's behind, the kittens rarely even move—only acknowledging Hector's jumping efforts with languid, slow blinks. 

However, as the video below shows, he remains undeterred! Once he finally achieves his goal, barn kitties are all, "Oh, yea, hai goat" before scampering away because he's invaded their space. His charm and persistence obviously wins one of them over, though. But later, when a curious pussycat finally reaches out to Hector for a bit of playtime, mama goat Amelia Earhart has something to say about it!

This looks fun! Japanese artist Tanaka Tatsuya’s Miniature Calendar series features playful scaled-down scenes using tiny figurines and everyday objects. In celebration of Star Wars Day (that’s May 4th, by the way), Tanaka created a series of miniature scenes featuring different tiny figurines based on the series: 

Tanaka has been crafting miniature scenes every single day for almost a decade, but he never seems to run out of ideas. His Star Wars-themed images are particularly imaginative; he incorporates otherwise mundane items into the scene and transforms them to look as though they’re part of the sci-fi world. In one image, an eggshell becomes Luke Skywalker’s igloo-shaped home on the planet Tatooine. In another, the Rebel Alliance battles against the Galactic Empire on a camera case that looks like a spacecraft.

When he’s not creating tiny Star Wars scenes, Tatsuya crafts miniature worlds inspired by everyday life. From a cheese grater-turned rock climbing wall to a cup of green tea that looks like a tiny lake, the talented artist can really turn any object into a whimsical narrative.

Image credit: Tatsuya Tanaka 

Tini Wini cookies are snacks made by Monde two decades ago. With the product no longer available in the market, any leftover evidence of its existence is considered as a rare item by collectors. John Albert Cortes was walking home when he found a metallic blue wrapper of Tini Wini cookies. Cortes took it home, cleaned it, and placed it in a plastic protector: 

Despite Tini Wini being discontinued around 20 years ago, it still remains to be a memorable snack for kids who grew up in the '90s. 

Now, a quick search on Google about Tini Wini will produce very few results. Cortes's photos are the most recent and clear images of the wrapper. 

Cortes collects items from the 1990s, but this is the first time he has picked up a wrapper. "I usually collect toys from my childhood," says Cortes. "This is the first time I decided to keep a wrapper." 

Asked about how much he thinks is the price for such a rare item, Cortes admits he has yet to learn about it. "I don't know how much it sells for, to be honest," says Cortes, who says what's more important is the item's historic and sentimental value to a lot of people.

Image credit: John Albert Cortes 

For your viewing pleasure. Modder Scottina123, who was known for creating a mod that removed all butt shots of Miranda from the Mass Effect series, created a new mod that technically reverses the work of their previously-released mod. Since BioWare acknowledged their questionable camera choices in the original games and decided to change the scenes for the remastered release,  Mass Effect Legendary Edition, the butt shots were already removed in the official remaster. Here’s where the new mod comes in, as Polygon details: 

Not everyone liked the exaggerated fan service. So, in 2018, Scottina123 released a mod called “No More Butt Shots” that removed the gratuitous butt shots from that conversation. On the mod’s original page, Scottina123 said that the camera positioning annoyed them, and that “it was extremly disrepectful [sic] to Miranda’s character.”

Well and good. And this year, BioWare’s people said Mass Effect Legendary Edition would have remastered, reframed sequences that significantly dialed down the amount of booty. (You can watch a comparison video here). So Scottina123, in what can only be described as a cheeky move, has created a mod that adds the sequences back into Mass Effect 2 and 3. Now people can play the remastered version with the original camera angles.

Image: BioWare/Electronic Arts

Do you throw your food away when it gets past its labeled ‘expiration date’? Frankly, while this action is understandable, as eating ‘expired’ food may squick you out, on some level, throwing away food is wasteful. Vox’s Alicia Wilkinson reports that throwing out uneaten food is bad for the environment. Landfills in the US are piled with wasted food, with most of which was still perfectly fine to eat. So how do we stop ourselves from wasting food? We need to look past the ‘expiration dates,’ Wilkinson believes: 

Apparently, very wrong. Researchers have found that “expiration” dates — which rarely correspond to food actually expiring or spoiling — are mostly well-intentioned, but haphazard and confusing. Put another way, they’re not expiration dates at all. And the broader public’s misunderstanding about them is a major contributor in every single one of the factors I named above: wasted food, wasted revenue, wasted household income, and food insecurity.

If you’ve been throwing out food based on the freshness label, though, you’re not alone. It’s a widespread practice. Chef, journalist, and cookbook writer Tamar Adler, author of An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace, explains: “In the absence of culinary information, people assume that any information they’ve been given must be the most important information.” A big part of the problem is that most of us don’t really believe we’re capable of determining if a food is good for us.

“It’s really hard to imagine you’re supposed to trust your own nose and mouth,” Adler said. “Add that to convenience culture and rapacious late-stage capitalism and, well, we’re fucked.”

Image credit: Jimmy Dean

Historians have determined the current number of living descendants Leonardo da Vinci has. Da Vinci has 14 living male relatives, according to a new analysis of his family tree. Alright, they got that number down, so what? According to Alessandro Vezzosi and Agnese Sabato, who spent more than a decade tracing the family tree of the artists, knowing the descendants would ‘help anthropologists sequence the DNA of da Vinci by sequencing the DNA of his descendants:’

Beyond establishing the identity of his possible remains, sequencing the artist's DNA could also give scientists a better understanding of "his extraordinary talents — notably, his visual acuity, through genetic associations," claim representatives from the Leonardo Da Vinci DNA Project, an initiative that aims to use the genetic information to create 3D images of da Vinci through a process called DNA phenotyping.

Da Vinci was a painter, architect, inventor, anatomist, engineer and scientist. Primarily self-educated, he filled dozens of secret notebooks with fanciful inventions and anatomical observations. To accompany famous sketches such as the "Virtruvian Man", da Vinci would write messages coded into his own shorthand, mirrored back to front to hide his studies from prying eyes. Along with detailed drawings of human anatomy, taken from observations of dissected cadavers, his notebooks contain designs for bicycles, helicopters, tanks and airplanes. 

In a new study, Vezzosi and Sabato used historical documents from archives alongside direct accounts from surviving descendants to trace the five branches of the da Vinci family tree. According to the historians, Leonardo was part of the sixth generation of da Vincis.

Image credit: Zach Dyson (Unsplash) 

Some cats prefer sitting in empty boxes rather than a well-made cat bed. Big boxes, tiny boxes-- regardless of the size, if a cat finds it, there’s a big possibility it will sit on it. The question now is: why? Why do cats have the tendency to sit on boxes, and on any square-shaped item? Animal psychology researcher Gabriella Smith did an experiment to find out: 

"When we ask, 'What is this animal seeing?' people think of using dogs because they're so easily trained," Smith says. "But cats are the perfect candidate because we already know they will sit in a 2D square." Not only do cats not have to be trained to do this, they don't even have to come into the lab to do it. Cat owners (or as cats call them, servants) could easily tape shapes to the floor and record their cats' reactions.

Thus the first cat cognition experiment to use citizen scientists was born. And what better timing than during the COVID-19 pandemic? Smith put out the call for volunteers (via Twitter, of course) in June 2020. Much of the world was on lockdown to some degree, and cat owners were looking for something — anything — to do in their homes. Plus, Smith notes, "Cats perform best at home. In the lab, they wouldn't behave naturally."

She designed the experiment so the humans could gather cat data over six days. Participants were given templates to print out: a square to tape on the floor, and a set of "Pac-Mans," as Smith calls them, that could make an illusory square. Officially, this is called a "Kanisza square," which means that pieces of an image construct a complete image in our brains. Our minds see an image, in this case of a square, in the negative space.

Image credit: Jackie Zhao (Unsplash) 

Oh, dear! A new epidemic has hit multiple bird species in North America. Birds across the United States have been hit with mysterious illnesses since April, DW reports. Experts stated that the affected avians had swollen eyes and neurological issues that caused them to lose balance. It isn’t unusual to see birds with eye problems, and it took experts a while to realize that the phenomenon was unusual: 

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) published a report on the mysterious bird deaths in early June. Details remain hazy, but experts are trying to trace the epidemic back to its origins.

"The first one we saw was in April. In the beginning of June, that's when we started sending birds to an animal center, where they were alarmed to hear our numbers at the time. Now, we're up to just under 200 that are infected," Monsma reports.

[...]

Animal centers have been examining the birds for a possible cause of death or illness, but tests have been inconclusive so far.

"West Nile [disease] is ruled out. . . Everything has been ruled out. To date, we still do not know," says Monsma, citing tests conducted by Wildlife's clinic director, Cheryl Chooljian.

Image credit: Vincent van Zalinge (Unsplash) 

Utagawa Hiroshige is an artist that was known for his mastery of ukiyo-e, the art of woodblock-printed “pictures of the floating world.” Hiroshige is the last of the form’s masters, producing more than 8,000 works-- that’s a lot! Besides his inclination to produce prints of urban and rural landscapes, Hiroshige also created a set of instructional pictures for children on how to make shadow puppets: 

Hiroshige explains in clear and vivid images “how to twist your hands into a snail or rabbit or grasp a mat to mimic a bird perched on a branch,” writes Colossal’s Grace Ebert. “Appearing behind a translucent shoji screen, the clever figures range in difficulty from simple animals to sparring warriors and are complete with prop suggestions, written instructions for making the creatures move — ‘open your fingers within your sleeve to move the owl’s wings’ or ‘draw up your knee for the fox’s back’ — and guides for full-body contortions.” The difficulty curve does seem to rise rather sharply, beginning with puppets requiring little more than one’s hands and ending with full-body performances surely intended more for amusement than imitation.

Image credit: The Minneapolis Institute of Art 

I, too, would love a big cat to greet me during my everyday commute. Just outside Shinjuku station, a billboard hosts a cat that happily greets visitors and passers by in the area. Commissioned by Cross Space, the cat is a 4K 3D moving image created MicroAd Digital Signage and Yunika Vision: 

Backed by an impressive sound system, 4K image quality and 3-D imagery created using curved LED screens, the display gives the impression of a living, breathing cat prowling the rooftop above the thousands that pass by each day!

During the day, the cat will appear periodically between ads, so if you’re lucky you’ll be able to catch sight of it, and you don’t have to be in Japan to see it either, thanks to this livestream of the building on Cross Space’s YouTube channel.

Image credit: cross_s_vision

The Phoenician empire thrived as one of the most influential and advanced civilizations in the Mediterranean during ancient times. Phoenician merchants participated in trade by exchanging cedarwood, olive oil, metals, ivory, and Phoenician purple dye, the most coveted of their wares. Also called Tyrian purple, the dye was popular until the days of the Roman empire, symbolising  wealth, abundance, and royalty. The production of the dye took a lot of resources and manpower, as This City Knows details:

Production of fabric in antiquity demanded substantial labor, more so than other crafts. In the case of Phoenician purple, extracting this dye required tens of thousands of sea snails, called Murex initially. The process further demanded an army of laborers. 

The biological pigment was extracted from the snail mucus. It was pretty difficult to acquire, but the end result was various shades of lasting colors that hardly ever fade but instead become brighter with wearing and exposure to elements. 

The Phoenicians were generally secretive about their method of manufacture, however, some ancient sources such as the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder did account for it.

Pliny notes in his first century A.D. book Natural History that two types of sea snails, Murex trunculus and Murex brandaris, were used to extract raw muddy liquid the snails leeched from the mucus glands. The first type was used to make blue-purple dye known as royal blue, while the second gave the more distinctive Tyrian purple.

Image credit: TeKaBe, CC BY-SA 4.0