Art
Art Deco Patterns of Beetles and Butterflies
Emile-Allain Séguy was enamored with the overlooked wonders of the natural world.
Science
Books
Art Nouveau’s Deep Sea Muse
Art Nouveau's organic shapes surfaced thanks to some underwater inspiration.
Art
Scientists Identify the Fungi Clouding Leonardo's Self-Portrait
A red chalk sketch from around 1512 CE, long believed to be a self-portrait by Leonardo da Vinci, has a glowering, bearded man's face emerging from a swarm of brown spots. Kept safely in the vaults of the Biblioteca Reale in Turin, the portrait's power, despite the imperfections, has even gained rum
News
Tweet Your Art at NASA to Send It on an Asteroid Journey
This September, NASA is launching its Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer spacecraft on a return journey to the Bennu asteroid, and is inviting the public to send space-inspired art along for the galactic ride.
Art
Tracking Artists' Expeditions, from Glacier Surveys to a Search for Nixon's Missing Moon Rocks
Art is often an act of venturing into the unknown, of starting something without knowing the outcome.
In Brief
NASA Releases Retro Posters for the Future of Space Exploration
Back in the 1930s and '40s, during the height of the Great Depression, artists designed posters for the Works Projects Administration (WPA) to encourage travel to national parks and other tourist sites in the United States.
In Brief
Erased Nude Discovered in a Leonardo da Vinci Notebook
It seems like there's always something new to discover in the thousands of pages of notes and drawings left behind by Leonardo da Vinci, whether it's a sketch for an early refrigerator or an illustration of a viola organista fusing a piano with a stringed instrument.
News
122-Foot Dinosaur Makes Its Colossal Debut at the American Museum of Natural History
A cast of one of the largest dinosaurs to walk the Earth some 100 million years ago is being unveiled this week at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Books
A Sonic Alarm for Our Natural World Going Silent
Bernie Krause has listened to nature since 1968, and in his decades recording environmental noise has become attuned to its changes.
News
The World's Oldest Tattoos Are on the Weathered Skin of an Alpine Ice Mummy
When hikers in the Alps stumbled upon the mummy known as Ötzi the Iceman along the Austrian–Italian border in 1991, the body was so well preserved that they feared they'd discovered the corpse of a fellow mountaineer.
Art
The Rise of the 20th-Century Yearbook Smile
With their standard formats and widespread availability, high school yearbooks represent a historical data set of 20th-century style. They also capture how our tendency to smile in photographs has intensified over time.
Art
How Audubon Pranked a Fellow Naturalist with a Bulletproof Fish
Field books capture essential information for ecological history but are often difficult to track down in scientific collections.