‘Restoring’ priceless works of art has never been an easy task. While it might have seemed like a good idea back in the 1960s to cover the porous marble of Michelangelo’s David (and plenty of other valuable frescoes) in an acrylic polymer called paraloid, now it just seems downright insane. But how do you get the toxic coating off once you’ve plastered it on? Not with a nail brush that’s for sure. So step up the face mask.

A team from the University of Florence have discovered a way to make oil and water mix, by using a sugar-like molecule to emulsify them. Like a nanoparticle salad dressing without the vinegar. Or mustard. Anyway, the artwork is draped in thin Japanese paper and then the ‘dressing’ is poured on. This poultice is left on for a couple of hours and hey presto, no more paraloid. This technique only works where the slap happy sixties restorers plastered their paraloid, it’s no help where other damage has been done in the name of restoration. But for David and his compatriots, it’s good news indeed.

Via ABC News Australia. (PHOTO: NZRIC)

An economic and feasibility study from the Vatican has found that solar panels are a good thing and should be applied to roof tops at the Catholic HQ in Rome. The first will be on a rarely used auditorium due to be updated next year.

Reasons cited include protected natural resources and saving the environment, because a ruined environment makes "the lives of poor people on Earth especially unbearable."

How true.

The poorest people in the world ARE going to be the ones hardest hit by climate change and higher energy prices. Like Africans.

Do you know what ELSE makes the lives of Africans especially unbearable? The AIDS epidemic. Do you know what helps stop the spread of HIV? Condoms.

And though we’ve heard rumors that Pope Benedict is considering endorsing the use of condoms to fight AIDS in hard-hit regions such as African, we’ve still seen no change. He continued to toe the party line in his recent visit to Brazil, a country that has aggressively fought its AIDS problem with lots and lots of free condoms.

So here’s the thing: if the Vatican can pull it’s backwards collective brain into the 21st century, fighting climate change and environmental justice with some of the newest technology available, why can’t it recognize the changing landscape of health and morality to help Africa? I mean seriously.

Then again, as Brazil has shown (especially with its recent funding of cheap contraceptives) you can be a Catholic county and ignore the Vatican all you like. Sweet.

This delectable specimen to your left is all that remains of a 2,100 year old melon found buried in Moriyama, a town outside of Tokyo. I’ll be the first to admit that this is a dry news story (“Archaeologists have excavated in Shiga Prefecture what they believe are the oldest remains of a melon ever found”) but people, think about it: this melon precedes Jesus even. And there’s still some flesh left!!

Radio carbon dating suggests the remains of this melon are 2,100 years old, the oldest around. This blows the previous contender, a whippersnapper of a Chinese melon that dates back to 1,600 ad, right out of the water.

Then again, that’s nothing compared to four millenia old noodle remains. Or the 17 million year old hoard of nuts some prehistoric hamster lost track of. 

For an exhaustive, random, and delightful look at other ancient food stuffs go check out the The FOOD Museum Online whose companion site The Potato Museum (the world’s largest collection and first museum on the subject) is pretty cool too. There you’ll find the potato-dedicated blog Potatoheads Talking that covers a myriad of spud topics including a WWII hand grenade that was almost mistaken for a potato by a farmer in Italy. 

COULD SPEAKING PAPER FIGURE OUT A WAY TO MAKE MONEY LITERALLY TALK? (PHOTO: MANJIDES)

A team from Mid Sweden University have produced a prototype billboard embedded with conductive inks and printed speakers, so that when you touch it it plays audio at you. The article in BBC News says that the inventors think it could be useful in product packaging - and I do see the temptation. However, I don’t really need my yoghurt to tell me how many grammes of fat it has or exactly how tasty it is. That would cause quite the cacophony in supermarkets.

Seems to me that this would be more useful for blind people, as a high-tech version of braille. But there’d presumably have to be some way of listening privately though (a printed headphone jack perhaps), otherwise you could reach the end of your intellectual magazine only to find it suddenly starts shouting out all the adverts for sex phone lines that are printed at the back. Very embarrassing.

A little bit of magic for a drizzly Monday morning (unless of course it’s sunny everywhere but Britain...) comes to you courtesy of NASA.com and features a phenomenon called the equivalence principle. Back in the 16th century, Galileo Galilei rolled spheres made of different materials down a long slope, and showed that even though the spheres were very different, they reached the bottom of the slope at the same time. He concluded that gravity accelerates all objects equally regardless of their masses or the materials from which they are made. This 36 year old video shows astronaut David Scott, demonstrating just that, by standing on the moon and dropping a heavy geological hammer and a light falcon feather. Both items hit the ground at the same time, reinforcing Galileo’s theory.

The experiment shown in the above video isn’t necessarily the most accurate scientific demonstration (nor is it brilliant quality, unsurprisingly), but it was the first such demonstration to be done on the moon, and it’s very eye-catching. Even though you know the outcome, it’s just impossible to make your brain accept that the hammer and the feather will fall at the same rate. And yet they do.