See the ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ painting in 10-gigapixel detail

Microscope manufacturer Hirox has created a panorama of Vermeer’s famous Girl with a Pearl Earring at a mind-goggling 10-gigapixel resolution, as spotted by Petapixel. Over 9,100 photos were captured by the company’s Hirox 3D microscope down to a det...

OpenAI’s DALL-E app generates images from just a description

OpenAI, the company co-founded by Elon Musk and backed by Microsoft, has already mastered Dota 2 and the art of writing fake news. Now, it has reached another milestone with DALL-E (a portmanteau of “Wall-E” and “Dali”), an AI app that can create an...

Modeling the bizarre remnants of a supernova

When stars of a certain large size and energy run out of fuel, the result is a supernova explosion that can be spotted with the naked eye just once in a lifetime. Some leave behind a relatively spherical supernova remnant. However, others expand with...

30 years on, Hubble is still making dazzling discoveries

Given that it was expected to last 10 years and considering all the early problems, it’s hard to believe the Hubble Space Telescope made it to 30. What’s more, it continues to be one of the most useful instruments in space, not just for doing science...

Designers help a rover navigate the crushing furnace of Venus

Venus is closer to Earth than Mars, but because it’s a hellhole that’s unforgiving to rovers, we still don’t know much about its surface. NASA and JPL recently launched a heroX design contest for mechanical sensors that would help its AREE (automaton...

AI uses traditional Chinese techniques to create ‘mindscapes’

The Chinese painting style called Xieyi literally means “writing ideas,” and marries the freehand techniques of calligraphy, line drawing and shading. Artists often use traditional Xuan rice paper along with organic brushes and ink, and the impressio...

Creating the first 3D map of the heart’s ‘brain’

Our hearts are primarily controlled by the brain and autonomic nervous system, but we also have a backup. The heart has its own mini-brain called the intracardiac nervous system (ICN), which fine tunes external autonomic signals and keeps the heart p...

How NASA’s new moon map will guide future manned missions

If Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin didn’t know the moon’s topography cold, the first human moon landing might have been aborted or worse. Now that NASA is planning new missions to the Moon with project Artemis, it needs the most detailed maps of our s...