Inakadate, the village in northern Japan’s Aomori prefecture famous for their rice paddy art, today unveiled their latest creation. The seeds of their labor, which were planted in June, have now grown and filled out the canvas, rendering versions of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” and Seiki Kuroda’s “Lakeside,” which depicts his wife Taneko Kaneko.

For all its transcendental appeals, art has always been inextricably grounded in the material realities of its production, an entwinement most evident in the intriguing history of artists' colours. Focusing in on painting's primary trio of red, yellow, and blue, Philip Ball explores the science and stories behind the pigments, from the red ochre of Lascaux to Yves Klein's blue.

The watermelon originally came from Africa, but after domestication it thrived in hot climates in the Middle East and southern Europe. It probably became common in European gardens and markets around 1600. Old watermelons, like the one in Stanchi's picture, likely tasted pretty good — Nienhuis thinks the sugar content would have been reasonably high, since the melons were eaten fresh and occasionally fermented into wine. But they still looked a lot different.

That's because over time, we've bred watermelons to have the bright red color we recognize today. That fleshy interior is actually the watermelon's placenta, which holds the seeds. Before it was fully domesticated, that placenta lacked the high amounts of lycopene that give it the red color. Through hundreds of years of domestication, we've modified smaller watermelons with a white interior into the larger, lycopene-loaded versions we know today.

Of course, we haven't only changed the color of watermelon. Lately, we've also been experimenting with getting rid of the seeds — which Nienhuis reluctantly calls "the logical progression in domestication." Future generations will at least have photographs to understand what watermelons with seeds looked like. But to see the small, white watermelons of the past, they too will have to look at Renaissance art.

On Jan. 7, the police cordoned off the streets. The auditorium’s ventilation and elevators were turned off. Every light bulb in the concert hall was unscrewed to eliminate a faint buzzing sound.

Upstairs in the museum, Mr. Cacciatori put on a pair of velvet gloves and took a 1615 Amati viola from its glass display case. He inspected it thoroughly, and then a security guard escorted him and the instrument down two flight of stairs to the auditorium.

The curator handed the instrument to Wim Janssen, a Dutch viola player, who walked to the center of the stage.

A very interesting article by a guy who went and did what I have been thinking of doing myself: experimenting with using a genetic algorithm and translucent polygons to render (somewhat distorted but cool-looking) photos and other images.

Tom Guilmette spent a productive evening locked in a Las Vegas hotel room with a Phantom Flex high-speed/high-def video camera, taking high-speed footage of water, breaking glasses, himself jumping on the bed, and other everyday phenomena that become amazing and dramatic when slowed down to wachowskiian speeds and cleverly edited.

In this graphic, when a train departs from its originating station, its path is traced on this webpage as a growing coloured string that is "plucked" by intersecting trains. Just as with a real stringed instrument (a cello in this case), longer train lines make lower notes when "plucked" than short ones. Time accelerates in this graphic, so you can watch a 24-hour train cycle. An interesting addition to this map is the artist's inclusion of discontinued subway lines: these so-called "ghost trains" slip by in the middle of the night.

According to his blog, Brooklyn resident Alexander Chen built this web page by combining MTA's public Application Programming Interface with Javascript, vector graphics (SVG), HTML5 and a dash of Flash. Many people find the sounds soothing or mesmerising, and some have likened the resulting sounds produced by this graphic to the music of John Cage.

Big Cartel provides you with your own independent store to sell your stuff online.

Visualizes the HTML DOM of any web page as a graph.

This scientific visualization creates a three-dimensional virtual tour of several dark pillars of cool gas in the Carina Nebula. The stars and nebula layers from Hubble's two-dimensional image have been separated using both scientific knowledge and artistic license to create the depth in the movie. Of note, the relative distances between stars and the nebula have been greatly compressed. The result is an intriguing journey through a virtual cosmic landscape.

This version of the movie is presented in anaglyph stereo 3D and is viewable with glasses that have a red lens over the left eye and a cyan (a.k.a. blue-green) lens over the right eye. Such glasses are often made of cardboard and have been distributed in numerous 3-D promotions. An internet search for "red cyan anaglyph glasses" will provide many options for obtaining such glasses.