Leonardo da Vinci famously experimented with the materials he used to prepare grounds and paint layers. A new study has identified a mixture of toxic pigments in the iconic painting…

Thanks to advances in imaging and chemical analysis, researchers can now hunt for surprises in the paint of “The Night Watch” (1642). Recently, a team from scientific centers across Europe…

Turkish researchers uncovered the formula for an ancient Mesopotamian perfume during excavations in Ashur, the capital of ancient Assyria in modern-day Iraq. In the second millennium BCE, the area where…

Two Czechoslovak chemists set out to answer a tricky question: how does the chemical composition of corn kernels vary from ear to ear? When they burned the samples and examined…