Paint

​A couple of years ago, design firm Carlo Ratti Associati (CRA) unveiled Paint By Drone, a system that utilizes quadcopters to spray-paint artistic graffiti onto outdoor walls. Well, the tech has now been used to create a crowdsourced work of art, applied to a wall by multiple drones simultaneously.

Researchers from ETH Zurich have refined a process that can detect modern fakes of paintings by measuring excessive levels of the isotope carbon-14 released into the atmosphere through nuclear testing in the 20th century.

Earlier this year British electronic music group Massive Attack revealed it was storing its classic album Mezzanine in DNA. Now it's been announced the DNA will be available in a limited release of spray paint cans, with each spray can estimated to contain around 1 million copies of the album.

​If you want to sense the emotion in what someone is saying, it helps if you can see their facial expressions. It's impossible, however, when news programs pixelate the faces of anonymous interviewees. Scientists have now developed a workaround, that uses AI to "paint" those people's faces instead.

​If these walls could talk. A new treatment that smartens up walls might not be about to give your bedroom a voice, but it could give it the ability to track your movements and your use of electronics, thanks to a special electrode-laden coating that turns them into interactive surfaces.

​For some people, one of the more challenging aspects of painting involves mixing off-the-shelf paint colors together in order to get the exact shades that they want. If you're such a person, then Picolor may be for you.

A team from the University of Cambridge and a Dutch company called Hoekmine BV has outlined how we might one day grow new organic paints and coatings out of vibrantly-colored bacteria colonies.

​Back in 2014, the “blackest” material ever produced was revealed. Dubbed Vantablack, this material absorbed 99.96 percent of light that hit it. Now designer Asif Khan has created a stunning pavilion spray-painted with Vantablack for the Winter Olympics.

​Known as biofouling, the accumulation of barnacles and other marine organisms on ships' hulls greatly decreases their hydrodynamic efficiency. Thanks to a new paint, however, removing those greeblies may soon be as simple as periodically wiping the ship's hull with a sponge.

​SprayPrinter hit the scene in early 2016 with its innovative app-controlled device that can sit on the head of any can of spray paint. Now the company has taken things to a new level, developing a prototype that can climb up and down walls to create large-scale murals.

​​While it may be worthwhile programming robots to paint many identical objects, the painting of smaller-run items is still done manually. That could be about to change, however. Scientists are developing a system which will allow robots to figure out how to paint individual objects.

Bird St in London has undergone something of a transformation recently, going from an underused offshoot to the "world's first Smart Street." Designed to showcase the High Street of the future, it merges pollution-busting and sustainable technology with a traffic-free shopping and dining experience.