Paint

Traditional paint gets it color from synthetic pigments, which fade over time and aren't very eco-friendly. There may soon be a better alternative, though, in the form of a paint which incorporates color-producing nanostructures.

Last year, engineers at Purdue University used their expertise in materials science to produce the world’s whitest paint, and have now made some tweaks to the recipe and produced a version that is thinner and lighter.

Engineers at Purdue University have been at the cutting edge of reflective paint research for some time, and have just produced the whitest paint ever created, which they say reflects 98.1 percent of sunlight and could be used to keep buildings cool.

Researchers have developed a new white paint that can reflect over 95 percent of sunlight, which can cool the surface even lower than the ambient temperature. Painted on a building, the new paint could help cut cooling costs and energy use.

When most people picture swarms of collaborating robots, they generally think of applications such as search and rescue operations. A new study, however, suggests that such swarms could also be used to help artists put paint to canvas.

Adding “two-faced” nanoparticles could improve paints and coatings. With one face that attracts water and another that repels it, the particles arranged themselves in a flat layer on a painted surface and could make for paint with unusual properties.

A team of material scientists from the University of California, Los Angeles is reporting a major advance in the area of reflective coatings for buildings, producing a new kind of super white paint that reflects almost all incoming radiation from Sun.

3D printing may indeed allow for the creation of intricate objects, but what happens if you want to apply a coating to all of those nooks and crannies? Well, a newly-adapted technology should let you do so easily, with a minimum of waste.

​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.