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Left in an attic and missing for decades, the long-lost Vincent van Gogh painting - "Sunset at Montmajour" - was authenticated by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in September. After a two-year investigation, art historians and researchers identified the work with pinpoint precision, in part, thanks to a technique based on a canvas "weave-map" developed in a Cornell-initiated project.

An international team, including Oxford University scientists, has used the powerful X-ray laser at the US Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to create atomic-scale movies of 'the ultimate spring'. Normally, when a metal is crushed suddenly, as during an impact, it deforms and buckles, with the atoms re-arranging themselves in a complex way to take up the deformed shape - and usually only small pressures allow a metal to 'bounce back' like a spring.

2 October 2013 Most of Australia's finest musicians are suffering for their art, according to new University of Sydney research. More than 80 percent of 377 professional orchestral musicians surveyed reported having experienced physical pain severe enough to impair their performance. Fifty percent of the musicians reported moderate to severe performance-related anxiety while 32 percent had symptoms of depression.

The differences are subtle, but marble, left, scatters light beneath its surface differently than jade, right, in these computer-generated images based on a model of the same statue. Whether it's a rare jade figurine or an ice sculpture, how light passes through a translucent surface is key to its appearance, and humans are sensitive to subtle differences in the result.

27 September 2013 A joint study by the University of Sydney's Faculty of Education and Social Work and the Australian Council for the Arts has found that engagement in the arts benefits students not just in the classroom, but also in life. Students who are involved in the arts have higher school motivation, engagement in class, self-esteem, and life satisfaction, researchers discovered.

Music has an uncanny way of bringing us back to a specific point in time, and each generation seems to have its own opinions about which tunes will live on as classics. New research suggests that today's young adults are fond of and have an emotional connection to the music that was popular when their parents were their age in the 1980s.

Researchers have devised a mathematical model which can be used to predict whether films will become blockbusters or flops at the box office - up to a month before the movie is released. Their model is based on an analysis of the activity on Wikipedia pages about American films released in 2009 and 2010.

Computer scientists develop new model to simulate cloth on a computer with unprecedented accuracy Computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego, have developed a new model to simulate with unprecedented accuracy on the computer the way cloth and light interact. The new model can be used in animated movies and in video games to make cloth look more realistic.

Music may be most helpful for kids more apt to experience pain or distress in pediatric ER, UAlberta researchers find. Newly published findings by medical researchers at the University of Alberta provide more evidence that music decreases children's perceived sense of pain. Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry researcher Lisa Hartling led a research team that involved her colleagues from the Department of Pediatrics, as well as fellow researchers from the University of Manitoba and the United States.

A new research project led by the School of Social Sciences will use creative arts practices to help inform health-related policy and service development. Funded jointly by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the 'Representing Communities' project, will use innovative research techniques to promote engagement between communities and policy makers.

People who think they have perfect pitch may not be as in tune as they think, according to a new University of Chicago study in which people failed to notice a gradual change in pitch while listening to music. When tested afterward, people with perfect, or absolute pitch, thought notes made out of tune at the end of a song were in tune, while notes that were in tune at the beginning sounded out of tune.

New research and detailed records of over 1,000 paintings have gone online as part of an ongoing project to research over 22,000 artworks held in public collections around the UK. The National Inventory of Continental European Paintings (NICE Paintings) project is cataloguing and digitising all of the pre-1900 Continental European oil paintings in the UK's public collections and making them available to the public, alongside new supporting information.

To participant in the study visit www.twins.org.au Email or freecall (Aus only) 1800-037-021. For media inquiries only Rebecca Scott 0417 164 791   A world-first study will investigate if singing ability is inherited in twins. Led by the University of Melbourne with the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music and the Australian Twin Registry, the study will explore if it is nature or nurture that most influences whether we can sing a pitch-perfect tune.

In the first large-scale review of 400 research papers in the neurochemistry of music, a team led by Prof. Daniel J. Levitin of McGill University's Psychology Dept. has been able to show that playing and listening to music has clear benefits for both mental and physical health. In particular, music was found both to improve the body's immune system function and to reduce levels of stress.

Our love of music and appreciation of musical harmony is learnt and not based on natural ability - a new study by University of Melbourne researchers has found.

Loud music damages your hearing ­— a warning that we're used to taking as fact. But surprisingly, little research has actually been done into how sustained exposure to loud music affects our hearing in the long term, and the results we do have are far from conclusive. A new research project taking place at the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) National Biomedical Research Unit in Hearing, based at The University of Nottingham, is the first to explicitly examine the effect of long-term exposure to loud music.

Paleolithic paintings in El Castillo cave in Northern Spain date back at least 40,800 years - making them Europe's oldest known cave art, according to new research published today in Science. The practice of cave art in Europe thus began up to 10,000 years earlier than previously thought, indicating the paintings were created either by the first anatomically modern humans in Europe or, perhaps, by Neanderthals.

A year-long study on children's music-making indicates that playing music in groups on a regular basis greatly improves a child's ability to empathise with others.

Researchers at the University of Melbourne have identified a formula to understand why some branded movies go viral on the internet. Researchers at the University of Melbourne have identified a formula to understand why some branded movies go viral on the internet. In a study of more than 130 YouTube movies created by some of the biggest brands, researchers identified patterns which form the basis of a Branded Viral Movie Predictor algorithm, which they say identifies why some movies are watched and passed on more than others.

There are no definitive findings that Marcellus Shale drilling activity has affected crime rates in Pennsylvania, but more study is needed, according to a preliminary report conducted recently by the Justice Center for Research at Penn State. The report was produced in response to public concerns that crime rates may be on the rise in areas experiencing drilling-related population growth.