Hasta La Gadget!

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Arthur Brand is not only a Dutch art historian. He’s famous in the art world for tracking down works of art that are either believed to have been lost or destroyed. He has managed to recover what is perhaps the greatest find of his life. It’s a 1,600 year old mosaic of Siant Marks from the Byzantine era that was stolen from a Cyprus church in the 1970s.

CNN reports that Brand has recovered more than 200 works of art so far, ranging from Surrealist paintings to artwork that was stolen by the Nazis. He recovered two horse sculptures by Josef Thorak in 2015 that stood outside Adolph Hitler’s Reichstag building.

He was able to trace them using archival documents, satellite images, and military informants to locate the sculptures that were believed to have been lost in the Battle of Berlin. He then created a fake art buyer persona to obtain more information about them before tipping off German law enforcement.

He has been hunting this 1,600 year old mosaic for the past three years. The Agence France-Presse reports that he started looking for it when an art dealer tipped him off that the mosaic was in Monaco. He used several intermediaries, including some in the underground art scene, to locate the apartment where the mosaic was. The owner had actually inherited it from his father who apparently didn’t know it was stolen when he bought it in the 1970s.

“They were horrified when they found out that it was, in fact, a priceless art treasure, looted from the Kanakaria Church after the Turkish invasion,” Brand told AFP. The owner agreed to give back the artwork in exchange for payment to cover the restoration and storage cost. The mosaic is reportedly worth up to $11.4 million and Brand says that finding it was “one of the greatest moments of my life.” It has since been returned to its rightful home in Cyprus.

Art Detective Recovers Stolen 1,600 Year Old Mosaic , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Drone delivery really only seems practical for two things: take-out and organ transplants. Both are relatively light and also extremely time sensitive. Well, experiments in flying a kidney around Baltimore in a refrigerated box have yielded positive results — which also seems promising for getting your pad thai to you in good kit.

The test flights were conducted by researchers at the University of Maryland there, led by surgeon Joseph Scalea. He has been frustrated in the past with the inflexibility of air delivery systems, and felt that drones represent an obvious solution to the last-mile problem.

Scalea and his colleagues modified a DJI M600 drone to carry a refrigerated box payload, and also designed a wireless biosensor for monitoring the organ while in flight.

After months of waiting, their study was assigned a kidney that was healthy enough for testing but not good enough for transplant. Once it landed in Baltimore, the team loaded it into the container and had it travel 14 separate missions of various distances and profiles. The longest of these was three miles, a realistic distance between hospitals in the area, and the top speed achieved was 67.6 km/h, or about 42 mph.

Biopsies of the kidney were taken before and after the flights, and also after a reference flight on a small aircraft, which is another common way to transport organs medium distances.

Image credit: Joseph Scalea

The results are good: despite the potential threats of wind chill and heat from the motors of the drone (though this was mitigated by choosing a design with a distal motor-rotor setup), the temperature of the box remained at 2.5 degrees Celsius, just above freezing. And no damage appeared to have been done by the drones’ vibrations or maneuvers.

Restrictions on drones and on how organs can be transported make it unlikely that this type of delivery will be taking place any time soon, but it’s studies like this that make it possible to challenge those restrictions. Once the risk has been quantified, then kidneys, livers, blood, and other tissues or important medical supplies may be transported this way — and in many cases, every minute counts.

One can also imagine the usefulness of this type of thing in disaster situations, when not just ordinary aircraft but also land vehicles may have trouble getting around a city. Drones should be able to carry much-needed supplies — but before they do, they should definitely be studied to make sure they aren’t going to curdle the blood or anything.

The specifics of the study are detailed in a paper published in the IEEE Journal of Translational Engineering in Health and Medicine.

The same team who brought the world Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator, which allowed for large-scale simulations like pitting 300 Jedi against 60,000 medieval soldiers, is back with a new open world RPG called The Black Masses. The new game features record-setting crowd rendering, as well as hyper-realistic character…

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JAN HENNOP/AFP/AFP/Getty Images

Arthur Brand is not only a Dutch art historian. He’s famous in the art world for tracking down works of art that are either believed to have been lost or destroyed. He has managed to recover what is perhaps the greatest find of his life. It’s a 1,600 year old mosaic of Siant Marks from the Byzantine era that was stolen from a Cyprus church in the 1970s.

CNN reports that Brand has recovered more than 200 works of art so far, ranging from Surrealist paintings to artwork that was stolen by the Nazis. He recovered two horse sculptures by Josef Thorak in 2015 that stood outside Adolph Hitler’s Reichstag building.

He was able to trace them using archival documents, satellite images, and military informants to locate the sculptures that were believed to have been lost in the Battle of Berlin. He then created a fake art buyer persona to obtain more information about them before tipping off German law enforcement.

He has been hunting this 1,600 year old mosaic for the past three years. The Agence France-Presse reports that he started looking for it when an art dealer tipped him off that the mosaic was in Monaco. He used several intermediaries, including some in the underground art scene, to locate the apartment where the mosaic was. The owner had actually inherited it from his father who apparently didn’t know it was stolen when he bought it in the 1970s.

“They were horrified when they found out that it was, in fact, a priceless art treasure, looted from the Kanakaria Church after the Turkish invasion,” Brand told AFP. The owner agreed to give back the artwork in exchange for payment to cover the restoration and storage cost. The mosaic is reportedly worth up to $11.4 million and Brand says that finding it was “one of the greatest moments of my life.” It has since been returned to its rightful home in Cyprus.

Art Detective Recovers Stolen 1,600 Year Old Mosaic , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

The world might be on fire, but last week Google published a patent application for “Augmented And/Or Virtual Reality Footwear.” Yes, the Google document describes motorized shoes with wheels on the bottom that keep you in place as you walk around in VR. They’re basically what Ars Technica has aptly dubbed, “VR roller…

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