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The mystery of the Mona Lisa lies not so much in her smile as in the painting techniques used by Leonardo da Vinci. Artist, engineer and architect, da Vinci was also an experimental chemist, with the Mona Lisa being his veritable laboratory.

" It is machination, it is deception ," said the Director General of the Berlin Royal Museums in his defence when criticized for buying a fake. Wilhelm Bode did not budge an inch: the sculpture he acquired in 1909 was an as yet unknown production of the great Renaissance master, Leonardo da Vinci. After one hundred years and numerous controversies, a group of scientists led by a CNRS researcher 1 has just proven him wrong once and for all.

Researchers at the Institut Jean Le Rond d'Alembert (CNRS/UPMC) have shown that recently-made violins have better sound projection 1 than those built by the famous violinmaker Antonio Stradivarius. This study, published in the journal PNAS on May 8th 2017, also shows that, despite the prestige of these old Italian violins, listeners prefer the sound made by recent instruments and cannot distinguish the two.