A surrealist painting from the 1940s by Frida Kahlo has sold for $54.7m (£41.8m) - shattering the auction record for an artwork by a female artist. The painting went for more than 1,000 times its original auction price in 1980, after a tense bidding battle between two collectors, according to the Sotheby's auction house. The auction also broke the previous record for the highest amount paid for a Kahlo portrait, which sold for $34.9 million in 2021. The work - titled El sueño (la cama), which is translated to The dream (The bed) - depicts Kahlo asleep in a canopy bed beneath a skeleton entwined with dynamite. It marks one of the Mexican artist's most psychologically charged self portraits, Sotheby's said, and was painted during a turbulent chapter in Kahlo's life - the year her former lover was assassinated and shortly after her divorce and remarriage.

Music recommendation algorithms could be amplifying the industry's existing gender bias problem, according to a study that proposes a new method allowing greater exposure for female artists. The existance of a gender bias in the music industry is not unknown. For instance, a study of the top five music charts in the UK between the years 1960-1995 showed how popular music is affected by a large gender inequality with a bias in listening preferences towards male artists. A recent analysis of music festivals found that lineups are heavily skewed towards male performers and this bias is also said to be prevalent in music streaming apps like Spotify. A growing number of people use streaming platforms to listen to music, and these apps use algorithms to recommend songs based on the users' listening habits.

A'widely-used' algorithm on streaming services including Spotify is more likely to recommend songs by male musicians than female musicians, a new study finds. European researchers who analysed the listening habits of 330,000 people over nine years found only 25 per cent of the artists ever listened to were female. When they tested the algorithm they found, on average, the first recommended track was by a man, along with the next six, and users had to wait until song seven or eight to hear a song by a woman. Stats have already suggested female artists don't get as much exposure as male artists – the 2020 Spotify Wrapped statistics showed that the top five most streamed artists were all male, with similar trends across all categories. 'We showed a widely used recommendation algorithm is more likely to pick music by male than female artists,' said study author Dr Christine Bauer at Utrecht University in a piece for the Conversation.

Have you ever woken up from a dream that made absolutely no sense and wondered what it was all about? A team of researchers claim the dream you've experienced is just a continuation of what is happening in your every day life - with no deeper or hidden meaning. Experts from the Nokia Bell Labs in Cambridge created a Natural Language Processing technique that can automatically analyse dreams and quantify them. According to what sleep scientists call the'continuity hypothesis,' our dreams reflect what we experience in our real lives and the new tool proves the theory. Because our dreams reflect every day life, the authors say it could be possible to build a tool that could help in mental health diagnosis and treatment.