“In the age of the internet, we’re fortunate to have virtual access to museum collections around the world, thanks to objects in the public domain and programs like The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Open Access Initiative. Through a searchable digital catalogue, visitors to the museum’s website can see hundreds of thousands of objects, many images of which are available for download. And it’s not alone—other institutions like the Art Institute of Chicago, The National Gallery of Art, and The Cleveland Museum of Art, among others, make pieces in their collections accessible to all.

The thing is, digital images don’t always give us the full picture, so to speak. Even two-dimensional paintings and drawings have unique textures, structural details, and materials that we can only really appreciate in person. This won’t ever really change—nothing beats the real thing. But one caveat is that even in person, much of the work remains hidden. We can’t see the backs of oil paintings, for example, and edges are often hidden within frames. Thanks to The Met’s continued emphasis on imaging, we can now experience every detail in three-dimensional renderings of nearly 140 significant objects in its holdings…

With careful attention to technical precision and color, these animated renderings are research-grade tools, allowing us to see the objects at any angle. View van Gogh’s brushstrokes closer than you’re allowed to in a museum, zoom in on a Babylonian cuneiform tablet, and turn an 18th-century Turkish tile over to see its reverse side.

The Met plans to continue adding 3D scans to its online library.”

From Colossal.

“In 2024, Eon senior scientist Philip Shiu and collaborators published in Nature a computational model of the entire adult Drosophila melanogaster brain, containing more than 125,000 neurons and 50 million synaptic connections, built from the FlyWire connectome and machine learning predictions of neurotransmitter identity. That model predicted motor behavior at 95% accuracy. But it was disembodied: a brain without a body, activation without physics, motor outputs with nowhere to go.

Now the brain has somewhere to go. Building on previous work, including Shiu et al.’s whole-brain computational model, the NeuroMechFly v2 embodied simulation framework, and Özdil et al.’s research on centralized brain networks underlying body part coordination, this demonstration integrates Eon’s connectome-based brain emulation with a physics-simulated fly body in MuJoCo. The result: multiple distinct behaviors driven by the emulated brain’s own circuit dynamics. Sensory input flows in, neural activity propagates through the complete connectome, motor commands flow out, and a physically simulated body executes the output, closing the loop from perception to action for the first time in a whole-brain emulation.”

From The Innermost Loop.

“The DNA foundation model Evo 2 has been published in the journal Nature. Trained on the DNA of over 100,000 species across the entire tree of life, Evo 2 can identify patterns in gene sequences across disparate organisms that experimental researchers would need years to uncover. The machine learning model can accurately identify disease-causing mutations in human genes and is capable of designing new genomes that are as long as the genomes of simple bacteria.”

From Phys.org.

“An international team of scientists has returned from the heart of West Antarctica with 228 metres of ancient rock and mud, the longest core ever retrieved from below an ice sheet.

Preliminary dating, based on the presence of fossilized algae that only existed during specific geological periods, suggests that the core represents an archive of the past 23 million years. This includes periods when Earth’s average surface temperature was hotter than today’s — and higher than the temperature projected for 2100 under current global climate policies.

The core was retrieved as part of the Sensitivity of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet to 2 °C (SWAIS2C) project. It aims to determine how far the West Antarctic Ice Sheet retreated during previous periods of global warming, and whether there is a temperature threshold after which its retreat becomes irreversible.”

From Nature.