Remains of a lavish home and garden occupied by the indulgent Emperor Caligula have been discovered under an office building in central Rome. Italian researchers who excavated the site found a luxury palace with an ornate garden complete with water fountains and an exotic menagerie that housed ostriches, deer and even a bear. Artefacts taken from the site, including jewels, coins, animal bones and a metal brooch belonging to an imperial guard, are set to go on public display. Caligula, the third leader of the Roman Empire, lived a depraved lifestyle, indulging in brazen affairs with wives of his allies and incestuous relationships with his sisters before his murder in AD 41. The remains lie under the offices of Enpam, a doctors' pension institute along Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II - a piazza in south-eastern central Rome.

Ancient Roman emperors' faces have been brought to life in digital reconstructions; the unnervingly realistic image project includes the Emperors Caligula, Nero and Hadrian, among others. The features of these long-dead rulers have been preserved in hundreds of sculptures, but even the most detailed carvings can't convey what these men truly looked like when they were alive. To explore that, Canadian cinematographer and virtual reality designer Daniel Voshart used machine learning -- computer algorithms that learn through experience -- in a neural network, a computing system processes information through hierarchies of nodes that communicate in a manner similar to neurons in a brain. In the neural net, called Artbreeder, algorithms analyzed about 800 busts to model more realistic facial shapes, features, hair and skin, and to add vivid color. Voshart then fine-tuned Artbreeder's models using Photoshop, adding details gleaned from coins, artworks and written descriptions of the emperors from historical texts, to make the portraits really come to life.

Some people have spent their quarantine downtime baking sourdough bread. But others -- namely Toronto-based artist Daniel Voshart -- have created painstaking portraits of all 54 Roman emperors of the Principate period, which spanned from 27 BC to 285 AD. The portraits help people visualize what the Roman emperors would have looked like when they were alive. Included are Voshart's best artistic guesses of the faces of emperors Augustus, Nero, Caligula, Marcus Aurelius and Claudius, among others. They don't look particularly heroic or epic -- rather, they look like regular people, with craggy foreheads, receding hairlines and bags under their eyes. To make the portraits, Voshart used a design software called Artbreeder, which relies on a kind of artificial intelligence called generative adversarial networks (GANs).