The scans revealed that Bentham was missing many teeth and had advanced arthritis in his lower jaw when he died of natural causes at the age of 84. During the scanning process, project leader Tannis Davidson, curator of UCL's Grant Museum of Zoology, saw how thin the jawbone had become. "He must have been in excruciating pain," she told Live Science.

Bentham's utilitarian philosophy inspired UCL's founders; it was only the third university in England, after Oxford and Cambridge, which was founded as London University in 1826 and opened to students in 1828.

As a young man, Bentham had declared that he would donate his body to science after his death. This was a radical idea at the time; in the U.K., dissection after death was looked down upon, even if it was for scientific purposes, and it was reserved for the worst criminals. After Bentham died in 1832, his remains were fashioned into an auto-icon — a supposed replica of himself — to memorialize him in the way a tombstone might, Davidson said.

Except for brief visits across Europe and to the Met Breuer in New York City, this auto-icon has been in a display case at UCL since the 1850s, where it can be seen by students as they pass by.

Brainless auto-icon

To make the auto-icon (which is not a mummy), Bentham's body was dissected and studied. Then, his skeleton was dressed in his clothes, which were padded with straw. His severed head was badly disfigured during an attempt to preserve it with sulfuric acid, so a wax reconstruction based on paintings and death masks was attached to the body.

Bentham's real head was displayed at the feet of the clothed skeleton that had a lifelike wax head; the real head's eyes were replaced with highly detailed glass eyes, which can be seen in the scans. According to UCL lore, the real head was stolen in 1975 and held ransom for a few days by rivals from King's College London, after which it was locked away.

Davidson explained that Bentham had coined the term "auto-icon" to mean "self-representation" and was setting an example for others. "He imagined a future where people were making auto-icons to keep their dead relatives around," she said.

The CT scans of the real head show that Bentham had dental damage and jaw arthritis, and that his brain had been removed before it was preserved—although some of his dura mater, a layer of connective tissue that covers the brain and spinal cord, was preserved. Davidson said the brain extraction was done to keep with Bentham's instructions that his head be mummified in the same way as Māori heads, which had their brains removed. The scanning process is shown in a short film called "Bentham Revealed."

"Godless" philosopher

Bentham wrote about his dental problems several times, Davidson said, but it is not clear if he understood that he also had severe arthritis in his lower jaw, which must have made the problems with his teeth much more painful. In addition, modern ideas about cleaning teeth had not been established by Bentham's time. "Dentistry 200 years ago was a very different kettle of fish than it is today," Davidson said.

Bentham was a polymath who hoped to improve the lives of ordinary people through social reform. He wrote extensively about subjects as varied as law, economics, education and animal rights, and he believed that society could be engineered to produce better outcomes through legislation and the objective measurement of "utility."

His most famous idea was the panopticon in 1791, a ring-shaped prison with one warden to watch all of the prisoners, which he proposed as a humane alternative to Australia's penal colonies. Today, however, it is a symbol of state control and surveillance. Bentham also invented a "felicific calculus" to numerically assess the benefits and drawbacks of any given action, based on variables like its intensity, duration, certainty, purity and extent.

Bentham's philosophy put him at odds with the established Church of England; he called himself an "unbeliever," while critics called him "godless."

This rift with the church may have played a part in Bentham's wishes for his remains. Davidson suggested that the auto-icon may have been a means for Bentham to avoid being buried with traditional Anglican rites. "Maybe this was a way he could 'stick it to them' a little bit," she said.

'> 'Godless' founder of utilitarianism had severe dental problems and was in 'excruciating pain,' CT scans of his severed head reveal Antonine Wall. But that wall was left undefended after Antoninus Pius died, and the Romans retreated from Scotland.

During that retreat, the Romans may have dismantled any valuable statues that they had set up, according to the statement. An examination of the Milsington leg ahead of a new exhibition showed that the bronze had no cut marks, suggesting it was removed carefully and not "brutally hacked off."

"This contrasts with examples of statues being deliberately destroyed after a battle, when an emperor's memory was condemned, or when they were chopped up for scrap," according to National Museums Scotland.

With the Scottish provenance firmly established, National Museums Scotland curators were able to learn more about Antoninus Pius and his approach to imperial expansion.

"This really turns on its head our understanding of Rome's second attempt at conquering Scotland," Fraser Hunter, principal curator of prehistoric art and Roman archaeology at National Museums Scotland, said in the statement. "This was a big deal for the Emperor, something which was worth celebrating."

But while the boot-clad bronze leg provides a glimpse into the monuments that may have graced southern Scotland nearly two millennia ago, it raises an important question for Hunter: Where is the rest of the statue?

The Milsington leg, the Inveresk Mithras altars and other Roman-period finds are on display beginning Nov. 14 in the exhibit "Roman Scotland: Life on the Edge of Empire" at the National Museum of Scotland.

From Augustus to Nero, see how much you know about ancient Rome's famous leaders with our Roman emperor quiz!

'> Romans carefully dismantled statue of emperor when they withdrew from Scotland 1,800 years ago, leaving only his foot behind

2026 QQ8 is tiny — only about 6 feet (2 meters) across, according to the IAU. If it got too close to Earth, it would likely burn up in our planet's atmosphere. However, researchers don't think there is much chance of that happening, since 2026 QQ8 is currently orbiting at around 1.5 times the average distance of the moon.

2026 QQ8 takes 359 days — almost a full Earth year — to orbit the sun. It comes close to our planet every 10 years or so. This minimoon is classified as an Aten asteroid; this population of space rocks occasionally cross into Earth's orbit and have semimajor axes smaller than Earth's, meaning they typically orbit closer to the sun than our planet does. Large Aten asteroids are considered the most dangerous type of asteroid, as they can easily get lost in the sun's glare before speeding toward Earth — but, again, our new mini companion is far too small to pose a threat.

2026 QQ8 is not the first minimoon discovered circling Earth. That distinction belongs to 1991 VG, which was around 30 feet (10 meters) in diameter when it was detected in November 1991. Astronomers now think Earth grabs minimoons pretty frequently; we are likely to have at least one at any given time. Most of the space rocks stay around for less than a year, although a handful may remain in Earth's gravitational pull for decades.

New telescopes ‪are expected to help researchers spot more minimoons as they enter and leave Earth's orbit. These include the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, which began operation earlier this year. The Rubin observatory, which takes a full scan of the entire Southern Hemisphere sky every few days, has already spotted what may be a new dwarf planet lurking in the outer solar system, as well as a new satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. Over its planned 10-year mission, the observatory is expected to detect millions of previously unknown moving objects in space.

'> Astronomers confirm a tiny new moon is orbiting Earth, and it'll stick around for the holidays

The decoder produces two types of visual predictions. One captures semantic information ‪—‬ the features associated with what is likely in a scene; for an image of a dog standing in grass, for instance, this would include things like the features of a dog and an outdoor, grassy setting. The other captures structural information, like the broad visual layout or how forms are arranged.

In the above example, this would be aspects like the outline of the dog or where it was positioned in the frame. The structural prediction gives the generator a starting point for the image, rather than beginning from pure noise, while the semantic info guides an image generator that removes the remaining static until the image emerges.

Although the new tool can recreate what people see, it can't reproduce memories or imagined scenes.

"We're not reading people's thoughts," study co-author Michal Irani, a computer scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, told Live Science. "The images we do manage to recover from fMRI require people's cooperation and full intended collaboration."

How scientists tested the model

Brain-IT's synthetic images were compared with the images that participants saw. Brain-IT surpassed prior leading methods on standard objective reconstruction metrics and produced more faithful results, the study authors wrote. The system shined when limited fMRI data from a new participant was available, with just one hour of data from a new participant producing results as accurately as earlier approaches that had been trained on 40 hours of recordings.

A high-scoring or realistic-looking output should not be mistaken for a perfect copy of what someone saw, however.

In the final stage of processing, the system uses an off-the-shelf diffusion generator trained on massive numbers of images. Models like this generate plausible images and can smooth textures, sharpen facial features or fill in missing details.

Beliy said this "beautification" can make reconstructions more polished and convincing and introduce details that don't necessarily come from the brain data itself. In other words, the scan constrains the generated picture, but the AI model supplies some of its realism from learned patterns in photographs.

Why this is not memory decoding

While the new system produces impressive results for seen images, it can't be used to reconstruct an imagined or remembered image.

"Brain-IT relies on how the brain processes a seen image," Irani said. "Information flows from the eyes to the primary visual cortex and onward through a series of visual areas that recognize objects and scenes."

In a controlled experiment, researchers also know precisely which image was shown, giving the model a target during training and evaluation. In contrast, memories and imagined images do not offer the same clean reference. They can be vague and shaped by brain networks involved in memory and thought, with only partial and weaker reactivation of visual regions, Irani said. One limitation that would prevent this technology from being widely deployed is that the only way to get reliable results is from fMRI scanning, which is cumbersome and expensive. The team is currently experimenting with using easier-to-collect electroencephalogram (EEG) data, which is obtained via electrodes on the head, but that work is in the very preliminary stages, according to Irani.

The new system could help brain researchers better understand which visual information is represented in different brain regions, how those regions interact and how individuals’ patterns differ. Such tools could eventually reveal differences in visual processing that could help clinicians spot neurological, neurodevelopmental and psychiatric conditions.

"There are numerous useful medical applications which we are currently striving toward," Irani said. "These include using our brain encoder/decoder to detect and analyze brain disorders such as MS, PTSD, autism and psychiatric disorders."

'> This AI finds patterns in visual brain activity and turns them into pictures

Recently, researchers claimed that they found a way to "train" people to lucid dream by having them meditate and complete virtual-reality-augmented exercises while they were awake. Following the release of that study, Live Science asked its readers whether they would learn to lucid dream if they could.

Over 300 readers weighed in, with 77% saying "Yes, I'd want to try to control my dreams." Additionally, 17% of respondents said "No, I already lucid dream enough without training," 3% said "No, I don't see the point," and the final 3% said they weren't sure.

In the comments, one reader shared that they'd once experimented with hypnagogic napping, a technique famously used by Thomas Edison and Salvador Dalí in which the famous luminaries would wake themselves up just as they were drifting to sleep. Edison claimed that this helped him access a creative sweet spot at the edge of sleep and wakefulness.

"When I was experimenting with the hypnagogic state (using the Edison method) I started having spontaneous lucid dreams," the reader wrote. "I can confidently say, that there were some of the most profound experiences of my life, so the answer is definitely yes."

Another reader reported having lucid dreams "about once or twice a year," adding that they typically wake up shortly after realizing it's a dream. "My most recent one was of my recently deceased wife. I became very sad when I realized she wasn't supposed to be there," the reader wrote. "I hugged her and told her I don't want to be without her. She replied that I could live a long life if I took care of myself (This was a very typical response from her...lol). I feel very blessed to have had that dream."

Other readers chimed in on Facebook. "Already have it [lucid dreaming], but if I didn't I would certainly practice to do so," one wrote. "Hell yes," another said, in response to the idea of training themselves to lucid dream.

Other readers noted that they already lucid dream quite often or that they can consistently control their dreams, with one even saying that all of their dreams are lucid. Another said, "Some nights I interrupt it [my dream] like Monty Python — 'Too silly!' and start over."

But while one person compared lucid dreaming to "writing and directing your own movie," another noted that "lucid dreams can be boring, repetitive, annoying." So while many people would practice lucid dreaming if they could, not everyone sees the appeal.

'> 'Like writing and directing your own movie': Live Science readers share whether they'd learn to lucid dream if they could