1 . There are world-class museums located across the globe, from well-established institutions to newer builds and niche offerings. For museum fans, the choice is endless. Here, we look at some of the world’s most visited museums.

With record-breaking visitor figures, The Louvre is undoubtedly one of the most popular museums in the world. It is home to over 380,000 objects and a permanent collection that covers 60, 600 square meters. Visitors can enjoy sculptures, paintings, drawings, and more, with famous highlights being the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo. As well as its world-class collection, it is also a landmark in itself, thanks to the iconic Louvre Pyramid, designed by the distinguished Chinese-American architect I. M. Pei.

This museum is home to 1.3 million objects, displayed in a series of galleries exploring everything from ancient ceramics and calligraphy to jade and bronze treasures, as well as Buddhist sculptures and socialist-realism art. Recent exhibitions have covered a wide range of topics from across the world of art, culture, history and politics. These have included The Power of Truth: Marking the Bicentenary of the Birth of Karl Marx, and The Splendor of Asia: An Exhibition of Asian Civilizations. Since May 2021, more than 30 of China’s top museums have adopted digital collectibles as an alternative to NFTs.

Next one on the list of the most visited museums in the world is The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met’). The Met is the largest art museum in the United States and holds more than 2million works in its permanent collection. It is famous for holding blockbuster attractions, such as 2018’s record-breaking Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer. It also hosts the Met Gala each year, although the 2020 event had to be moved online due to the pandemic. In 2021, Sofie Andersen, head of digital content at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, spoke to Blooloop about digital storytelling and the museum’s online strategy.

8 . Until now, dressing robots, designed to help an elderly person or a person with a disability get dressed, have been created in the laboratory as a one-armed machine, but research has shown that this can be uncomfortable for the person in care.

To solve this problem, Dr Jihong Zhu, a robotics researcher at the University of York’s Institute, proposed a two-armed assistive dressing plan, which has been inspired by caregivers who have demonstrated that specific actions are required to reduce discomfort to the individual in their care.

Dr Zhu gathered important information on how care workers moved during a dressing exercise, through allowing a robot to observe and learn from human movements and then, through AI, generate a model that mimics (模仿) how human helpers do their task. This allowed the researchers to gather enough data to illustrate that two hands were needed for dressing and not one, as well as information on the angles that the arms make.

Dr Zhu said, “We know that practical tasks, such as getting dressed, can be done by a robot, freeing up a care worker to concentrate more on providing companionship and observing the general well-being of the individual in their care. It has been tested in the laboratory, but for this to work outside of the lab, we really need to understand how care workers do this task in real life.”

“We’ve adopted a method called learning from demonstration, which means that you don’t need an expert to programme a robot; a human just needs to demonstrate the motion that is required of the robot and the robot learns that action. It is clear that for care workers two arms are needed to properly attend to the needs of individuals,” Dr. Zhu said. “With the current one-armed machine scheme a patient is required to do too much work in order for a robot to assist them, moving their arm up in the air or bending it in ways that they might not be able to do.”

9 . Leading museums in the United States are covering up or closing displays featuring Native American cultural objects owing to new federal rules. The new regulations require museums to obtain “free, prior and informed permission” from tribal leaders before displaying ancestral heritage items.

The American Museum of Natural History in New York City, the largest natural history museum in the world, announced on Jan 26 that it would close two halls spanning 10,000 square feet with Native American exhibits, as the exhibits are “severely outdated”. “The halls we are closing contain artifacts (历史文物) of an era when museums such as ours did not respect the values, perspectives and indeed shared humanity of Native Americans,” museum President Sean Decatur said in a letter to the staff, The New York Times reported. “The number of cultural objects on display in these halls is significant, and because these exhibits are also severely outdated, we have decided that rather than just covering or removing specific items, we will close the halls,” Decatur said. The move comes because of the implementation (执行) in early January of update d regulations under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).

Over the next five years, museums, universities, art institutions and similar places are required to undertake essential updates to prepare all human remains and related funerary (葬礼的) objects for repatriation (遣送), making sure that tribes have more power and increased authority throughout the process. “The ultimate goal of the law is not to cover up exhibitions. It’s not to prevent appropriate education about diverse native cultures. It’s about repairing and repatriating items that have been stolen over the last couple of centuries and returning them to the rightful people,” Shannon O’Loughlin, the CEO of the Association on American Indian Affairs said.

Chicago’s Field Museum earlier this month also closed several displays featuring Native American cultural items. The Field Museum has one of the biggest collections of Native American remains in the country and opened a new permanent exhibition in the spring of 2022 that displaced the museum’s longstanding Native American exhibition since the 1950s.

Harvard University, which has more than 5,000 Native American human remains, has said it will remove all Native American funerary items from its exhibits. “Exhibitions have always been discussed during tribal discussions and cultural items have been removed from display at the tribal request. With the new NAGPRA regulations, the museum is in the process of removing all the funerary belongings and likely funerary belongings off display,” Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, said in a statement.