Deloitte published their assessment of Rome's 2000 year-old Colosseum, which could well cost from $250 million to $1 billion to build today.  You can  read the details here , but, ta-da, it is worth $79 billion.  It would rank   #14 in the current list of world billionaires . There are moments and experiences, says Mastercard, that are priceless, but many famous historical artifacts are also in that category, especially those of Leonardo da Vinci. Some of his works do have known values.  A prominent one, and most expensive art piece ever sold, is  Salvator Mundi,  which was bought by the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed Bin Salman in 2017 for $450 million, some say as a gift to the Louvre Abu Dhabi, and today has a value closer to $500 million, or half a billion dollars. To the right is how the Leonardo pictured Jesus Christ, but it is still not clear if he finished it in the 1490s while working in Milan on  The Last Supper , or in Florence after 1500 while painting the  Mona

Before I go into my Wednesday science topic, one note about COVID-19.  Of course, with so many tests now taken at home and not reported, surely the 100,000 or so new cases/day in the U.S. must be higher.   Here is one estimate by the University Columbia's Jeffrey Shaman : Shaman's research group turned to using models to estimate the "ascertainment rate" — the portion of real infections that were being captured in official case counts. That rate has fluctuated — at the end of 2020, they estimated one in four cases were being counted. During the omicron surge it was closer to one in six.   Now with the widespread availability of at-home rapid tests that aren't reported to health departments, Shaman thinks the true number of cases may be in the ballpark of eight times higher than case counts. In other words, instead of 100,000 new cases a day, the true number may be 800,000 cases per day. As terrible as that may sound, I think there is a silver lining.   So many hav