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| X-rays used to read burnt scrolls | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Jan 21 2015, 11:18 PM (253 Views) | |
| CJ | Jan 21 2015, 11:18 PM Post #1 |
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A very minor case of serious brain damage
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-30888767 For the first time, words have been read from a burnt, rolled-up scroll buried by Mount Vesuvius in AD79. The scrolls of Herculaneum, the only classical library still in existence, were blasted by volcanic gas hotter than 300C and are desperately fragile. Deep inside one scroll, physicists distinguished the ink from the paper using a 3D X-ray imaging technique sometimes used in breast scans. They believe that other scrolls could also be deciphered without unrolling. The work appears in the journal Nature Communications. Pretty amazing that this is possible - especially when they don't have to unroll the scroll in order to do it ! I wonder whether this will give us access to any knowledge about the ancient world which would otherwise have been lost forever?
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| Zero Revolution | Jan 22 2015, 02:48 AM Post #2 |
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King Zero
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Well, that of course depends on if we'd even be able to decipher what it says when we know. But yeah, this is pretty amazing, I didn't know technology had advanced this far in order to do this.
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| CJ | Jan 22 2015, 07:45 AM Post #3 |
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A very minor case of serious brain damage
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Considering where it was found, I assume that the text will be in Latin, so there should be no trouble reading it once we know what it says .
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| GrieferLord | Jan 22 2015, 08:26 AM Post #4 |
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Tank Sniper
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so long as a majority of the ink that the xrays are reading are carefully translated, would not want any puns
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! I wonder whether this will give us access to any knowledge about the ancient world which would otherwise have been lost forever?




But yeah, this is pretty amazing, I didn't know technology had advanced this far in order to do this.
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12:34 AM Jul 11