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X-rays used to read burnt scrolls
Topic Started: Jan 21 2015, 11:18 PM (253 Views)
CJ
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A very minor case of serious brain damage

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 :O ! 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
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King Zero

Well, that of course depends on if we'd even be able to decipher what it says when we know. :P 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
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A very minor case of serious brain damage

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
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Tank Sniper

so long as a majority of the ink that the xrays are reading are carefully translated, would not want any puns :P
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