X-ray reveals ancient Greek author of charred first century BC Vesuvius scroll
A charred scroll recovered from a Roman villa that was buried under ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted nearly 2,000 years ago has been identified as the influential work of an ancient Greek philosopher.
Researchers discovered the title and author on the Herculaneum scroll after X-raying the carbonised papyrus and virtually unwrapping it on a computer, the first time such crucial details have been gleaned from the approach.
Traces of ink lettering visible in the X-ray images revealed the text to be part of a multi-volume work, On Vices, written by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus in the first century BC. The scroll is one of three from Herculaneum housed at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford.
'It's the first scroll where the ink could just be seen on the scan,' said Dr Michael McOsker, a papyrologist at University College London, who is collaborating with researchers in Oxford to read the text. 'Nobody knew what it was about. We didn't even know if it had writing on.'
The scroll is one of hundreds found in the library of a luxury Roman villa thought to have been owned by Julius Caesar's father-in-law. The villa was buried under ash and pumice when Herculaneum, near Naples, was destroyed along with Pompeii in the eruption of AD79.
Excavations in the 18th century recovered many of the ancient scrolls, most of which are held at the National Library of Naples. But the documents are so badly burnt that they crumble when researchers try to unroll them and the ink is unreadable on the carbonised papyrus.
The latest work builds on earlier breakthroughs from the Vesuvius Challenge, a global competition launched in 2023, which offers prizes for progress in reading the scrolls from 3D X-rays. Last year, a team of computer-savvy students shared the $700,000 (£527,350) grand prize for developing artificial intelligence software that enabled them to read 2,000 ancient Greek letters from another scroll.
The scroll from the Bodleian, named PHerc. 172, was scanned last July at Diamond, the UK's national synchrotron facility in Oxfordshire. Unusually, some ink was visible in the X-ray images, with researchers spotting the ancient Greek word for 'disgust' at least twice in the document.
Further work by Sean Johnson at the Vesuvius Challenge, and separately by Marcel Roth and Micha Nowak at the University of Würzburg, found the title and author of the text in the innermost section of the scroll, earning them the challenge's $60,000 (£45,200) first title prize.
Alongside 'On Vices' and 'Philodemus', a book number on the scroll may be an alpha, suggesting it could be the first instalment of the work. On Vices contains at least 10 books with others covering topics such as arrogance, greed, flattery and household management.
Before long, experts should know far more about the scrolls. Eighteen were scanned at Diamond in March and 20 more will be imaged at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble this week.
'We're seeing evidence of ink in many of the new scrolls we've scanned but we haven't converted that into coherent text yet,' said Dr Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, who co-founded the Vesuvius Challenge. 'That's our current bottleneck: converting the massive scan data into organised sections that are properly segmented, virtually flattened, and enhanced so that the evidence of ink can then be interpreted as actual text.'
McOsker said: 'The pace is ramping up very quickly … All of the technological progress that's been made on this has been in the last three to five years and on the timescales of classicists, that's unbelievable. Everything we're getting from the Herculaneum library is new to us.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Newsweek
2 days ago
- Newsweek
Doctors Studied How Babies Feel Pain—the Results Were Surprising
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. A new University College London study reveals that a newborn's response to pain is more complex and less conscious than previously thought. Researchers have discovered that while premature babies can physically feel pain, they lack the emotional and cognitive capacity to fully interpret or understand it—an insight that could reshape how neonatal care is approached in hospitals around the world. "Pain is a complex experience with physical, emotional and cognitive elements," said lead author and neuroscientist professor Lorenzo Fabrizi in a statement. Little infant tired and hungry, start crying standing in crib, looking aside at empty space Little infant tired and hungry, start crying standing in crib, looking aside at empty space Prostock-Studio In adults, pain processing involves a network of brain regions known as the 'pain connectome', where each part contributes to different aspects of the pain experience. "In newborn babies, this network is underdeveloped, which could mean that pain experience in newborns is totally different from the way we, as adults, understand it," Fabrizi explained. In their study, the researchers used advanced MRI data from more than 370 preterm and full-term infants—some as early as 32 weeks gestation—to analyze how the brain's pain connectome forms over time. This network of brain regions, responsible for sensing, reacting to and cognitively evaluating pain, matures in stages with different components developing at different points before and after birth. Fabrizi and his colleagues focused on three major components of pain processing: Sensory-discriminative (identifying where and how intense the pain is), affective-motivational (the emotional response to pain) and cognitive-evaluative (interpreting and understanding the meaning of pain). Their findings suggest that the ability to simply feel pain—the sensory-discriminative network—begins to resemble adult levels of connectivity between 34 and 36 weeks after conception, but the emotional and interpretive responses lag behind. At around 36 to 38 weeks, the affective-motivational network matures, allowing infants to recognize pain as unpleasant or threatening. However, the cognitive-evaluative network—responsible for contextualizing or "understanding" pain—doesn't reach adult-like maturity until well beyond 42 weeks, meaning even full-term newborns aren't fully capable of interpreting pain experiences. "These results challenge assumptions about the completeness of infant pain perception and raise new concerns about how pain is managed in neonatal care," Fabrizi said. The study builds on earlier findings by the same research team who reported in 2023 that premature babies don't habituate to repeated pain, such as from medical procedures. In essence, their brain does not "adjust" or reduce its response to ongoing painful stimuli. The new research helps explain why. Without mature cognitive or emotional pain-processing systems, premature infants may feel the same pain repeatedly without developing coping mechanisms or psychological resilience. "Our results suggest that preterm babies may be particularly vulnerable to painful medical procedures during critical stages of brain development," Fabrizi said. This emphasizes the importance of informed pediatric care, including tailored pain management and carefully timed medical interventions, he concluded. Do you have a tip on a science story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about neuroscience? Let us know via science@ Reference Jones, L., Batalle, D., Meek, J., Edwards, A. D., Fitzgerald, M., Arichi, T., & Fabrizi, L. (2022). Differential maturation of the brain networks required for the sensory, emotional, and cognitive aspects of pain in human newborns. PAIN.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Yahoo
How do baby planets grow? Study of 30 stellar nurseries sheds new light
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Infant planets are ravenous little blighters that quickly devour what remains of the star-circling gas and dust clouds in which they form. The gas in these protoplanetary disks disappears rapidly, within just a few million years. Astronomers now have a better picture of this process of planetary evolution than ever before, thanks to a new study. The research was conducted by an international team of astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), as part of a program called the ALMA Survey of Gas Evolution of PROtoplanetary Disks (AGE-PRO). The AGE-PRO team studied 30 protoplanetary disks around sunlike stars, finding that gas and dust components in these disks evolve at different rates. The amount of gas remaining as these disks are whittled away determines the type of planets these systems produce, the researchers found. The new results could help scientists better understand how planetary systems, including our own solar system, form and evolve. Indeed, the AGE-PRO results have given rise to a staggering 12 research papers by different research teams, showing just how ground-breaking the discovery is. "These studies have revealed how protoplanetary disks evolve over time," AGE-PRO researcher Anibal E. Sierra Morales, of the Mullard Space Science Laboratory at University College London (UCL), said in a statement to "The extraordinary results are an essential step toward understanding the initial conditions that lead to the formation of Earth-like planets." The story of protoplanetary disks begins when clumps of overdense, cool gas collapse under their own gravity in interstellar molecular clouds, birthing stars. These infant stars, or "protostars," continue to gather matter from their prenatal envelope of gas. Eventually, what is left behind is a main sequence star surrounded by a flattened, swirling cloud of gas and dust — a protoplanetary disk. Within this disk, conglomerations of material bump together and stick, gathering mass until they form planetesimals. These planetesimals continue to gather material from the protoplanetary disk, and it is from this process that planets grow. It's estimated that protoplanetary disks surround infant stars for several million years, and this sets the time that giant planets have available to form. The initial size and mass of the protoplanetary disk and the speed at which it spins — its angular momentum — determine the kind of planets it is capable of birthing. The lifespan of gas in the disk then determines how long the clumps have to gather and grow into bodies the size of asteroids or planets. Additionally, these factors can also determine if planets migrate through the planetary disk during their youth, moving from their birthplaces closer to or farther away from their star. This, therefore, determines the final shape that the planetary disk will take. Before this new study, researchers had analyzed how the dust content of protoplanetary disks evolves, but the way the gas content changes over time was not as well understood. "AGE-PRO provides the first measurements of gas disk masses and sizes across the lifetime of planet-forming disks," research principal investigator Ke Zhang, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in a statement. Using ALMA the team zoomed into 30 protoplanetary disks of different ages, ranging from 1 million years old to over 5 million years old. These disks were located in the star-birthing regions of the constellations Ophiuchus, Lupus and Upper Scorpius. The sensitivity of ALMA allowed the team to track particular chemical "tracers" that reveal gas and dust masses during vital stages of protoplanetary disk evolution, from initial formation to their inevitable disintegration millions of years later. While carbon monoxide is one of the most commonly used chemical tracers for astronomers, the AGE-Pro team also relied on the molecule diazenylium. ALMA was also able to detect the chemical signatures of other molecules like aldehyde, deuterated cyanogen and cyanomethane, thus painting a more detailed picture of the chemical evolution of protoplanetary disks than ever before. "This is the first large-scale chemical survey of its kind, targeting the 30 disks with a broader range of ages to characterize the gas masses," research co-leader John Carpenter, of the Joint ALMA Observatory, said in the same statement. The research hints at the timeframes at which gas giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn are born, compared to those for smaller terrestrial worlds like Earth and Mars. "AGE-PRO reveals that the median average of the gas disk mass goes from several Jupiter masses in the early ages of less than 1 million years to less than a Jupiter mass in the first 1 to 3 million years," said AGE-PRO researcher Paola Pinilla, of the Mullard Space Science Laboratory at UCL. "This means that disks have the reservoir to form giant planets in the young disks, but as they mature, the fuel for forming giant planets significantly decreases. "However, it is surprising that the disks that survive for longer times of between 2 million to 3 million years, maintain a very similar gas disk mass as the 1 million to 3-million-years-old examples.' Related Stories: — Exoplanet nurseries around infant stars can be much smaller than expected: 'It is astonishing' — James Webb Space Telescope's ground-breaking study of a planet-forming disk hints at future exoplanet discoveries — Exoplanet 'baby pictures' reveal exomoons possibly taking shape around infant worlds Another surprise delivered by ALMA was the fact that, as protoplanetary disks age, the gas and dust within them are consumed at different rates. In particular, the ratio of gas to dust undergoes a "swing" as these swirling flattened clouds age. "The most surprising finding is that, although most disks dissipate after a few million years, the ones that survive have more gas than expected," Zhang said. "This fundamentally changes our estimation of the atmospheric accretion of planets formed at a later time." By comparing AGE-PRO's observations of gas evolution in protoplanetary disks of different ages to other studies of gas evolution, the team can start to paint a broader and more detailed picture of how planetary systems evolve. The 12 new papers will be published in a forthcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal.
Miami Herald
4 days ago
- Miami Herald
Shallow hole turns out to be rare 1,600-year-old structure in Germany. See it
Sifting through damp soil in northwestern Germany, archaeologists found hundreds of artifacts, dozens of traces of long-gone buildings and a few rare structures. The remnants were often mundane but sometimes extraordinary. Altogether, the finds offered a glimpse into life about 1,600 years ago. A team of archaeologists began excavating a site near Bentfeld in November 2024 ahead of residential construction, the Regional Association of Westphalia-Lippe said in a June 13 news release. Previous work in the area had exposed some remains of an ancient settlement so archaeologists knew they'd find at least something. But as they began digging, the team quickly realized the site had a longer and more varied history than initially suspected. In total, archaeologists identified the ruins of two houses, two wells, a cremation burial and about 750 artifacts, officials said. The most sensational finds emerged near the end of the project, archaeologists said. Sven Knippschild, the excavation leader, said they initially thought a shallow indentation was a livestock watering hole. Instead, the hole turned out to be a 1,600-year-old wooden well, officials said. Excavations uncovered a section of wooden pipe built from three tree trunks and measuring over 3 feet across as well as some other beams and wicker used to construct the well. Photos show the ancient wooden artifacts. One of the beams from the well still had processing marks on it and several character-like carvings, archaeologists said. Wooden artifacts or structures are generally rare finds for archaeologists because the material decays quickly unless preserved in a low-oxygen environment, such as in mud or water. At the Bentfeld site, the natural preservation quality was so good that the team also found a section of leather and an ancient insect wing, Knippschild said in the release. On top of the 1,600-year-old well, the team unearthed a layer of charcoal with small burnt bones and a few glass beads, possibly traces of a since-removed burial. They also found a separate cremation burial with a Roman military belt, bone comb, garment clasps and spearhead. Archaeologists finished excavations at the site near Bentfeld and plan to continue analyzing their finds. Bentfeld is a village in northwestern Germany and a roughly 270-mile drive southwest from Berlin. Google Translate was used to translate the news release from the Regional Association of Westphalia-Lippe (LWL).
