World's most mysterious text cracked

For 600 years it has steadfastly refused to give up its secrets and has beaten some of the world's most brilliant brains, including Alan Turing. Experts variously claimed that the Voynich manuscript - known as the'world's most mysterious text' - contained codes, magic spells, alien messages and even communist propaganda. Eventually most agreed that it was either impossible to solve or else written in gibberish as an elaborate practical joke. But a linguistics expert from the University of Bristol has now cracked it - and it took him just two weeks. Dr Gerard Cheshire worked out that it was written in a dead language - proto-Romance - and then by studying symbols and their descriptions he deciphered the meaning of the letters and words.