Can YOU decipher these scrolls? Scientists are offering a $250,000 prize

Scientists are offering $250,000 (£205,000) in prizes for anybody who can read a series of 2,000-year-old manuscripts that were charred during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. When the volcano blast wiped out Pompeii in 79AD, hundreds of texts from the Herculaneum library were buried and carbonised by the smoking ash and gases. They resurfaced in 1752 in a villa near the Bay of Naples which is once believed to belong to the father-in-law Julius Caesar, but their contents have remained a mystery as scientists judged them too fragile to unfurl. Now a team of researchers has launched a contest after showing that an artificial intelligence system can extract letters and symbols from high-resolution X-ray images of the documents. This machine-learning algorithm was trained to read the ink on both the surface and hidden layers of the unopened scrolls.