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Researcher claims he's found Plato's grave after using AI to decipher ancient Herculaneum scrolls

Daily Mail - Science & tech

An Italian researcher has claimed to have found the long-lost burial place of the famed Greek philosopher Plato who died around 348 BC. Graziano Ranocchia used AI to decipher the Herculaneum scrolls, charred papyrus found buried by the Mount Vesuvius eruption in 79AD, revealing new text that pointed to an exact location in Athens. The analysis showed Plato was buried in'The Academy,' a famous school founded by the philosopher in 387 BC, near the so-called Museion - a small building sacred to the Muses that no longer stands among the ruins. Ranocchia and his team uncovered 1,000 words, corresponding to 30 percent of the text, using the'bionic eye' - and believe they will have the papyrus completely analyzed by 2026. The analysis showed Plato was buried in'The Academy,' a famous school founded by the philosopher in 387 BC, near the so-called Museion - a small building sacred to the Muses The team uncovered 1,000 words, corresponding to 30 percent of the text, using the'bionic eye' - and believe they will have the papyrus completely analyzed by 2026 'Compared to previous editions, there is now an almost radically changed text, implying a number of new and concrete facts about various academic philosophers,' Ranocchia said in a statement.

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  Country: Europe > Italy > Sicily (0.07)

Light brighter than the sun to virtually decipher ancient Herculaneum scrolls

The Japan Times

LONDON – Scientists at Britain's national synchrotron facility have harnessed powerful light beams to virtually unwrap and decipher fragile scrolls dating back some 2,000 years in a process they hope will provide new insights into the ancient world. The two complete scrolls and four fragments -- from the so-called Herculaneum library, the only one surviving from antiquity -- were buried and carbonized by the deadly eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79 and are too fragile to be opened. The items were examined at the Diamond Light Source facility in Oxfordshire, home to Britain's synchrotron, a particle accelerator in which beams travel around a closed-loop path to produce light many times brighter than the sun. "The idea is essentially like a CT scanner where you would take an image of a person, a three-dimensional image of a person and you can slice through it to see the different organs," said Laurent Chapon, physical science director of Diamond Light Source. "We … shine very intense light through (the scroll) and then detect on the other side a number of two-dimensional images. From that we reconstruct a three-dimensional volume of the object … to actually read the text in a nondestructive manner," Chapon said.

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