We're finally reading the secrets of Herculaneum's lost library A whole library's worth of papyri owned by Julius Caesar's father-in-law were turned to charcoal by the eruption of Vesuvius. Deep within a particle accelerator, theoretical physicist Giorgio Angelotti is hard at work. He sets a black cylinder on a mount, bolts it down, then runs through some safety checks before retreating from the chamber, known as "the hatch". "You have to be sure there's no one in the hatch before you close the door," he says. That's because he is about to blast the sample with a super-powerful beam of X-rays.

The Herculaneum Scrolls contain hugely significant philosophical and literary texts from ancient Greek and Roman scholars, but were turned to carbonized lumps by the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. Attempts to unroll the scrolls have damaged or destroyed them, turning the precious coal-like relics to dust. Now, scientists are using clever scanning techniques to identify the text written within – without having to unroll the fragile'papyrus' pages. The team has already read one of the scrolls to discover how Greek philosopher Plato spent his last evening 2,500 years ago - but say other huge revelations about Socrates could be in store. Graziano Ranocchia, a papyrologist from the University of Pisa in Italy, said: 'Plato is just the start'.

Reproduced under a CC BY 4.0 license. On 19 October 1752, a discovery was made 20 metres underneath the town of Resina, near Naples in Italy. Peasants digging wells in the area around Mount Vesuvius had struck marble statuary and mosaic pavements – and they also found lumps of carbon. Initially, they were tossed aside – the lumps weren't considered valuable or pretty, so were of no interest. But thankfully, someone noticed they were all about the same size and shape, and investigated further.

Ancient rock carvings have been uncovered near the Amazon River amid drought conditions in Brazil. A set of ancient texts burned by the volcanic eruption on Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. have been deciphered thanks to a team of researchers using AI. The nearly 2,000-year-old texts were unreadable after being charred in a villa in Herculaneum, a Roman town near Pompeii. The texts were discovered in an ancient villa in the town of Herculaneum. Believed to have been owned by the father-in-law of Julius Caesar, the texts were carbonized by the heat of the volcanic debris.

The Greek word for "purple" has been extracted from a Herculaneum scroll Almost 2000 years after they were buried by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, scrolls from a library in the ancient Roman town of Herculaneum have begun to reveal their secrets. The tightly wrapped papyrus scrolls were charred in the disaster, which also destroyed the nearby town of Pompeii. But by studying 3D X-ray scans of the scrolls, researchers have deciphered a word on one of them: "porphyras", meaning "purple". The breakthrough came from Luke Farritor, a 21-year-old computer science student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His success involved training an AI to identify nearly invisible ink-like patterns in the 3D scans. "Seeing Luke's first word was a shock," says Michael McOsker at the University College London in the UK, who was not involved in the discovery.

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.

Data-to-text (D2T) generation is the task of generating texts from structured inputs. We observed that when the same target sentence was repeated twice, Transformer (T5) based model generates an output made up of asymmetric sentences from structured inputs. In other words, these sentences were different in length and quality. We call this phenomenon "Asymmetric Generation" and we exploit this in D2T generation. Once asymmetric sentences are generated, we add the first part of the output with a no-repeated-target. As this goes through progressive edit (ProEdit), the recall increases. Hence, this method better covers structured inputs Figure 1: An example of generating asymmetric sentences.

Before the devastating eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, Pompeii was a thriving city with a population of up to 20,000 people. Now, scientists have delved deeper into one of Pompeii's most beautiful homes, the House of Greek Epigrams. While the house has been damaged through centuries of neglect, weathering and volcanic eruptions, researchers from Lund University have been able to rebuild it, using virtual reality and eye-tracking technology. 'Eye-tracking technology and virtual reality do now provide unprecedented opportunities to assess the visual qualities of ancient spaces,' said Dr Giacomo Landeschi, co-author of the study. Moment Miley Cyrus' plane was struck by lightning The House of Greek Epigrams is an impressive home in northeast Pompeii that was once decorated with intricate frescoes.

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD79 it destroyed the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum, their inhabitants and their prized possessions – among them a fine library of scrolls that were carbonised by the searing heat of ash and gas. But scientists say there may still be hope that the fragile documents can once more be read thanks to an innovative approach involving high-energy x-rays and artificial intelligence. "Although you can see on every flake of papyrus that there is writing, to open it up would require that papyrus to be really limber and flexible – and it is not any more," said Prof Brent Seales, chair of computer science at the University of Kentucky, who is leading the research. The two unopened scrolls that will be probed belong to the Institut de France in Paris and are part of an astonishing collection of about 1,800 scrolls that was first discovered in 1752 during excavations of Herculaneum. Together they make up the only known intact library from antiquity, with the majority of the collection now preserved in a museum in Naples.

The exploded skull of a man who died in the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius nearly 2,000 years ago has been pieced together giving scientists a unique opportunity to capture the ancient face using 3D imaging. It is the first real-life reconstruction of the features of a victim of the volcanic disaster who lived in the ill-fated seaside town of Herculaneum. The appearance is that of a typical southern European who may have been wealthy and educated because he was 50 years old when he died - an unusual milestone for the time. He was one of 350 casualties discovered frozen in time, buried under volcanic ash in Herculaneum. This is the first real-life reconstruction of the features of a victim of the volcanic disaster who lived in the ill-fated seaside town of Herculaneum.