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.

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.

On a Saturday night in late August, Luke Farritor, a 21-year old computer science student at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, was on his way home from a party at a friend's house in Omaha when he saw something on his phone that he says almost caused him to break into tears and fall to the floor. Farritor had spent the last six months poring over 3D X-rays of ancient scrolls, often for more than 40 hours per week, all alongside internships and his studies. While he was at the party he had received a message informing him that new segments of scanned and virtually flattened scrolls had just been uploaded. With the music blaring around him, he logged onto his PC remotely to set the AI model that he'd built to detect ink from previous scroll scans to work on the new segments and rejoined the party. After driving home, on the walk back to his college dorm from the parking lot, Farritor remembered the scrolls and checked his phone.

After proving that an artificial intelligence algorithm can extract letters and symbols from high-resolution X-ray photographs of the delicate, unrolled sheets, researchers are announcing a global competition to decipher the burned papyri, The Guardian reports. Led by computer scientist Prof. Brent Seales of the University of Kentucky, researchers could read the ink on the surface and hidden layers of scrolls by training a machine-learning algorithm to spot subtle differences in the papyrus structure captured by the X-ray images. "We've shown how to read the ink of Herculaneum. That gives us the opportunity to reveal 50, 70, maybe 80 percent of the entire collection," said Seales. Now we want everybody to get on and sail it with us."

The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79 laid waste to Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum where the intense blast of hot gas carbonised hundreds of ancient scrolls in the library of an enormous luxury villa. Now, researchers are launching a global contest to read the charred papyri after demonstrating that an artificial intelligence programme can extract letters and symbols from high-resolution X-ray images of the fragile, unrolled documents. Scientists led by Prof Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, were able to read the ink on surface and hidden layers of scrolls by training a machine-learning algorithm to spot subtle differences in the papyrus structure captured by the X-ray images. "We've shown how to read the ink of Herculaneum. That gives us the opportunity to reveal 50, 70, maybe 80% of the entire collection," said Seales.

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.

If you've ever read The Da Vinci Code or thrilled to the adventures of Indiana Jones, you know few things are more fun than stories of how the ancient world -- and our modern one -- intersect. A University of Kentucky computer scientist, Brent Seales, has found himself in the middle of such a tale, as he uses AI to virtually unravel ancient texts, long thought unreadable, and bring lost literature to light. Last year, Seales and his team caused a worldwide sensation when they used non-invasive scans to unlock writings on the ancient Ein-Gedi scroll to reveal the earliest copy of a book of the Bible -- Leviticus -- ever found in a holy ark. "It confirmed readings that were there in our bibles in Sunday school, that really was a dream for me," Seales said in a conversation on the AI Podcast with host Michael Copeland.