Scientists are using brilliant light, 10 billion times brighter than the sun, to help decipher scrolls turned to brittle charcoal and buried when Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD79. With the two 2,000-year-old Roman scrolls fused closed and unable to be unfurled, a team of scientists at Diamond Light Source in Oxfordshire, UK, is laying the groundwork to deciphering them by using their Synchrotron’s powerful X-ray beam to scan through the carbonised papyri, layer by layer.

Source: Sunday Times October 15, 2019 03:10 UTC