Perseverance rover finds even more signs of extinct life on Mars
A breakthrough from the Vesuvius Challenge team has turned a two-thousand-year mystery into a nearly complete, readable scroll. Using high-resolution phase-contrast X-ray microtomography at the European Synchrotron Facility and a new machine-learning workflow, they scanned, modelled, and digitally unrolled Herculaneum’s sealed papyrus, revealing PHerc.1667 end-to-end and extracting readable text from other scrolls. This marks a shift from piecemeal glimpses to systematic, scroll-scale recovery, promising a flood of new material for historians. The latest high-res images even confirmed the grand-prize results on PHerc.Paris.4, while PHerc.139 appears to contain Philodemus on gods. Challenges remain in geometry and ink detection, but the method is scalable and poised to unlock more of antiquity’s library
