A collection of ancient papyrus scrolls found in Herculaneum, a Roman town buried alongside Pompeii by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD. The scrolls were stored in a library in a villa thought to have belonged to the father-in-law of Julius Caesar. Scorching volcanic gases carbonised them, making them impossible to unroll physically—all attempts since the 18th century have caused disintegration.
Researchers led by W. Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, pioneered a two-stage method to read the scrolls without unrolling them. High-resolution 3D X-ray scans are produced using particle accelerators; the rolled-up papyrus is then traced ("segmented") inside the scan to extract 2D surface images, and ink-detection algorithms distinguish the text from the background. The process is especially difficult because the Herculaneum scrolls were written in carbon-based ink, which offers very little contrast against the carbonised papyrus.
In 2023 Dr Seales launched the Vesuvius Challenge with Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, two technology entrepreneurs. X-ray scans were published online, and a community of thousands of volunteers developed software to speed segmentation and ink detection. In late 2023, three computer-science students shared a $700,000 prize for extracting the first passages of Greek text from a scroll nicknamed "Banana Boy" (after its shape, not its content). The text appears to be a previously unknown philosophical work, likely by Philodemus, a philosopher who lived in Herculaneum.
In May 2025 two volunteer researchers won a $60,000 prize for identifying the title of a fifth scroll, scanned at the Diamond Light Source in Oxfordshire—the first time a specific work on a Herculaneum scroll had been named. It was "On Vices" by Philodemus.
The Diamond Light Source (DLS), a synchrotron in Oxfordshire with a 562-metre-circumference storage ring, was used for the initial scans. In 2025 the team began using the Extremely Brilliant Source (EBS) at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, the world's brightest synchrotron, which produces X-rays 10trn times brighter than medical imaging and operates at twice the DLS's maximum energy. Some 300 surviving unwrapped scrolls remain. In April 2025 the team scanned 20 scrolls flown by private jet from the Victor Emmanuel III National Library in Naples. The ultimate hope is that success will justify a full excavation of the Herculaneum villa, which may contain thousands more scrolls.
Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds. Biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that crawl.