A Roman scroll that should be ash has just been read without being opened. In 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius buried the Roman town of Herculaneum under metres of ash. In one villa, a library of papyrus scrolls was buried too. The scrolls didn’t burn, but were charred: turned into fragile, cigar-shaped lumps of carbon. For 2,000 years they’ve been unreadable. Researchers with a project called the Vesuvius Challenge have read an entire scroll without opening it. https://scrollprize.org/firstscroll #ShareGoodNewsToo