Title and author of burned, still-rolled scroll decoded after nearly 2,000 years
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Researchers working to decipher the contents of a burned, still-rolled scroll have uncovered both the author and the title of the text nearly 2,000 years after it was buried in the Mount Vesuvius eruption.
The scroll — named PHerc. 172 — is one of hundreds from the ancient Roman town of Herculaneum, which was buried under volcanic debris when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, according to the Vesuvius Challenge, an initiative focused on decoding the texts of the Herculaneum scrolls without needing to unroll them.
Preserved under mud and ash in a villa believed to have been once owned by the father-in-law of Julius Caesar, the scrolls were discovered by an Italian farmer in the 18th century.
Burned so badly they were carbonized, they are extremely fragile. Over the years, scholars have tried a range of methods to unroll them, including using weights, chemicals, gases and pulverization, though this often led to the scrolls being damaged or destroyed.
The Vesuvius Challenge was launched in 2023 to encourage researchers from around the world to try and decipher the scrolls by virtually unwrapping and decoding them.
Now, Marcel Roth and Micha Nowak, graduate students from Germany's University of Würzburg, have uncovered the title and author of PHerc. 172. Vesuvius Challenge researcher Sean Johnson made the same discovery around the same time, and both findings were independently reviewed by the competition's papyrological team, according to a Tuesday press release from Oxford University's Bodleian Libraries, where the scroll is housed.
The text deciphered identifies the scroll as 'On Vices' by the Greek philosopher Philodemus, according to the Vesuvius Challenge. It is a part of Philodemus' ethical treatise known in full as 'On Vices and Their Opposite Virtues and In Whom They Are and About What,' and could even be the first book in the series, though this is not yet clear.
Oxford University's Bodleian Libraries suggests that the book number could 'plausibly' be read as an alpha, which would indicate that the scroll is book one in the series, but it could also be other numbers, such as a delta, which would mean it is book four.
Scholars have generally thought that the first book of 'On Vices' was a text called 'On Flattery,' but the content of PHerc. 172 does not correspond with this.
Philodemus, according to the Bodleian Libraries, was an Epicurean philosopher whose teachings 'emphasise the pursuit of pleasure as central to a good life.' The majority of the scrolls found preserved in the Herculaneum villa were his works, Bodleian Libraries said.
Michael McOsker, a researcher in papyrology at University College London, who is also a member of the Vesuvius Challenge papyrology team, called the new discovery a 'very exciting development.'
'Other books from the On Vices and their Opposite Virtues are known from the papyri that were physically unrolled — best known are On Property Management (book 9, presumably the opposite virtue to greed) and On Arrogance (book 10, presumably the opposite vice to having a correct evaluation of yourself), but there are others too,' McOsker said.
'This will be a great opportunity to learn more about Philodemus' ethical views and to get a better view of the On Vices as a whole, especially if it turns out to be the first book,' McOsker said.
This find, the first time a scroll's title has been read, is the latest from the Vesuvius Challenge.
In October 2023, the first full word from one of the unopened ancient papyri was decoded with the help of computer technology and advanced artificial intelligence. The word was 'πορφυρας' or 'porphyras,' which is Greek for purple.
And in February, researchers investigating columns of text from PHerc. 172 identified the word 'διατροπή,' meaning 'disgust,' which appears twice within a few columns of text, the Bodleian Libraries said.
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WIRED
7 hours ago
- WIRED
A New Law of Nature Attempts to Explain the Complexity of the Universe
Jun 8, 2025 7:00 AM A novel suggestion that complexity increases over time, not just in living organisms but in the nonliving world, promises to rewrite notions of time and evolution. Illustration: Irene Pérez for Quanta Magazine The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1950 the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi was discussing the possibility of intelligent alien life with his colleagues. If alien civilizations exist, he said, some should surely have had enough time to expand throughout the cosmos. So where are they? Many answers to Fermi's 'paradox' have been proposed: Maybe alien civilizations burn out or destroy themselves before they can become interstellar wanderers. But perhaps the simplest answer is that such civilizations don't appear in the first place: Intelligent life is extremely unlikely, and we pose the question only because we are the supremely rare exception. A new proposal by an interdisciplinary team of researchers challenges that bleak conclusion. They have proposed nothing less than a new law of nature, according to which the complexity of entities in the universe increases over time with an inexorability comparable to the second law of thermodynamics—the law that dictates an inevitable rise in entropy, a measure of disorder. If they're right, complex and intelligent life should be widespread. In this new view, biological evolution appears not as a unique process that gave rise to a qualitatively distinct form of matter—living organisms. Instead, evolution is a special (and perhaps inevitable) case of a more general principle that governs the universe. According to this principle, entities are selected because they are richer in a kind of information that enables them to perform some kind of function. This hypothesis, formulated by the mineralogist Robert Hazen and the astrobiologist Michael Wong of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, DC, along with a team of others, has provoked intense debate. Some researchers have welcomed the idea as part of a grand narrative about fundamental laws of nature. They argue that the basic laws of physics are not 'complete' in the sense of supplying all we need to comprehend natural phenomena; rather, evolution—biological or otherwise—introduces functions and novelties that could not even in principle be predicted from physics alone. 'I'm so glad they've done what they've done,' said Stuart Kauffman, an emeritus complexity theorist at the University of Pennsylvania. 'They've made these questions legitimate.' Michael Wong, an astrobiologist at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, DC. Photograph: Katherine Cain/Carnegie Science Others argue that extending evolutionary ideas about function to non-living systems is an overreach. The quantitative value that measures information in this new approach is not only relative—it changes depending on context—it's impossible to calculate. For this and other reasons, critics have charged that the new theory cannot be tested, and therefore is of little use. The work taps into an expanding debate about how biological evolution fits within the normal framework of science. The theory of Darwinian evolution by natural selection helps us to understand how living things have changed in the past. But unlike most scientific theories, it can't predict much about what is to come. Might embedding it within a meta-law of increasing complexity let us glimpse what the future holds? Making Meaning The story begins in 2003, when the biologist Jack Szostak published a short article in Nature proposing the concept of functional information. Szostak—who six years later would get a Nobel Prize for unrelated work—wanted to quantify the amount of information or complexity that biological molecules like proteins or DNA strands embody. Classical information theory, developed by the telecommunications researcher Claude Shannon in the 1940s and later elaborated by the Russian mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov, offers one answer. Per Kolmogorov, the complexity of a string of symbols (such as binary 1s and 0s) depends on how concisely one can specify that sequence uniquely. For example, consider DNA, which is a chain of four different building blocks called nucleotides. Α strand composed only of one nucleotide, repeating again and again, has much less complexity—and, by extension, encodes less information—than one composed of all four nucleotides in which the sequence seems random (as is more typical in the genome). Jack Szostak proposed a way to quantify information in biological systems. Photograph: HHMI But Szostak pointed out that Kolmogorov's measure of complexity neglects an issue crucial to biology: how biological molecules function. In biology, sometimes many different molecules can do the same job. Consider RNA molecules, some of which have biochemical functions that can easily be defined and measured. (Like DNA, RNA is made up of sequences of nucleotides.) In particular, short strands of RNA called aptamers securely bind to other molecules. Let's say you want to find an RNA aptamer that binds to a particular target molecule. Can lots of aptamers do it, or just one? If only a single aptamer can do the job, then it's unique, just as a long, seemingly random sequence of letters is unique. Szostak said that this aptamer would have a lot of what he called 'functional information.' Illustration: Irene Pérez for Quanta Magazine If many different aptamers can perform the same task, the functional information is much smaller. So we can calculate the functional information of a molecule by asking how many other molecules of the same size can do the same task just as well. Szostak went on to show that in a case like this, functional information can be measured experimentally. He made a bunch of RNA aptamers and used chemical methods to identify and isolate the ones that would bind to a chosen target molecule. He then mutated the winners a little to seek even better binders and repeated the process. The better an aptamer gets at binding, the less likely it is that another RNA molecule chosen at random will do just as well: The functional information of the winners in each round should rise. Szostak found that the functional information of the best-performing aptamers got ever closer to the maximum value predicted theoretically. Selected for Function Hazen came across Szostak's idea while thinking about the origin of life—an issue that drew him in as a mineralogist, because chemical reactions taking place on minerals have long been suspected to have played a key role in getting life started. 'I concluded that talking about life versus nonlife is a false dichotomy,' Hazen said. 'I felt there had to be some kind of continuum—there has to be something that's driving this process from simpler to more complex systems.' Functional information, he thought, promised a way to get at the 'increasing complexity of all kinds of evolving systems.' In 2007 Hazen collaborated with Szostak to write a computer simulation involving algorithms that evolve via mutations. Their function, in this case, was not to bind to a target molecule, but to carry out computations. Again they found that the functional information increased spontaneously over time as the system evolved. There the idea languished for years. Hazen could not see how to take it any further until Wong accepted a fellowship at the Carnegie Institution in 2021. Wong had a background in planetary atmospheres, but he and Hazen discovered they were thinking about the same questions. 'From the very first moment that we sat down and talked about ideas, it was unbelievable,' Hazen said. Robert Hazen, a mineralogist at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, DC. Photograph: Courtesy of Robert Hazen 'I had got disillusioned with the state of the art of looking for life on other worlds,' Wong said. 'I thought it was too narrowly constrained to life as we know it here on Earth, but life elsewhere may take a completely different evolutionary trajectory. So how do we abstract far enough away from life on Earth that we'd be able to notice life elsewhere even if it had different chemical specifics, but not so far that we'd be including all kinds of self-organizing structures like hurricanes?' The pair soon realized that they needed expertise from a whole other set of disciplines. 'We needed people who came at this problem from very different points of view, so that we all had checks and balances on each other's prejudices,' Hazen said. 'This is not a mineralogical problem; it's not a physics problem, or a philosophical problem. It's all of those things.' They suspected that functional information was the key to understanding how complex systems like living organisms arise through evolutionary processes happening over time. 'We all assumed the second law of thermodynamics supplies the arrow of time,' Hazen said. 'But it seems like there's a much more idiosyncratic pathway that the universe takes. We think it's because of selection for function—a very orderly process that leads to ordered states. That's not part of the second law, although it's not inconsistent with it either.' Looked at this way, the concept of functional information allowed the team to think about the development of complex systems that don't seem related to life at all. At first glance, it doesn't seem a promising idea. In biology, function makes sense. But what does 'function' mean for a rock? All it really implies, Hazen said, is that some selective process favors one entity over lots of other potential combinations. A huge number of different minerals can form from silicon, oxygen, aluminum, calcium, and so on. But only a few are found in any given environment. The most stable minerals turn out to be the most common. But sometimes less stable minerals persist because there isn't enough energy available to convert them to more stable phases. 'Information itself might be a vital parameter of the cosmos, similar to mass, charge, and energy.' This might seem trivial, like saying that some objects exist while other ones don't, even if they could in theory. But Hazen and Wong have shown that, even for minerals, functional information has increased over the course of Earth's history. Minerals evolve toward greater complexity (though not in the Darwinian sense). Hazen and colleagues speculate that complex forms of carbon such as graphene might form in the hydrocarbon-rich environment of Saturn's moon Titan—another example of an increase in functional information that doesn't involve life. It's the same with chemical elements. The first moments after the Big Bang were filled with undifferentiated energy. As things cooled, quarks formed and then condensed into protons and neutrons. These gathered into the nuclei of hydrogen, helium, and lithium atoms. Only once stars formed and nuclear fusion happened within them did more complex elements like carbon and oxygen form. And only when some stars had exhausted their fusion fuel did their collapse and explosion in supernovas create heavier elements such as heavy metals. Steadily, the elements increased in nuclear complexity. Wong said their work implies three main conclusions. First, biology is just one example of evolution. 'There is a more universal description that drives the evolution of complex systems.' Illustration: Irene Pérez for Quanta Magazine Second, he said, there might be 'an arrow in time that describes this increasing complexity,' similar to the way the second law of thermodynamics, which describes the increase in entropy, is thought to create a preferred direction of time. Finally, Wong said, 'information itself might be a vital parameter of the cosmos, similar to mass, charge and energy.' In the work Hazen and Szostak conducted on evolution using artificial-life algorithms, the increase in functional information was not always gradual. Sometimes it would happen in sudden jumps. That echoes what is seen in biological evolution. Biologists have long recognized transitions where the complexity of organisms increases abruptly. One such transition was the appearance of organisms with cellular nuclei (around 1.8 billion to 2.7 billion years ago). Then there was the transition to multicellular organisms (around 2 billion to 1.6 billion years ago), the abrupt diversification of body forms in the Cambrian explosion (540 million years ago), and the appearance of central nervous systems (around 600 million to 520 million years ago). The arrival of humans was arguably another major and rapid evolutionary transition. Evolutionary biologists have tended to view each of these transitions as a contingent event. But within the functional-information framework, it seems possible that such jumps in evolutionary processes (whether biological or not) are inevitable. In these jumps, Wong pictures the evolving objects as accessing an entirely new landscape of possibilities and ways to become organized, as if penetrating to the 'next floor up.' Crucially, what matters—the criteria for selection, on which continued evolution depends—also changes, plotting a wholly novel course. On the next floor up, possibilities await that could not have been guessed before you reached it. For example, during the origin of life it might initially have mattered that proto-biological molecules would persist for a long time—that they'd be stable. But once such molecules became organized into groups that could catalyze one another's formation—what Kauffman has called autocatalytic cycles—the molecules themselves could be short-lived, so long as the cycles persisted. Now it was dynamical, not thermodynamic, stability that mattered. Ricard Solé of the Santa Fe Institute thinks such jumps might be equivalent to phase transitions in physics, such as the freezing of water or the magnetization of iron: They are collective processes with universal features, and they mean that everything changes, everywhere, all at once. In other words, in this view there's a kind of physics of evolution—and it's a kind of physics we know about already. The Biosphere Creates Its Own Possibilities The tricky thing about functional information is that, unlike a measure such as size or mass, it is contextual: It depends on what we want the object to do, and what environment it is in. For instance, the functional information for an RNA aptamer binding to a particular molecule will generally be quite different from the information for binding to a different molecule. Yet finding new uses for existing components is precisely what evolution does. Feathers did not evolve for flight, for example. This repurposing reflects how biological evolution is jerry-rigged, making use of what's available. Kauffman argues that biological evolution is thus constantly creating not just new types of organisms but new possibilities for organisms, ones that not only did not exist at an earlier stage of evolution but could not possibly have existed. From the soup of single-celled organisms that constituted life on Earth 3 billion years ago, no elephant could have suddenly emerged—this required a whole host of preceding, contingent but specific innovations. However, there is no theoretical limit to the number of uses an object has. This means that the appearance of new functions in evolution can't be predicted—and yet some new functions can dictate the very rules of how the system evolves subsequently. 'The biosphere is creating its own possibilities,' Kauffman said. 'Not only do we not know what will happen, we don't even know what can happen.' Photosynthesis was such a profound development; so were eukaryotes, nervous systems and language. As the microbiologist Carl Woese and the physicist Nigel Goldenfeld put it in 2011, 'We need an additional set of rules describing the evolution of the original rules. But this upper level of rules itself needs to evolve. Thus, we end up with an infinite hierarchy.' The physicist Paul Davies of Arizona State University agrees that biological evolution 'generates its own extended possibility space which cannot be reliably predicted or captured via any deterministic process from prior states. So life evolves partly into the unknown.' 'An increase in complexity provides the future potential to find new strategies unavailable to simpler organisms.' Mathematically, a 'phase space' is a way of describing all possible configurations of a physical system, whether it's as comparatively simple as an idealized pendulum or as complicated as all the atoms comprising the Earth. Davies and his co-workers have recently suggested that evolution in an expanding accessible phase space might be formally equivalent to the 'incompleteness theorems' devised by the mathematician Kurt Gödel. Gödel showed that any system of axioms in mathematics permits the formulation of statements that can't be shown to be true or false. We can only decide such statements by adding new axioms. Davies and colleagues say that, as with Gödel's theorem, the key factor that makes biological evolution open-ended and prevents us from being able to express it in a self-contained and all-encompassing phase space is that it is self-referential: The appearance of new actors in the space feeds back on those already there to create new possibilities for action. This isn't the case for physical systems, which, even if they have, say, millions of stars in a galaxy, are not self-referential. 'An increase in complexity provides the future potential to find new strategies unavailable to simpler organisms,' said Marcus Heisler, a plant developmental biologist at the University of Sydney and co-author of the incompleteness paper. This connection between biological evolution and the issue of noncomputability, Davies said, 'goes right to the heart of what makes life so magical.' Is biology special, then, among evolutionary processes in having an open-endedness generated by self-reference? Hazen thinks that in fact once complex cognition is added to the mix—once the components of the system can reason, choose, and run experiments 'in their heads'—the potential for macro-micro feedback and open-ended growth is even greater. 'Technological applications take us way beyond Darwinism,' he said. A watch gets made faster if the watchmaker is not blind. Back to the Bench If Hazen and colleagues are right that evolution involving any kind of selection inevitably increases functional information—in effect, complexity—does this mean that life itself, and perhaps consciousness and higher intelligence, is inevitable in the universe? That would run counter to what some biologists have thought. The eminent evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr believed that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence was doomed because the appearance of humanlike intelligence is 'utterly improbable.' After all, he said, if intelligence at a level that leads to cultures and civilizations were so adaptively useful in Darwinian evolution, how come it only arose once across the entire tree of life? Mayr's evolutionary point possibly vanishes in the jump to humanlike complexity and intelligence, whereupon the whole playing field is utterly transformed. Humans attained planetary dominance so rapidly (for better or worse) that the question of when it will happen again becomes moot. Illustration: Irene Pérez for Quanta Magazine But what about the chances of such a jump happening in the first place? If the new 'law of increasing functional information' is right, it looks as though life, once it exists, is bound to get more complex by leaps and bounds. It doesn't have to rely on some highly improbable chance event. What's more, such an increase in complexity seems to imply the appearance of new causal laws in nature that, while not incompatible with the fundamental laws of physics governing the smallest component parts, effectively take over from them in determining what happens next. Arguably we see this already in biology: Galileo's (apocryphal) experiment of dropping two masses from the Leaning Tower of Pisa no longer has predictive power when the masses are not cannonballs but living birds. Together with the chemist Lee Cronin of the University of Glasgow, Sara Walker of Arizona State University has devised an alternative set of ideas to describe how complexity arises, called assembly theory. In place of functional information, assembly theory relies on a number called the assembly index, which measures the minimum number of steps required to make an object from its constituent ingredients. 'Laws for living systems must be somewhat different than what we have in physics now,' Walker said, 'but that does not mean that there are no laws.' But she doubts that the putative law of functional information can be rigorously tested in the lab. 'I am not sure how one could say [the theory] is right or wrong, since there is no way to test it objectively,' she said. 'What would the experiment look for? How would it be controlled? I would love to see an example, but I remain skeptical until some metrology is done in this area.' Hazen acknowledges that, for most physical objects, it is impossible to calculate functional information even in principle. Even for a single living cell, he admits, there's no way of quantifying it. But he argues that this is not a sticking point, because we can still understand it conceptually and get an approximate quantitative sense of it. Similarly, we can't calculate the exact dynamics of the asteroid belt because the gravitational problem is too complicated—but we can still describe it approximately enough to navigate spacecraft through it. Wong sees a potential application of their ideas in astrobiology. One of the curious aspects of living organisms on Earth is that they tend to make a far smaller subset of organic molecules than they could make given the basic ingredients. That's because natural selection has picked out some favored compounds. There's much more glucose in living cells, for example, than you'd expect if molecules were simply being made either randomly or according to their thermodynamic stability. So one potential signature of lifelike entities on other worlds might be similar signs of selection outside what chemical thermodynamics or kinetics alone would generate. (Assembly theory similarly predicts complexity-based biosignatures.) There might be other ways of putting the ideas to the test. Wong said there is more work still to be done on mineral evolution, and they hope to look at nucleosynthesis and computational 'artificial life.' Hazen also sees possible applications in oncology, soil science and language evolution. For example, the evolutionary biologist Frédéric Thomas of the University of Montpellier in France and colleagues have argued that the selective principles governing the way cancer cells change over time in tumors are not like those of Darwinian evolution, in which the selection criterion is fitness, but more closely resemble the idea of selection for function from Hazen and colleagues. Hazen's team has been fielding queries from researchers ranging from economists to neuroscientists, who are keen to see if the approach can help. 'People are approaching us because they are desperate to find a model to explain their system,' Hazen said. But whether or not functional information turns out to be the right tool for thinking about these questions, many researchers seem to be converging on similar questions about complexity, information, evolution (both biological and cosmic), function and purpose, and the directionality of time. It's hard not to suspect that something big is afoot. There are echoes of the early days of thermodynamics, which began with humble questions about how machines work and ended up speaking to the arrow of time, the peculiarities of living matter, and the fate of the universe. Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.
CNN
a day ago
- CNN
AI analysis of ancient handwriting gives new age estimates for Dead Sea Scrolls
Many of the Dead Sea Scrolls, some of the most widely known archaeological finds of all time, may be older than once thought, according to a new study. The fresh analysis, which paired radiocarbon dating with artificial intelligence, determined some of the biblical manuscripts date to about 2,300 years ago, when their presumed authors lived, said Mladen Popović, lead author of the report published Wednesday in the journal PLOS One. Bedouin shepherds first spotted the scrolls by chance in the Judaean Desert, near the Dead Sea, in 1947. Archaeologists then recovered thousands of fragments belonging to hundreds of manuscripts from 11 caves, all near the site of Khirbat Qumran in what is now the West Bank. 'The Dead Sea Scrolls were extremely important when they were discovered, because they completely changed the way we think about ancient Judaism and early Christianity,' said Popović, who is also dean of the Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. 'Out of around 1,000 manuscripts, a bit more than 200 are what we call biblical Old Testament, and they are the oldest copies we have of the Hebrew Bible. They gave us a lot of information about what the text looked like back then.' The scrolls are like a time machine, according to Popović, because they let scholars see what people were reading, writing and thinking at the time. 'They are physical, tangible evidence of a period of history that is crucial — whether you're Christian, Jewish or don't believe at all, because the Bible is one of the most influential books in the history of the world, so the scrolls allow us to study it as a form of cultural evolution,' he said. Almost none of the Dead Sea Scrolls — which were written mostly in Hebrew on parchment and papyrus — have dates on them. Based primarily on paleography, the study and deciphering of ancient writing and manuscripts, scholars have believed the manuscripts range from the third century BC to the second century AD. 'But now, with our project, we have to date some manuscripts already to the end of the fourth century BCE,' he said, meaning that the earliest scrolls could be up to 100 years older than previously thought. 'That's really exciting because it opens up new possibilities to think about how these texts were written and how they moved to other users and readers — outside of their original authors and their social circles,' Popović added. The findings will not only inspire further studies and affect historical reconstructions, according to the authors of the report, but will also unlock new prospects in the analysis of historical manuscripts. Earlier estimates of the manuscripts' age came from radiocarbon dating conducted in the 1990s. Chemist Willard Libby developed this method — used to ascertain the age of organic materials — in the late 1940s at the University of Chicago. Also known as carbon 14 dating, a chemical analysis of a sample, such as a fossil or manuscript, determines the quantity of carbon 14 atoms it contains. All living organisms absorb this element, but it starts to decay as soon as death occurs, so looking at how much is left can give a fairly accurate age of an organic specimen as old as about 60,000 years. Carbon dating has downsides, however. The analyzed sample is destroyed during the process, and some results can be misleading. 'The problem with earlier tests (on the scrolls) is that they didn't address the issue of castor oil,' Popović said. 'Castor oil is a modern invention, and it was used in the 1950s by the original scholars to make the text more legible. But it's a modern contaminant, and it skews the radiocarbon result to a much more modern date.' The study team first used new radiocarbon dating, applying more modern techniques, on 30 manuscripts, which revealed that most of them were older than previously thought. Only two were younger. The researchers then used high-resolution images of these newly dated documents to train an AI they developed, called Enoch after the Biblical figure who was the father of Methuselah. The scientists presented Enoch with more documents they had carbon-dated, but withheld the dating information, and the AI correctly guessed the age 85% of the time, according to Popović. 'In a number of cases, the AI even gave a narrower date range for the manuscripts than the carbon 14 did,' he said. Next, Popović and his colleagues fed Enoch more images from 135 different Dead Sea Scrolls that were not carbon-dated and asked the AI to estimate their age. The scientists rated the results as 'realistic' or 'unrealistic,' based on their own paleographic experience, and found that Enoch had given realistic results on 79% of the samples. Some of the manuscripts in the study were found to be 50 to 100 years older than formerly thought, Popović said. One sample from a scroll known to contain verse from the Book of Daniel was once believed to date to the second century BC. 'That was a generation after the original author,' Popović said, 'and now with the carbon 14, we securely move it (further back) to the time of the author.' Another manuscript, with verses from the Book of Ecclesiastes, also dates older, Popović added. 'The manuscript was previously dated on paleographic grounds to 175 to 125 BCE, but now Enoch suggests 300 to 240 BCE,' he said. Eventually, artificial intelligence could supplant carbon 14 as a method of dating manuscripts, Popović suggested. 'Carbon 14 is destructive,' he said, 'because you need to cut off a little piece of the Dead Sea Scroll, and then it's gone. It's only 7 milligrams, but it's still stuff that you lose. With Enoch, you don't have to do any of this. This a first step. There are all sorts of possibilities to improve Enoch further.' If the team pushes forward with Enoch's development, Popović believes it could be used to assess scripts such as Syriac, Arabic, Greek and Latin. Scholars who were not involved with the study were encouraged by the findings. Having both AI and an enhanced carbon 14 dating method allows a level of calibration across both methodologies that is helpful, according to Charlotte Hempel, a professor of Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. 'The pronounced pattern seems to be that AI offers a narrower window within the Carbon 14 window,' she said via email. 'I wonder whether this suggests a higher level of precision, which would be extremely exciting.' The study represents a first attempt to harness AI technology to extend existing scientific knowledge from carbon 14 dating of certain manuscripts to other manuscripts, said Lawrence H. Schiffman, Global Distinguished Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. 'To some extent, it is not yet clear whether or not the new method will provide us with reliable information on texts that have not yet been Carbon-14 dated,' he added via email. 'The interesting comments regarding revision of the dating of some manuscripts that may be expected through further development of this approach or new carbon-14 dating, while not new to this study, constitute a very important observation about the field of Dead Sea Scrolls in general.' Commenting on the computational aspects of the study, Brent Seales, the Alumni Professor of Computer Science at the University of Kentucky, said the approach taken by the authors seems rigorous even if the sample sizes are small. Using AI to completely replace carbon dating may be premature, however. '(AI) is a useful tool to incorporate into the broader picture, and to make estimates in the absence of Carbon-14 based on the witness of other similar fragments,' Seales wrote in an email. 'Like everything with machine learning, and like a fine wine, it should get better over time and with more samples. The dating of ancient manuscripts is an extremely difficult problem, with sparse data and heavy constraints on access and expertise. Bravo to the team for this data-driven contribution that takes a massive step forward.'
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Science news this week: 'City-killer' asteroid swarms and a buried toddler 'Ice Prince'
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. This week's science news started off with a bang as Europe's largest active volcano erupted Monday morning (June 2), spewing ash and black smoke around 21,300 feet (6,500 meters) into the air and sending tourists scrambling. Italy's Mount Etna towers over nearby Catania, whose metro area is home to more than 1 million people, and officials have warned those nearest the eruption that gas and smog from the eruption can cause respiratory problems and other health issues. And speaking of explosions, a very public feud erupted between Elon Musk and President Trump on Thursday afternoon (June 5). The social media spat culminated in Musk threatening to decommission SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft "immediately," raising concerns over the future of America's space industry. A hidden swarm of large space rocks around Venus could pose a threat to our planet one day, new research suggests. All 20 "city-killer" asteroids are thought to be wider than 460 feet (140 m), meaning they could wipe out a heavily populated area if they were to impact our planet. These asteroids currently pose no threat to Earth. However, if they get too close to Earth's gravitational field, that could potentially set them on a collision course with our planet. Discover more space news —Ginormous planet discovered around tiny red star challenges our understanding of solar systems —NASA spacecraft finds solar 'cannonballs' may have stripped Mars of its water — proving decades-old theory —Long, dark 'streaks' spotted on Mars aren't what scientists thought Leopards and jaguars are hard to distinguish at first glance: Both are large predators with similar builds and black and tan spots. Although similar in appearance, leopards and jaguars separated from their common ancestor between 3.6 million and 2.5 million years ago and live on opposite sides of the globe. So how can you tell them apart? Archaeologists have uncovered the 1,350-year-old remains of an 18-month-old toddler with bright-blue eyes. The youngster was buried with rare riches, including a small sword, silk clothes, a gold cross and a piglet. The child, who is thought to have died between A.D. 670 and 680, was dubbed the "Ice Prince" because the archaeologists who found the remains froze the burial chamber to excavate its contents in a single block. An analysis revealed the boy had died from a "chronic infection" in his middle ear, and the lavish treasures surrounding his body suggest he was from a wealthy and important family. Discover more archaeology news —Prosciutto di Portici: A portable sundial that looks like a pork leg — and it was likely owned by Julius Caesar's father-in-law before Mount Vesuvius erupted —Ancient DNA reveals mysterious Indigenous group from Colombia that disappeared 2,000 years ago —Braided gold Viking arm ring discovered by amateur metal detectorist on Isle of Man —Facing steep funding cuts, scientists propose using black holes as particle colliders instead of building new ones on Earth —Mysterious 'mega-tsunamis' that shook the entire world for 9 days revealed by satellite —Nuclear fusion record smashed as German scientists take 'a significant step forward' to near-limitless clean energy —College student discovers psychedelic fungus that eluded LSD inventor Scientists at NASA are developing plans to build a giant radio telescope in an enormous crater on the far side of the moon. The $2 billion project aims to help unravel some of the universe's biggest mysteries, but it could also act as a backup telescope in case leaking radiation from private satellite "megaconstellations" becomes too disruptive for radio instruments here on Earth. The proposed telescope would be built entirely by robots in a 0.8-mile-wide (1.3 km) depression in the moon's Northern hemisphere, although NASA are keeping its exact location under wraps. If approved, the Lunar Crater Radio Telescope could be constructed as early as the 2030s — but it won't actually be the first ever radio telescope on the moon. If you're looking for something a little longer to read over the weekend, here are some of the best long reads, book excerpts and interviews published this week. —'Foolhardy at best, and deceptive and dangerous at worst': Don't believe the hype — here's why artificial general intelligence isn't what the billionaires tell you it is (Book excerpt) —10 weird and wonderful things to look at under a microscope (Countdown) —Can adults grow new brain cells? (Query) And something for the skywatchers. 'Strawberry Moon' 2025: June's full moon is about to break an annual record Wild cockatoos in Western Sydney have learned a clever trick to access water from public drinking fountains. The twist-handle faucets are no easy feat to turn on, requiring fine motor skills in a coordinated sequence of actions — not something a bird would stumble across by accident. The birds use both of their feet to manipulate the twist handle, then lower their body weight to turn it clockwise and keep it from springing back. The cockatoos have become such fans of the fountains that they will even wait in line to have a drink, in what researchers believe now qualifies as a new local tradition. Want more science news? Follow our Live Science WhatsApp Channel for the latest discoveries as they happen. It's the best way to get our expert reporting on the go, but if you don't use WhatsApp, we're also on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Flipboard, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky and LinkedIn.
