It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Two-thirds of a century after Jane Goodall observed ‘David Greybeard’ break off a twig to fashion a fishing rod for termites, researchers following in her footsteps have found that adult chimpanzees in Senegal literally hand youngsters the tools for learning.
Darwin noted in 1871 that chimpanzees use stones to crack nuts, striking a blow to human hubris. Over the 20th century, a select few animals as diverse as octopuses and parrots have been observed making and using tools. But in agreement with Darwin’s observation, tool use seems to have evolved more frequently among monkeys and apes. For example, chimpanzees are known to manufacture leaf sponges to soak up liquids, shape sticks to fish for algae, and sharpen simple spears for hunting.
“Here we show that receiving food and tools from experienced individuals, which we call food or tool transfer, may help chimpanzees learn to use technology to extract foods that are difficult to access,” said Andreu Sánchez-Megías, a PhD candidate at the University of Barcelona and the Jane Goodall Institute Spain in Senegal, who is the first author of a new study in Frontiers in Psychology.
“Tool transfers thus appear to be a form of teaching, together with observation and supervised practice. It appears that mothers are the main models and teachers for young chimpanzees in this manner.”
Share and share alike
Sánchez-Megías and colleagues from the Jane Goodall Institute Spain in Senegal and the University of Barcelona studied wild western chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) at the savanna site of Dindefelo, Senegal. They analyzed almost 15 hours of footage from camera traps taken between 2017 and 2025. The traps had been deliberately installed at 14 spots where chimpanzees were known to use tools, including fishing for algae, army ants, and fungus-growing termites. They also gathered 30 minutes of footage from cameras at 11 sites where chimpanzees habitually carry baobab fruit, which they pound against stationary stone ‘anvils’. While termite fishing and ant dipping occur in communities of all four chimpanzee subspecies across Africa, fishing for algae and ‘baobab pounding’ are known only from western chimpanzees in Senegal, Mali, and Guinea.
Overall, the authors recorded 33 instances of tool transfer from one chimpanzee to another, as well as four where they handed over fruit. The researchers compared the behavior before and after these donations, from both the initial ‘possessors’ and the ‘recipients’ to whom the first handed these objects.
Of the 33 transfers observed, 58% happened in the context of ant dipping, while 30% and 12% took place during algae fishing and termite fishing, respectively. Most (58%) of the original owners were adults, especially females. In contrast, the greatest percentage (42%) of the recipients were infants rather than youngsters or adults. The majority of objects were handed over from one relative to another, most frequently (30%) by mother to her offspring. All but one voluntary transfer seemed to happen at the recipient’s initiative. In some cases, tools and fruit were stolen outright, in which case the unlucky possessor might hit the thief to retaliate or grab the object back.
Unique footage of newly discovered behavior
Importantly, the authors presented two fascinating videos – respectively of ant dipping and baobab pounding – in their study, which for the first time allow other scientists and the general public to watch how such seemingly deliberate ‘technological transfers’ proceed in Dindefelo chimpanzees.
In the first, taken in 2018, mother Soukki deliberately inserted a dipping stick into an ant colony, grabbed her baby daughter Saïsaï, and led it to the ready-to-be-extracted tool. Saïsaï then pulled it from the nest and went on to eat the ants sticking to it. In the second video from 2021, mother Féré collected three fruits. An unidentified juvenile male ‘teacher’ then approached, who proceeded to pick up one fruit and repeatedly pound it against a rocky outcrop, then guided Fotti’s hand to it once. The video shows clearly how Fotti attentively observed the juvenile’s movements and proceeded to try his hand at pounding for himself – eventually with success.
The authors found that the majority of tool transfers took place from skilled to inexperienced individuals, including mothers-offspring pairs and other relatives.
“Teaching is one of the strategies that chimpanzees use to transfer information and skills between individuals. It requires an active role from the teacher, who must modify their behavior to facilitate the transmission of information to the learner, and this is why teaching is thought to have evolved to transfer information that is too complex to be acquired through simpler mechanisms, such as individual or observational learning,” summarized Sánchez-Megías.
”One question that needs to be answered is the extent to which teaching contributes to the transmission of technological behaviors in great apes. Other questions are whether more complex behaviors require more teaching, and whether the individuals that receive more teaching ultimately become better teachers themselves,” said Prof R. Adriana Hernandez-Aguilar, the study’s senior author and the research co-director of the Jane Goodall Institute Spain, as well as Serra Hunter Professor at the University of Barcelona.
Savanna chimpanzee tool and fruit transfers facilitate the transmission of technological behaviors at Dindefelo, Senegal
Article Publication Date
16-Sep-2026
COI Statement
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest
Credit: Mohsen Mahmoudi-Dehaki and Nasim Nasr-Esfahani
Knowing English involves more than knowing the right words and grammar. Effective communication also requires understanding how language changes according to the people involved, the situation, and the cultural context. A new study suggests that immersive virtual reality (VR) can help English teachers develop this often-overlooked dimension of language use.
The study, Socio-Culturally Responsive VR Training for Enhancing English Teachers' Pragmatic Competence, found that teachers who participated in a 108-hour immersive VR training program showed statistically significant improvements in pragmatic competence, including both their ability to use appropriate linguistic forms and their ability to respond appropriately to social and cultural expectations.
The research, conducted by Mohsen Mahmoudi-Dehaki and Nasim Nasr-Esfahani, was first published online on August 27, 2026, in ECNU Review of Education.
Pragmatic competence is the ability to use language appropriately in real-world situations. A request, refusal, apology, or complaint, for example, can be expressed in many grammatically correct ways, but the most appropriate choice depends on factors such as social relationships, power, distance, and cultural expectations.
For teachers in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) contexts, developing this competence can be challenging because opportunities for authentic interaction may be limited. While classroom instruction can explain pragmatic rules, providing repeated opportunities to practice context-sensitive communication in realistic situations is more difficult.
To investigate whether immersive technology could help address this challenge, the researchers employed a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design involving 122 randomly selected EFL teachers. Participants completed verbal discourse completion tasks (DCTs) before and after the training, allowing the researchers to assess changes in pragmatic competence. Focus group interviews were then used to explore participants' experiences and help explain the quantitative findings.
The 108-hour intervention used fully immersive VR simulations featuring artificial intelligence (AI)-driven avatars. The simulations incorporated diverse sociocultural scenarios as well as different speech acts, power relations, and levels of social distance. The intervention followed a human-on-the-loop (HOTL) approach, maintaining human involvement in the AI-supported learning process.
Following the training, participants demonstrated statistically significant improvements in pragmatic competence. The gains were evident in two key dimensions: pragmalinguistic accuracy, or the ability to select and use appropriate linguistic forms, and sociopragmatic appropriateness, or the ability to respond appropriately to the social and cultural expectations of a situation.
The qualitative findings provided further insight into these improvements. Participants identified immersive engagement, real-time adaptive feedback, increased communicative confidence, greater metapragmatic awareness, and reflective practice as important aspects of the VR experience.
These findings suggest that the value of the VR intervention was not simply that teachers were practicing English in a virtual environment. Rather, the simulations created opportunities for participants to make communicative choices within sociocultural situations, receive adaptive feedback, and reflect on why particular choices were appropriate in context.
“Pragmatic competence is not simply a matter of knowing what a particular expression means,” claim Mohsen Mahmoudi-Dehaki and Nasim Nasr-Esfahani. “Teachers also need to understand how their linguistic choices interact with social relationships, cultural expectations, and the context of an interaction. Our findings suggest that immersive VR can create meaningful opportunities to practice these context-sensitive choices through interaction, feedback, and reflection.”
A distinctive feature of the study is its integration of AI-driven interaction with a socio-culturally responsive approach. Rather than using VR solely to reproduce conventional language exercises, the intervention incorporated sociocultural dimensions of communication, including speech acts, power relations, and social distance.
The researchers emphasize that VR is not a replacement for human interaction or conventional teacher education. Instead, immersive technology may provide an additional environment for professional learning, particularly in EFL contexts where opportunities for authentic interaction may be constrained.
Further research is needed to determine whether improvements in pragmatic competence are sustained over time and how effectively skills developed in immersive simulations transfer to teachers’ real-world professional and classroom interactions.
The findings contribute to research on technology-enhanced language teacher education by demonstrating the potential of immersive, AI-supported environments to support the development of English teachers’ pragmatic competence. They also highlight the importance of combining technological innovation with sociocultural awareness, adaptive feedback, and reflective practice when designing professional learning experiences.
A rendered third-person view of the VR scenarios developed for the socio-culturally responsive VR intervention described in the study.
Douglas Seiler painstakingly sourced papyrus and reed pens from Egypt and traditional lampblack ink from Japan, then paid some high school students to inscribe the papyrus with lines from “Star Wars” and the Bible and a quote from the ‘60s sci-fi TV show “The Outer Limits.”
Seiler, an affiliate of Berkeley SETI, then rolled up the papyrus, placed it in a container inside a high-temperature furnace and burned it to a crisp.
The procedure replicated what happened to more than a thousand papyrus scrolls in a library in the Italian city of Herculaneum, when ash from Mount Vesuvius inundated the city in 79 C.E. and turned ancient learning — some likely unknown today — into brittle, carbonized husks. The eruption, which also buried nearby Pompeii, preserved for posterity the only known intact library from antiquity.
Seiler’s goal was to determine whether it’s possible to read the text on carbonized scrolls without unrolling them and reducing them to black dust. The key, he hypothesized, was that inks that contain lead would stand out when a scroll is scanned by an X-ray beam, and that computer algorithms could virtually unroll the scroll to reveal the hidden text.
In a paper published today (Sept. 16) in the journal PLOS ONE, Seiler and his collaborators, including a range of Berkeley experts, report that even minuscule amounts of lead in the ink make the letters readable by X-ray tomography, or X-ray CT. The lead absorbs up to 25 times the X-rays absorbed by the charred papyrus, making the inked letters stand out.
“With lead in the ink, you would get a huge friggin' signature, so you really need to be looking for scrolls with lead in them,” Seiler said. “They're having problems reading a lot of them because of the low contrast of carbon ink on carbon paper. We're relatively certain that if they start searching for lead, or they let us search for lead, it will help this whole process. This is the Holy Grail.”
In the paper, the researchers also showed that an inexpensive handheld X-ray fluorescence scanner can easily detect leaded ink in a burned scroll, providing a simple way to identify those scrolls that would be more easily deciphered using X-ray CT.
To date, only a few charred scrolls from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum have been virtually unrolled and read and none of them were tested for leaded ink. Though no one has systematically looked for leaded ink in the scrolls, at least one researcher found lead in the ink of a fragment that remained from earlier efforts to physically unroll some of them. Most of those attempts followed the scrolls’ discovery in 1752, but when unrolling mostly produced heaps of ashes, the Italian authorities called a halt to such efforts.
Of those physically unrolled, all have been texts unknown to scholars, many of them written by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus, who lived in Herculaneum a century before the Vesuvius eruption. Currently, what remains of the library’s 1,800 or so scrolls and scroll fragments are housed in Italy, France and England.
“Almost everything from antiquity has been destroyed,” Seiler said. “There's very little left except papyrus that was in a dry climate or some works that were copied by scribes and transferred down. But some of the Herculaneum scrolls aren't copies. These are books directly from the ancient world frozen in time. They’re actually from Roman intellectual circles.”
“The value in this project is practically unquantifiable,” said Berkeley archaeology graduate student Leah Packard-Grams, who consulted on the project as a papyrologist. “The stakes are the largest in the history of Greek literature.”
As someone enamored of the ancient Greek and Roman world, Packard-Grams mourns the many lost works of philosophy, science and literature that disintegrated before they could be copied for posterity. She is now translating Greek and Egyptian writing on ancient papyri housed at UC Berkeley in the Center for the Tebtunis Papyri in the Bancroft Library. Unlike the Herculaneum papyri, these were preserved in the dry sands of Egypt. One set of fragments was written by a man named Dionysios, a school teacher and scribe-for-hire, who recorded his mundane daily activities, down to the costs of food he bought for his children along the canal.
“This is what drew me to papyrology — that I could read the words of ancient people not through a library book or through a Renaissance copy but actually sit down and know that someone wrote this letter to whomever, his father or something,” she said. “It's autograph history — not just from a book, but from what they were actually writing.”
Lucky for Seiler, Packard-Grams has studied the ink chemistry of Egyptian papyri in Berkeley’s collection. She has hopes that the composition of ink — traditionally made from soot, water and a binder like gum Arabic — can provide a signature allowing her to identify the author of a specific text. Any metals in the ink, accidental or purposely added, would help in this identification.
The Tebtunis papyri are fragments of scrolls dating from between 300 B.C.E. and 300 C.E. and were excavated for UC Berkeley 126 years ago at the site of the ancient city of Tebtunis. Using a hand-held X-ray fluorescence scanner, Packard-Grams confirmed that some of these scrolls — generally those inscribed after the first century C.E. — are written with ink containing lead and/or copper. That bodes well for finding lead in some of the Herculaneum scrolls.
“If we know that the Herculaneum papyri have lead in them — some of them do, some of them don't — then when they take the CT scan, they can scan it with a sensitivity for the element lead and we can see where the ink is,” she said. “As you unroll it, you can map the letters a lot more clearly.”
Seiler also tapped the expertise of retired Berkeley chemists David Kreimer and Elena Kreimer, a retired manager of the College of Chemistry’s Microanalytical Facility. With their help, he added calibrated amounts of lead — in the form of lead nitrate — to lampblack ink to get samples with different lead concentrations. Seiler asked the children of friends to write passages on a new papyrus scroll using traditional reed pens and the various lead-spiked inks. Packard-Grams and Jesse Obert of the Archaeological Research Facility scanned these newly created scrolls to confirm the lead concentration of the inks used to inscribe the papyrus.
Seiler then carbonized the scrolls in his home lab by placing them inside a semi-sealed steel container containing very little oxygen and heating it in a high temperature furnace. Using his connections at the Space Sciences Laboratory, Seiler was able to find and enlist the help of Jake LaManna, a physicist at the Center for Neutron Research at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland. LaManna gladly created a 3D X-ray CT scan of the charred scroll with the center’s laboratory X-ray source.
“It’s the first scroll I've ever done,” he said. “I don't tend to say no to interesting projects.”
LaManna jury-rigged a stand for the charred scroll and rotated it in an X-ray beam, recording thousands of slices that were turned by computer into a 3D rendering. Because lead absorbs more X-rays, the leaded ink stood out as bright spots against the darker paper, like an underexposed portion of a black-and-white negative. Ink with a lead concentration as low as 25 micrograms per square centimeter was easily detected both by X-ray CT and X-ray fluorescence.
“If you look at the images, the letters lit up like a Christmas tree,” Seiler said.
Coincidentally, a postdoctoral fellow at NIST, Michael Cyrus Daugherty, had developed a program to unroll CT scans of the “jelly rolls” inside lithium-ion batteries, and LaManna asked if that algorithm would work with the scrolls.
“He got excited and ran off with the data and within a couple of days and after just a couple little tweaks to his program, he came back with examples of the scroll unrolled,” LaManna said. “He just had to tweak his code to follow the uneven and changing thickness along the length of the scroll.”
The Vesuvius Challenge
In 2009, Brent Seales at the University of Kentucky was the first to take micro-CT scans of a Herculaneum scroll — one owned by the Institut de France — and in 2015 he revealed a successful digital unrolling of a charred scroll from a synagogue that burned in about 600 C.E.
With that success and the consent of Italy, Seales and some venture capitalists launched the Vesuvius Challenge in 2023, promising a $700,000 Grand Prize to the first person to decipher four passages of at least 140 characters each from two Herculaneum scrolls that had been scanned by X-ray CT. It took only five months for two people working independently to decipher the first word: πορφύραc, Greek for purple. They used AI.
In 2024, the same team employed AI to decipher 15 full columns — less than one-tenth of a Herculaneum scroll that belongs to the Institut de France. It turned out to be an Epicurean philosophical treatise concerning per
AI again came to the rescue in 2026, when Seales’ team decoded the remains of a Herculaneum scroll, PHerc. 1667, that people had tried to unroll and had instead nearly destroyed. It appears to be a commentary on the philosophy of the ancient Greek Stoics and may date from the second or third century B.C.E., making it perhaps one of the oldest of the Herculaneum scrolls.
All of these texts were detected by virtually unrolling the scrolls and then using machine learning to look for subtle texture or morphological differences associated with the ink — an extremely faint signal.
Finding lead in the ink would be a game changer. LaManna estimates that leaded ink is up to 25 times brighter than the papyrus on X-ray CT scans.
Seiler holds out hope that X-ray fluorescence scanning of the scrolls will turn up many with leaded ink, which could then be scanned by X-ray CT to reveal many more texts, advancing the work done by Seales and his collaborators.
“What I would like to see and what I'd like to do is a much more rigorous study into the ink concentrations or what's in the ink, not just lead,” LaManna said. “And see how far we could push this into making training data sets to actually make more robust algorithms for reading the real ones.”
Model scrolls provide a low-risk method to develop algorithms without endangering the priceless artifacts, the researchers said.
“Doug had a really great idea scientifically with creating a model,” Packard-Grams said. “Why? Because if you hurt a model, it's fine. If you hurt a 2,300 year old ancient artifact, you'll have a bunch of archeologists ready to jump you. Not to mention me jump you!”
Seiler’s not sure where his research will go from here. He took up the project on a whim, having heard about the scrolls while working with Berkeley SETI on a new telescope called Panoseti, which will search for laser signals from intelligent life in the galaxy. Now retired, he previously made a living in real estate and banking and as an inventor.
“Honestly, getting here is, for me, just as unique as our research,” he said. “I mean, inorganic chemistry, papyrus, X-ray tomography, AI — it's really quite an eclectic group of scientists and methodology to get to the point that yes, if there's lead in those scrolls, you guys will be able to read the images much better. I'll give you 10 to 1 odds. We’d like it to be our team, but if some other team is going to take this idea — which is okay — we don't care.”
“Following Douglas' progress on the scroll project has been fascinating,” said Karl van Bibber, a Berkeley professor of nuclear engineering who served as Seiler’s informal advisor on everything from X-ray imaging to the ins and outs of scientific publishing. “One might be tempted to imagine the 'gentleman scientist' as a bygone era, but it's alive and well here in Berkeley.”
Seiler, who funded the research, is first author of the paper. His co-authors are LaManna, Daugherty, David Kreimer, Michael McOsker of University College London and Jens Dopke of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the United Kingdom.
a) One of several papyrus scrolls before carbonization and (b) after carbonization. Carbonized scroll produced with tight packing of layers and waviness that will challenge unrolling algorithms.
Credit: Seiler et al., 2026, PLOS One, CC0 (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)
X-ray technology and artificial intelligence — along with the discovery of lead in the ink of fragments of a collection of ancient Roman scrolls — could soon help scientists read long-lost texts buried by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE, according to a study published September 16, 2026, in the open access journal PLOS One by Douglas Seiler, an affiliate of the University of California Berkeley, USA, Jacob Michael LaManna from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, USA, David Kreimer from University of California Berkeley, USA, and colleagues.
The Herculaneum papyri scrolls were discovered in the ruins of the town of Herculaneum, near Naples, Italy. During the volcanic eruption, the scrolls were covered by 65-70 feet of rock and ash, “carbonizing” them in the extreme heat and making them very brittle. While some of the scrolls have been opened and read, revealing previously unknown writings by Epicurus and other ancient thinkers, many have proven too fragile to study.
Recently, AI and x-ray tomography have allowed researchers to virtually “unroll” some of the scrolls and read some of the text. That said, x-rays can have a hard time distinguishing the text since the ink and papyrus are made of similar materials, carbon. But some of the Herculaneum scroll letters have been found to contain lead. Since x-rays can more easily distinguish between papyrus and lead, the authors of this new paper suggest scanning the scrolls for lead and then attempting to virtually unroll those that contain lead.
To test this, the team recreated some carbonized scrolls by writing on new papyrus using ink with various concentrations of lead, then heating the scrolls in a high temperature furnace, carbonizing them. X-ray fluorescence was able to detect lead in the scrolls at each lead concentration level — and x-ray tomography, combined with a custom software program, allowed the team to re-read some of the words they had written on these scrolls.
These results demonstrate a new potential opportunity to finally read some of the more complex Herculaneum scrolls. In addition, the team’s method of recreating carbonized scrolls could help improve the “unrolling” algorithms. By knowing what’s written inside these recreated carbonized scrolls, researchers could train an algorithm to correctly decipher the text inside — possibly improving the algorithm’s success at reading ancient texts as well.
Douglas Seileradds: “It's amazing what you can get electrons to do.”
In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS One: https://plos.io/4cvYsci
Citation: Seiler D, LaManna JM, McOsker M, Kreimer D, Daugherty MC, Dopke J (2026) A model carbonized papyrus scroll opens a novel path to identifying readable scrolls of the Herculaneum Library. PLoS One 21(9): e0353485. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0353485
Author countries: USA, UK.
Funding: The work conducted at NIST, was funded (just use of equipment & staff) by the Department of Commerce, Radiation Physics Division, and the Center for Neutron Research.
