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)
Thursday, September 17, 2026
The Local Costs of Remote Sensing: Examining the Ethics of Laser Scanning in Tropical Forests
Laser scanning, often referred to as Lidar, has rapidly transformed how tropical forest regions are studied, monitored, and understood across academic disciplines. The technology enables researchers to peer through dense forest canopy, rapidly providing high resolution scans of the landscape below. This growing observational power is central to the scientific value of remote sensing technologies, but also brings into focus the conditions, interests, and power structures under which they are used.
Now in a new paper in Nature Ecology and Evolution, an international team of researchers argues that the visibility brought by high-resolution remote sensing may result in the loss of what have long been cultural refuges against dominant powers, and that ethical considerations should be integral to research planning when using such data.
“Remote sensing research has often been framed as a technical exercise to support more efficient management and observation,” says Patrick Roberts, director of the Department of Coevolution of Land Use and Urbanisation at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology (MPI GEA), and corresponding author of the study. “Yet, mapping is never only a technical practice, and decisions about what is revealed, how, where are inherently ethical and political.”
The new paper acknowledges the value of remote sensing but argues that while discipline-specific ethical discussions around the technology have occurred, they have tended to focus on technicalities of research and data presentation rather than whether and under what conditions to map. The authors organize these considerations into three broad areas:
Knowledge, access, and control – who decides when to map, why, and who controls the data?
Population rights, exposure and dispossession – how might this data be used to ‘expose’ communities, marginalized groups in society, or resources for extraction?
The material costs of seeing – how might the process of remote sensing, in turn, contribute to the climatic and environmental impacts it is seeking to prevent?
“These issues challenge us to think about the oft-promoted but simplistic idea of mapping ‘for the greater good,’” says Gabriel Hes of the University of Toulouse, lead author of the current paper. “Whose ‘greater good’ are we talking about and are forest mapping technologies reinforcing imbalances in knowledge production, political power and environmental impacts? In this paper, we urge our colleagues to reflect on the ethical costs of their methods, considering the potential intersectional impacts (on race, age, gender, wealth, class) of high-resolution mapping of tropical forests.”
“We are not arguing that remote sensing is inherently ‘bad’,” Roberts adds, “indeed it has been used by local communities to safeguard their territories and rights. Rather, we urge consideration by scientists of the varied ethical dimensions impacting their research whether they carry out mapping on local, regional or global scales.”
The authors conclude with a framework for helping researchers decide when mapping is inappropriate. In reframing environmental science as an asset for transformative change, they hope that these considerations will ensure that tropical forest mapping best serves the needs of those impacted most by the current global ecological crisis.
The authors looked at the foods sold in the UK by 44 major food and beverage manufacturers – that account for approximately 50% of the UK food retail market – and assigned scores for nutrition and sustainability per 100g to each product. They found significant variation in similar products between different manufacturers. For instance, a ready meal from one manufacturer might be much less nutritious and sustainable than a similar bar at another manufacturer.
The authors then looked at what might happen if the manufacturers swapped some of their least nutritious and sustainable products with products that had closer to average scores and found significant potential for improvement. And for many manufacturers, more than half the potential improvements were achieved by changing 10% or less of their product line.
Two well-known British supermarkets, whose own brands collectively account for 28.9% of sales value in this analysis, have some of the largest scope to improve their scores for both environment and nutrition, the authors find. But manufacturers with narrow product ranges, such as snack and energy drink manufacturers, generally have lower scope to improve their scores.
“Ours is the first study we are aware of to assess the capacity for food & beverage manufacturers to support nutrition and environmental sustainability through changes within their existing product portfolios,” explains lead author Eleanor Hammond, who conducted the research while working at the University of Oxford.
“If food systems are to transition to more nutritious and environmentally sustainable outcomes, food manufacturers are going to have to change the products they sell. This change can either be driven by food & beverage manufacturers, or imposed on them by government policy. Our findings show manufacturers can get a head start on this necessary transition by making small changes to their product portfolios today,” says co-author Dr Michael Clark, Associate Professor, Sustainable Food Solutions at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.
The timing of the study is significant as the UK Government is under pressure to bring forward legislation requiring mandatory reporting on the nutrition of UK food and beverage products. “Our study demonstrates how the UK Government could monitor both sustainability and nutritional outcomes together. It could also be used for ESG reporting and support regulatory frameworks such as the EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive,” says Dr Clark.
When education systems introduce a new test, school-evaluation framework, performance indicator, or accreditation procedure, the change may appear technical. Yet such tools do much more than implement decisions already made. Indeed, they define what counts as a policy problem, establish which knowledge is credible, allocate roles to different actors, and shape how schools and education systems are governed.
That is the central message of a new scoping review published online on August 1, 2026, in ECNU Review of Education. Luís Miguel Carvalho and Catarina Gonçalves, of the Institute of Education, University of Lisbon, examined 42 peer-reviewed articles published between 2005 and 2023. Their study maps research in the sociology of policy instruments in education and asks what this perspective reveals about contemporary policy and educational change.
The sociology of policy instruments treats instruments as both technical and social devices. Legislation, contracts, assessments, benchmarks, indicators, funding mechanisms, and communication platforms embody specific values and assumptions about the relationship between government, education professionals, learners, and society. Studying them therefore makes it possible to see how power operates through apparently technical and practical arrangements.
According to the literature reviewed, researchers have concentrated especially on performance-based instruments such as PISA, national large-scale assessments, school evaluation and self-evaluation, indicators, standards, and accreditation. This focus reflects a broader shift toward governance through comparison, data, and performance-oriented accountability. The review also finds growing attention to European education governance, global intergovernmental organizations, private companies, and intermediary actors working between national policy and local practice.
The authors organize existing knowledge around three dimensions: the institutional ideas embedded in instruments, the trajectories instruments follow as they are designed and used, and the effects they generate. Instruments do not simply travel unchanged from policymaking centers to schools. National traditions, political interests, professional identities, and local conditions can lead to adoption, opposition, hybridization, or the creation of new tools. Similar instruments may therefore take quite different forms in different systems.
The review identifies six recurring effects. Instruments can legitimize certain actors and coalitions, reorganize political spaces and timelines, privilege certain forms of knowledge and expertise, gather actors around common issues, produce hybrid policies when several tools and governing logics interact, and generate unintended consequences. For example, comparative assessments may strengthen the authority of international organizations and structure national debate, while indicators designed to inform policy can become simplified rankings. Performance tools intended to encourage innovation may also intensify supervision or standardize practice.
“Studies on policy instruments are well suited to address the complexity of education policy: the multiple policy scales as interdependent contexts, the variety of individual and collective actors involved, and the various governance patterns, ranging from state-oriented to market-oriented regimes, and from norm-based governance patterns to performance-oriented ones”, said Carvalho and Gonçalves.
The study also identifies important gaps. The evidence base remains strongly centered on Europe, and researchers have paid less attention to combinations of multiple instruments. The authors call for a broader geo-cultural range of studies, clearer theoretical foundations, and more systematic explanations of why the same instrument follows different trajectories in different settings.
For policymakers and education leaders, the findings offer a practical caution: choosing a policy instrument is itself a political decision. A test, indicator, contract, or platform may affect not only whether a policy achieves its goals, but also what goals appear legitimate, who gains authority, and which realities remain visible or become obscured. For researchers, the review provides a map of a developing field and a framework for examining the complex links between technical devices, institutional change, and power in education.
A cotton trailer outfitted with benches and a sunshade offers farmworkers a reprieve from the sun as they take a break from picking cantaloupe melons in Firebaugh, Calif.
As the climate warms, people are more exposed to heat stress, which depresses their productivity and the global economy. A study from the University of California, Davis, quantifies the cost of heat stress on global labor.
Highly populated areas meeting critical thresholds for heat and humidity were particularly affected, the study found. This includes India, Nigeria, China and Pakistan, as well as countries in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa.
“Our study contributes to the body of evidence about what the real costs of climate change are,” said lead author Frances Moore, a professor in the UC Davis Department of Environmental Science and Policy. “Based on these new numbers, labor is the second-largest contributor to the total social cost of carbon, just behind heat-related deaths.”
The social cost of carbon and its value
The social cost of carbon, or SC-CO2, is the quantifiable cost of one additional ton of CO2 emissions. The measurement is highly relevant for policy decisions related to cost-benefit analyses, infrastructure planning, utility regulation and carbon taxes.
The study lends strong support for a social cost of carbon value of $200, a value similar to that estimated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2023. Current federal guidance does not recognize the metric and discourages monetizing the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions in regulatory analysis. However, the study states “we can confidently rule out a SC-CO2 of zero or below.”
“We’re getting better and better at evaluating climate damages,” Moore said. “We’re getting more confident in the social cost of carbon, and it is a metric that should be used. This number is ready to help inform good climate policy analysis.”
Heat stress varies by region, job, A/C access
To reach their findings, the authors combined projections from a heat stress metric called the “wet-bulb globe temperature” (WBGT) with job and region-specific estimates of work intensity and outdoor exposure across different economic sectors. WBGT captures the physical risks of hot temperatures by accounting for weather variables that influence the body’s ability to dissipate heat, including humidity and wind speed.
Exposure to heat stress by both indoor and outdoor workers varied across the globe depending on the local environment, strenuousness of the work and access to shade and air conditioning.
Agricultural and construction laborers are far more exposed to heat than office or service workers because they often perform strenuous, outdoor work. However, indoor workers with minimal or no air conditioning also are at risk. For example, a dataset of residential air conditioning adoption in 33 countries showed A/C penetration rates ranging from 0% in South Sudan to 90% in Japan.
In addition to air conditioning, more shade, water, breaks and shifting work to cooler hours of the day when possible can protect workers from heat stress.
“Heat is very dangerous,” Moore said. “Employers and policymakers need to be treating it as the real health hazard that it is and thinking seriously about ways to mitigate those damages because we’re going to keep seeing more frequent, more intense heat extremes.”
The study’s additional authors include Iman Haqiqi, Uris Baldos, Matthew Huber and Thomas Hertel of Purdue University; Qinqin Kong and Lisa Rennels of Stanford University and Hamsa Ganapathi of UC Davis.
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies Bass Fellowship, Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowship, National Institutes of Health, NASA, Stanford Energy Postdoctoral Fellowship and Precourt Institute for Energy.
A farmworker takes a drink of water while taking a break from harvesting cantaloupes in Firebaugh, Calif.
When policymakers and city officials plan for climate change, they rely on economic studies showing how extreme heat impacts violent crime, public health, energy grids and crop yields.
However, a new study published in the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economistsreveals a hidden problem in that research: the temperatures used in many climate-impact studies can contain substantial measurement error, leading researchers to misestimate the true impacts of temperature and, on average, potentially understate climate impacts by at least 15%.
The study, co-authored by Wake Forest Assistant Professor of Economics Alex Yu and Distinguished Professor of Economics Richard Carson (UC San Diego), demonstrates that standard methods researchers use to construct temperature measures can introduce substantial measurement error that varies systematically across locations and geography.
Why temperature measurement can be inaccurate
Because physical weather stations are miles apart, researchers use statistical estimates of temperatures in specific cities, neighborhoods or farm fields. The study reveals that these best guesses or “proxies” carry substantial measurement errors that traditional statistical assumptions fail to capture:
Microclimate blindspots: In mountainous regions like Boulder, Colorado, standard weather proxies differed from actual temperatures by an average of nearly 15°F. In flatter, more densely monitored areas like Chicago, errors were as low as 1°F.
Distorting the temperature signal: Measurement errors can persist over time and vary systematically with local geography. When researchers apply these estimated temperatures to real-world outcomes—such as crime or heat-related illnesses—the resulting estimates can be biased upward or downward.
Larger than climate targets: For one commonly used weather proxy—temperature measurement errors averaged 3.3°F(1.85°C)—an error magnitude larger than the global Paris Climate Agreement warming limit of 1.5°C.
What this means for public policy
Using more than 20 million crime records, the researchers first estimated the relationship between extreme heat and violent crime using city-level crime and temperature data as a benchmark. They then aggregated both crime and temperature to the county level and estimated the same relationship, finding that the estimated effect of extreme heat became smaller at this coarser geographic scale.
"If climate-impact studies misestimate how severely extreme heat drives crime rates, crop loss, or health emergencies, policymakers may also misestimate the scale of the responses needed to address those impacts," said Yu.
Improving temperature measurement
The research doesn't just expose the problem; it provides practical guidance for researchers. No single temperature proxy works best everywhere: in areas with dense weather-station networks, nearby station measurements can outperform more complex gridded products, while gridded data may perform better where monitoring is sparse.
More broadly, the study highlights the value of better spatial monitoring of temperature. Expanding and maintaining dense weather-station networks—and more carefully matching temperature measurements to where people, farms, businesses and ecosystems are actually exposed—can reduce measurement error at its source.
About the researchers
Chu (Alex) Yu, Assistant Professor of Economics, Wake Forest University (yua@wfu.edu)
Richard T. Carson, Distinguished Professor of Economics, UC San Diego (rcarson@ucsd.edu)
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.
