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Comment by hprotagonist | Hacker News Reader

By 2016 we had figured out how to take very high resolution microCT scans of things with ink on them and "unroll" them virtually. This was successfully used to read text from a scroll that had been turned into a column of charcoal in a fire. The ink is different enough from the parchment, even when both are partially combusted, to make the technique work.

Figure 1 is ... striking:

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/9/e1601247

http://www.sci-news.com/archaeology/en-gedi-scroll-deciphere...

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Hey! Is 'we' you who has presented this at the Bruker User Meeting? I'm the guy who presented the zebrafish gills story this year :) Your work with virtually unscrolling the scrolls is amazing, keep on trucking! Have a good day!

Hey, that was me! What a pleasant surprise, you made my day. Have a good one yourself!

Come on, you can't mention zebrafish gills without actually telling the story!

Sorry, didn't want to hijack the thread :)

We were able to show that the gills of zebrafish grow and get more 'sparse' with endurance training. This means - to our understanding - that the water can more easily penetrate the gills and is transported through the gills more efficient, i.e. the oxygen is extracted from the water more efficiently.

Here's a little bit of the backstory on my 'work' blog: https://micro.tomo.graphics/manuscripts/2019/08/26/adaptatio... And here's the manuscript on bioRxiv: https://doi.org/10.1101/744300

Just yesterday we submitted the 'minor revisions' for our submission of the manuscript to PLOS One :)

Based on username and DDG, I suspect:

https://www.bruker.com/fileadmin/user_upload/8-PDF-Docs/Micr...

Exactly, nice search engine fu :)

Here's a bit more information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21782922

Even papyrus scrolls not already charred by historical events (e.g., at Pompeii and Herculaneum) were often considered incense and burned by their discoverers.

One shudders....

I always wonder if all those reports are real, are inflated (to show some bad-looking-past and how noble we are today) or if was a form of hiding a kind of robbery (see, I found something, but wasn't possible to bring it to the museum/king/whatever because... my team just burned it).

in 1778, a Danish classical scholar named Niels Iversen Schow bought a papyrus scroll from a hoard alleged to have been discovered near the pyramids at Giza, whereupon the “native” sellers reportedly tore up and burned the rest so as to enjoy the pungent smoke.

-- Keith Houston, The Book https://www.worldcat.org/title/book-a-cover-to-cover-explora...

Citing:

James G. Keenan, “The History of the Discipline,” in The Oxford Handbook of Papyrology, ed. Roger Bagnall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 59.

Considering most people couldn't read, I believe it

That's truly amazing.

I can't even fathom how to handle that, let alone how to _read_ something out of it.

Striking is an understatement.

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