Scholars are studying an ancient scroll that has been virtually unrolled 2,000 years after it was burned to a crisp during the eruption of Italy’s Mount Vesuvius.

A breakthrough out of the Vesuvius Challenge builds on past efforts to virtually “unroll” fragile papyrus documents carbonized into hardened lumps by the volcanic blast.

For the past two years, citizen scientists and scholars have been working to reveal the previously hidden texts of the Herculaneum scrolls

This week, explore decoded words from charred ancient scrolls, meet heroic frog daddies, see Grand Canyon-size lunar features, and more.

Another Herculaneum scroll is being deciphered using X-ray imaging and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms by a team competing in the Vesuvius Challenge. Among the ancient Greek words identified so far are ἀδιάληπτος (foolish), διατροπή (disgust), φοβ (fear), and βίου (life).

After two students correctly identified the ancient Greek word for "purple" in a papyrus scroll charred by the AD79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius, they teamed up with a third student to identify about 5% of the philosophical text,