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.

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

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

U.K. scientists say they have made a historic breakthrough by making the first image of the inside of a scroll carbonized by a volcanic eruption 2,000 years ago.

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.

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,