A Bit More Detail

• Centauri Dreams considers the possible roles and threats posed by artificial intelligence for interstellar missions.


• John Quiggin at Crooked Timber makes the point that blaming Facebook for the propagation of fake news misses entirely the motives of the people who spread these rumours, online or otherwise.


• The Crux looks at the factors which led to the human species' diversity of skin colours.


• Dangerous Minds reports on a new collection of early North American electronica.


• Far Outliers reports on the salt extraction industry of Sichuan.


• JSTOR Daily notes how inbreeding can be a threat to endangered populations, like gorillas.


• Language Log examines the connection of the Thai word for soul with Old Sinitic.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at divisions on the American left, including pro-Trump left radicals.


• Caitlin Chandler at the NYR Daily reports on the plight of undocumented immigrants in Rome, forced from their squats under the pressure of the new populist government of Italy.


• Spacing takes a look at the work of Acton Ostry Architects.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel looks at the ten largest non-planetary bodies in the solar system.


• Strange Company looks at the very strange 1997 disappearance of Judy Smith from Philadelphia and her latest discovery in the North Carolina wilderness. What happened to her?


• Strange Maps looks at the worrisome polarization globally between supporters and opponents of the current government in Venezuela. Is this a 1914 moment?


• Window on Eurasia suggests that Russia and Venezuela share a common oil-fueled authoritarian fragility.


• Arnold Zwicky looks at the camelids of Peru, stuffed toys and llamas and more.

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes the frequency with which young red dwarf stars flare, massively, with negative implications for potential life on these stars' planets.


• Centauri Dreams shares a proposal for probe expeditions to Pluto and Charon, and to the wider Kuiper belt beyond.


• D-Brief explains just how elephants manage to eat with their trunks.


• JSTOR Daily answers the question of just why so many American states--other subnational polities too, I bet--have straight-line borders.


• Language Hat links to a recent blog post examining the very specific forms of language used by the Roman emperor Justinian.


• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Paul Campos looks at where the whole concept of "political correctness" came from, and why. (Hint: It was not anti-racists who did this.)


• Geoffrey K. Pullum at Lingua Franca describes the circumstances behind his new book, _Linguistics: Why It Matters.


• At the LRB Blog, Caroline Eden writes about the shipwrecks of the Black Sea, preserved for centuries or even millennia by the sea's oxygen-poor waters.


• Gabrielle Bellot writes at the NYR Daily about how she refuses to be made into an invisible trans woman.


• At the Speed River Journal, Van Waffle describes--with photos!--how he was lucky enough to find a wild growth of chicken of the woods, an edible bracket mushroom of the Ontario forests.


• Window on Eurasia suggests that the loss of Ukraine by the Russian Orthodox Church will contribute to that church being increasingly seen as a national one, limited by borders.

• Centauri Dreams shares a cool design for a mid-21st century Triton landing mission.


• Crooked Timber argues American conservative intellectuals have descended to hackwork.


• D-Brief notes the surprisingly important role that eyebrows may have played in human evolution.


• Dead Things notes how a hominid fossil discovery in the Arabian desert suggests human migration to Africa occurred almost 90 thousand years ago, longer than previously believed.


• Hornet Stories notes that biphobia in the LGBTQ community is one factor discouraging bisexuals from coming out.


• At In Media Res, Russell Arben Fox gives a favourable review to Wendell Berry's latest, The Art of Loading Brush.


• JSTOR Daily explores the connections between Roman civilization and poisoning as a means for murder.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes how the early 20th century American practice of redlining, denying minorities access to good housing, still marks the maps of American cities.


• The LRB Blog notes how the 1948 assassination of reformer Gaitan in Bogota changed Colombia and Latin America, touching the lives of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Fidel Castro.


• The Map Room Blog notes that Spacing has launched a new contest, encouraging creators of inventive maps of Canadian cities to do their work.


• The NYR Daily notes a new exhibit of Victorian art that explores its various mirrored influences, backwards and forwards.


• At the Planetary Society Blog, Jason Davis explores TESS, the next generation of planet-hunting astronomy satellite from NASA.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel shares photos of planetary formation around sun-like star TW Hydrae.


• Window on Eurasia notes that a combination of urbanization, Russian government policy, and the influence of pop culture is killing off minority languages in Russia.

The volcanic Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D., destroying the wealthy Roman resort town of Herculaneum along with the better-known Pompeii. Only some 260 years ago did explorers at Herculaneum first uncover the roughly 800 charred scrolls from a library in a building dubbed the "Villa de Papyri," buried beneath more than 50 feet (15 meters) of ash.

While hundreds of the scrolls have been painstakingly unwrapped since then, with some destroyed in the process, most remain too fragile to unroll and read. But a new x-ray technique reads the text right through the rolled-up papyrus, reports a team led by Vito Mocella of the Institute for Microelectronics and Microsystems of the National Council of Research, in Naples, Italy, by discerning charcoal ink from charred papyrus.

"This pioneering research opens up new prospects not only for the many papyri still unopened, but also for others that have not yet been discovered," the team reports in the journal Nature Communications.

The x-ray technique, called phase-contrast tomography, can read the letters on a rolled-up fragment of a scroll that suffered the 608°F (320°C) heat of the ash avalanche that buried the town. The deciphered letters most likely were written in the century before the destruction of the resort.

The scrolls undergo the equivalent of a chest x-ray, which doesn't do much damage, says computer imaging expert Brent Seales of the University of Kentucky, in Lexington, who is on the larger team that for years has sought to peer inside the Herculaneum scrolls. "The real worry comes from handling them; they are very delicate," he says.