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Reading the Dead Sea Scrolls
By Miss Cellania in Everything Else on Sep 20, 2007 at 9:20 am
New x-ray techniques will be used on some of the Dead Sea Scrolls that are too fragile to unravel.
They will look at the texts using x-rays produced at the £360m Diamond Light Source in Didcot, Oxfordshire. The machine works by propelling electrons at great speeds around a giant tunnel. As they corner, they emit x-rays 100bn times brighter than a medical x-ray.
Researchers led by Tim Wess have developed computer software that can “unravel” x-ray images of rolled up parchment documents to reveal the writing, even if the parchment has text on either side.
Link -via the Presurfer
