Opening a Nearly 2,000-Year-Old Treasure

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Emma Varvaloucas: Ancient scrolls are revealing their secrets 2,000 years later. Researchers are bringing eyes back to life in a box. Americans are shifting the way they’re staying cool, and a drone might be coming to a beach near you in the name of safety. Welcome to the What Could Go Right? Progress Report, where we dive into all the good news that most of us missed because it was buried under the barrage of bad news.

Hey, if you’re new here, I’m Emma Varvaloucas, and I’m the executive director of The Progress Network. Let’s get into it. If I say Pompeii, chances are you can picture the sprawling ruins of ancient Roman streets and buildings, or at least the plaster casts of victims who perished during the almighty eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

But when I say Herculaneum, let me guess, that mental image goes dark . . . maybe, say, as dark as 50 feet of ash. Now, while Pompeii might have gotten all the historical PR, you really should know about Herculaneum. It’s the site of an incredible discovery that led to one of the most epic intellectual treasure hunts of our time.

But before we get to that, let me explain what made that discovery possible. The year is 79 AD, and you’re lounging on your lectus, flipping through or, I guess scrolling through, your latest read hot off the papyrus line. Who are you? We’re not entirely sure, but what we do know is that you’re likely reading a scroll from the private library of Julius Caesar’s father-in-law.

Within hours, the entire town of Herculaneum, sadly probably including you, will be buried by 50 feet of scorching volcanic ash and mud. Sounds like a great time. But in a supreme stroke of historical irony, that heavy, suffocating layer of destruction will end up acting like a giant time capsule, and that library, which scholars believe could be a trove of ancient Greek and Roman plays, poetry, and philosophy, and may hold unknown works by the likes of Sappho, Sophocles, and Aristotle, was essentially flash carbonized and vacuum sealed away from the usual destruction of time.

Scholars have been drooling over this collection since it was discovered in 1750, because it’s the only library to survive from that time. Today, hundreds of carbonized scrolls have been excavated from the site, and likely thousands more are still waiting to be found. What’s more, their interiors are basically intact.

The only problem? The state of their exteriors is best described as charred logs, and over the years, well-meaning people tried to physically open them, which generally resulted in destroying them completely. Nothing says historical preservation quite like pulverizing the only copy of a lost masterpiece.

For literal centuries, researchers were stuck. By the early 2000s, though, they were able to avoid the crumble-when-opened problem by using advanced x-ray scans. It was then that they found their first major clue. Greek letters were detected in one rolled up scroll. These letters, as well as words on a fragment of a partially unrolled scroll, pointed to an Epicurean philosopher named Phil, who was under the patronage of the villa’s owner.

Okay, his legal name was Philodemus, but I imagine his friends called him Phil. Fast-forward to the COVID pandemic when most of us were busy baking sourdough and forgetting how to socialize, Nat Friedman, the former CEO of GitHub, was getting bored and decided he wanted to help solve the centuries-old mystery of what the heck is in these scrolls.

So he teamed up with an investing partner, as well as a computer science professor at the University of Kentucky named Brent Seales, to launch the Vesuvius Challenge. See, Brent had been banging his head against these scrolls for 20 years. Well, not literally. That would’ve been wildly irresponsible. But the point is, he was more than happy to release 3D X-ray scans of two of our homeboy Phil’s scrolls to the internet with the hope that someone could finally figure out how to decode the text inside.

The reward wasn’t only knowledge or the thrill of the hunt. Big cash prizes were offered to anyone who could decode at least four passages of 140 characters each. Why 140 characters? Well, nota bene, clock the Latin, this was back when Twitter was still Twitter and still cool. Expectations in the academic world were low.

But as Bloomberg perfectly described it, a, quote, “volunteer army of nerds immediately got to work.” And because the internet occasionally uses its powers for good, they actually pulled it off. The breakthrough came via machine learning. The participants designed an algorithm to find and decode text by identifying what they called crackle patterns, microscopic ridges of dried out ink sticking up from the papyrus inside the closed scroll.

Another tool was then used to digitally stitch together the individual sheets of papyrus from the scans, and it worked. The winning team delivered over a dozen columns of readable text without ever having to physically open a scroll. The very first entire word read from the inside of a Herculaneum scroll was . . . drum roll, please… purple.

Not especially illuminating, but a somewhat solid start. Eventually, dozens of the scrolls traveled to France to be scanned at equipment that is significantly higher tech than the copy machine at Kinko’s. Wait, do people still know what Kinko’s is? ‘Cause I think that also might be an ancient relic at this point.

Anyway, suffice it to say, the scanning requires a particle accelerator. That’s how high definition it is. Then, this summer, researchers announced a major milestone. The first Herculaneum scroll, known as PHerc. 1667, had been virtually unwrapped and read in its entirety. Well, what was left of it after several of the scroll’s layers were ruined in the 1960s and ‘80s, as well as sometime in the 19th century when conservators tried to physically open the scroll.

After all that, the papyrus surface inside was about the size of an A3 sheet of paper. Look, guys, we’ll take what we can get. So what profound, earth-shattering wisdom did the forces of nature leave for us to find? Well, the scroll’s author waxes poetic about ethics and human behavior, so essentially the same things I was posting about on my MySpace back in 2007.

Jokes aside, the team thinks it may be a Stoic text, possibly by Chrysippus, the third head of the Stoic school. Little of his work, the team says, survives, so if this is a new work by him, that could be a big find.

The bottom line is it’s no longer a question of whether the secrets of the Herculaneum scrolls can ever be revealed. They can. It just might be a while before we know the full contents of what survives. Deciphering that first scroll took 775 hours of manual annotation.

Still, this ancient library has been holding its secrets close for nearly 300 years after its discovery. Now, finally cracking them is simply a matter of time, and when it’s done, it could be the largest discovery from the ancient world ever.

Before we get into our shorter stories, here are some numbers that will make you smile. 51 million, the estimated number of lives saved by vaccines in Africa over the last five decades. One in 10, the number of older Americans with dementia, which might not sound so impressive, but 40 years ago, that number was three in 10.

And 10,000, the population of Taiwan’s mangrove land crab, which doubled after safety measures were put into place to protect their migratory path during breeding season.

And here are our quick hits for today. First up, recently it seems like there is a new miraculous transplant story every few months. I mean, earlier this year, doctors at the Cleveland Clinic performed the first robotic lung transplant in the US, which is honestly amazing.

But as impressive as that is, it isn’t the story that caught our eye this week. Researchers at the Center of Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, or Barthelona, as your Eurotrip friend keeps insisting, have created a device that aims to bring eyes back from the dead. Yes, you heard that right. It’s called the Eye-in-Care Box, or ECabox.

Ultimately, the hope is that the box will succeed in, “reviving eyes and maintaining them healthy for at least one month.” Now, you might be thinking, “Okay, one month with zombie eyes in a box. What does that really change?” Well, the answer to that is quite a lot, actually.

Currently, early phases of trials for eye-focused treatments are limited due to the complex structure of the eye and the fact that nobody really wants to test out the safety of something new on the eyes of healthy individuals.

These eyes in a box, with a fox . . . actually, strike that . . . could allow researchers to test out new drugs or treatments on real human eyes, which would be a game changer. That is, if they can get it to work.

Before we get too far into this story, it’s important to point out a few things. The research I’m about to share with you is from a pre-print study, but it looks like researchers have used the ECaBox to take these donated eyeballs and extend responses to light for up to 10 hours after death.

Now, the sense of seeing involves far more than just the nerves reacting to light, so these eyes were certainly not seeing from beyond the grave, and 10 hours is a long way from 30 days. But that is double the length of time anyone has achieved before.

So the next time someone tells you that they’ll keep an eye out for you, it’s possible, if they’re in Spain and work in a specific research lab, that they might mean it more literally than you think.

Next up, Europeans may have spent the last few weeks marveling at the air conditioning in the US, but it might be going out of style. Now, before you get all hot and bothered, let me explain. No, US households have not suddenly decided to listen to the Department of Energy’s recommendation to keep their thermostat at 78.

And yes, that is a real recommendation that they’ve since deleted. Instead, the change is in the air due to the rise in the adoption of heat pumps. Okay, yes, it is confusing to talk about heat pumps when discussing cooling. Maybe they would get adopted even faster if they were called something different.

But when you learn how they work, the name actually does make sense. Heat pumps work by moving heat rather than using fossil fuels to create it. In the summer, it works by absorbing heat inside your home and pushing it outside, and in the winter, it pulls heat energy from the outside air and pushes it into your home.

It’s simple, better for the environment, and over 3 million heat pumps were sold in the US in 2025. That’s getting extremely close to catching up with AC unit sales. And that’s a pretty good sign, seeing as only 10 years ago, air conditioners were selling at double the rate of heat pumps. So yeah, to circle back, if you’re a soccer fan looking to recreate the frozen indoor tundra you recently fell in love with in the US, just remember, all the cool kids are buying heat pumps.

And finally, typically, if a drone is circling overhead while you’re in a bathing suit, your assumption is it’s up to no good. But you might wanna put down that BB gun and look around, especially if you’re floating on a surfboard at one of Australia’s beaches. Governments across the land Down Under are putting drones in the air above in an effort to keep beachgoers safe from shark attacks.

As part of the Shark Smart Drone program in Queensland, drones fly over the water during weekends and holidays, scanning for sharks in the water, and when necessary, lifeguards and officials on the ground are alerted and are able to get swimmers out of the water and away from potential danger. And following a recent Great White attack, the government in New South Wales, which is slightly to the south, will be investing, adding an additional $34 million in funding for drones to monitor 70 beaches, including those in Sydney.

Over in the US, there’s a program called Shark Eye, which is an AI-powered drone program out of UC Santa Barbara. They’re utilizing drones to monitor high-traffic shark areas and notify lifeguards and other officials about shark movements and potential risks. And it’s not just the lives of swimmers that might be saved by the rise of the shark drone.

Conservationists hope that they could replace shark nets or other culling methods that result in the death of sharks. I’d say anything that could save both people and sharks at the same time is a positive thing. And PS, happy early Shark Week to those who celebrate, and if you don’t, FYI, your feed is about to become very sharky next week, whether you want it to or not.

I hope these stories remind you that there is so much good in the world, so it’s important to shift our focus away sometimes from all of the bad. Send this episode to your friend who’s been stuck in the bathroom after falling victim to the explosive diarrhea outbreak. They could use some cheering up.

And make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, follow us on your preferred podcast platform, and leave us a review. Use the link in the description to sign up for our newsletter if you’d like more of these stories right to your inbox, and comment if you’ve got a good news story we should cover next week.