This week, we delve into one of the ancient world's biggest mysteries: the Herculaneum scrolls. Computer scientist Brent Seales of the University of Kentucky talks about a journey that has taken him from Mars to Beowulf to the Dead Sea and beyond. AI has been key to finally reading what's inside the scrolls -- but this is a story about human ingenuity, and what it takes to make an impossible dream come true.

These are hundreds of Greek and Latin papyri, buried by the Vesuvius eruption in 79 AD and dug up in the 1700s. The scrolls were crushed and carbonised; when anyone tried to read them, they crumbled. Scholars had to accept the rest would never be opened.

This is the only intact library we have from the classical world – complete texts, direct from the pens of ancient scribes. Yet we can’t read them.

Until now. These unopenable scrolls are now being read, through the Vesuvius Challenge, which offers prizes for teams using AI to find the ink in X-ray scans. I’ve written several articles on this, and the pace of discovery has been jawdropping: scholars could soon read the whole library.

But solving this problem hasn't just been about switching on AI. For me, the truly fascinating story is the 20 years of imagination, invention and persuasion that led to this point, all essentially due to one man who persevered even when everyone else thought the idea was crazy.

Brent Seales

https://educelab.engr.uky.edu/w-brent-seales

Vesuvius Challenge

https://scrollprize.org/

Schmidt Sciences

https://www.schmidtsciences.org/focus-area-ai/

My articles:

Scaling up the Vesuvius Challenge: Apr 2025

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01087-y

AI could rewrite history: Jan 2025

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-04161-z

First passages revealed: Feb 2024

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00346-8

Brent Seales' quest: Jul 2018

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/buried-ash-vesuvius-scrolls-are-being-read-new-xray-technique-180969358/

Journal papers:

Reading En-Gedi scroll

https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.1601247

Recovering Herculaneum ink

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0215775

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This week, we’re exploring the secrets of bliss – with neurologist and epilepsy specialist Fabienne Picard of the Medical School of Geneva.

Fabienne became fascinated by a rare condition called “ecstatic seizure” after reading the work of 19th century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. He used his own experiences with epilepsy as inspiration, in particular a profound and intriguing feeling that would strike him just before the seizure itself. He wrote about how, for a few moments, all of his doubts and anxieties disappeared, and the world felt perfectly vivid and clear.

“I feel entirely in harmony with myself and the whole world,” he wrote, “and this feeling is so strong and so delightful that for a few seconds of such bliss one would gladly give up ten years of one’s life, if not one’s whole life.”

Fabienne asked her patients whether any of them had similar experiences, and found that some did, they’d just never had the opportunity to talk about it in conventional consultations. She has identified dozens of new cases, which has enabled her to pin down which part of the brain is involved, and even trigger this feeling in people who don’t have this kind of epilepsy.

I spoke to Fabienne about her patients, what she thinks is happening in their brains, and whether we might all one day be able to benefit from such episodes of bliss -- without the devastating seizures that follow.

LINKS

Fabienne’s home page at University Hospitals of Geneva

https://www.hug.ch/en/neurology/dr-fabienne-picard

Ecstatic or mystical experience through epilepsy: 2023 paper by Fabienne & colleagues

https://direct.mit.edu/jocn/article/35/9/1372/116669/Ecstatic-or-Mystical-Experience-through-Epilepsy

Insular stimulation produces mental clarity and bliss: 2022 paper by Fabienne & colleagues

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ana.26282

Epilepsy and ecstatic experiences: 2021 paper by Fabienne & colleagues

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3425/11/11/1384

Fabienne’s talk to the Buddhist monks at Plum Village

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M16k8Djz29A&t=1957s

Epilepsy in the artistic creation of Dostoevsky: 2014 review

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2173580814000686

Dostoevsky’s epilepsy: 1990 case report

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2161565/

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In this first episode of Where the Wild Thoughts Are, I chat to Paco Calvo, prof of cognitive science from the University of Murcia in Spain. He’s author of the fascinating Planta sapiens: Unmasking Plant Intelligence, and he researches the neurobiology of plants. From bean plants searching out supports to climb up, to parasitic vines chasing down prey, to slow-growing oak trees, Paco is convinced that not only are plants showing intelligent behaviour, they’re sentient, awake, aware.

Perhaps you’re convinced that of course plants aren’t thinking! But is that based on evidence? Could there be other routes to intelligence than the neurons we happen to find in our own brains?

Paco and I discuss how to tell if an organism is intelligent; some of plants’ most impressive abilities (my favourite is the chameleon vine); as well as the mechanics of botanical decision-making. And, of course, we talk about the ethical implications… What would it even mean to start considering our plant companions as sentient?

Paco’s lab at University of Murcia

https://www.um.es/mintlab/index.php/about/people/paco-calvo/

Paco’s book, Planta sapiens: The New Science of Plant Intelligence (written with Natalie Lawrence)

https://www.um.es/mintlab/index.php/publications/planta-sapiens/

‘Do plants behave?’: 2024 paper

https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/kr69e_v1

‘Plant sentience revisited’: 2023 paper

https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1830&context=animsent

‘The potential of plant action potentials’: 2023 paper

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-023-04398-7

‘A case study of learning in plants: Lessons learned from pea plants’: 2023 paper

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17470218231203078

Video: ‘Reflections of a plant intelligence maverick’: 2025 lecture by Paco Calvo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-l1vJNm2H0&t=1s

Michael Pollan on how timelapse photography reveals the inner life of plants

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPql1VHbYl4

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When physicists investigate the very smallest components of reality – atoms and subatomic particles – they famously find all sorts of things that make no sense. Particles can apparently be in different places at once, and they have different properties depending on how we measure them. Spooky effects seem to act instantaneously, across vast distances. The decisions we make can even alter journeys that particles have already made.

Researchers have come up with different interpretations for what these weird results might mean. Maybe mysterious waves we can’t measure are guiding the course of the entire universe. Or maybe there are countless parallel universes, hosting different versions of ourselves...

What if none of these ideas is wild enough? My guest in this episode, quantum physicist Chris Fuchs from the University of Massachusetts, thinks physicists are still being boxed in by their assumptions about reality. Chris has pioneered a new interpretation of quantum mechanics, called QBism, which says that the probabilities and predictions of quantum physics were never describing physical entities out there in the world. Instead, he says, they are telling us about… us.

QBism is seen by many physicists as extreme, but it’s also wild, lawless, freeing and I love it! Our tour of the QBist universe took us from starships and black holes to party games, gambling and free will. Enjoy.

‘Introducing QBism’: 2014 paper by Chris Fuchs

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Christopher-Fuchs/publication/300478790_Introducing_QBism/links/575027c008aefe968db723df/Introducing-QBism.pdf

‘QBism: Where next?’ 2023 research paper on the future of QBism

https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.01446

Nautilus feature article on Chris Fuchs and QBism

https://nautil.us/my-quantum-leap-238433/

Excerpt on QBism from Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQvCTZgNRNw

Documentary on QBism produced by the Essentia Foundation

https://youtu.be/nSqDMtHoaT0

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Where The Wild Thoughts Are is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada https://www.yada-yada.net/.

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In the search for alien life, we don’t always hear much about Venus. There’s a lot of effort going into detecting possible signs of life on Mars, and looking for potentially habitable planets beyond our solar system. Venus seems a crazy place to look for aliens: its surface is burning hot, hot enough to melt lead; and it has clouds made of concentrated acid. But could a very different kind of life from ours be living in those cloud droplets?

My guest is astronomer Jane Greaves, from the University of Cardiff. A few years ago, she used a telescope in Hawaii to scan Venus’s clouds for a molecule called phosphine. On earth, phosphine is rare, its only natural source is microbes in certain oxygen-starved environments. We don’t currently know of any way it could be made on Venus, apart from life, but Jane figured why not just have a look anyway. And she found it…

Some findings immediately touch a nerve. Researchers immediately criticised her work, attacking the team scientifically and personally. But Jane and her colleagues have been working to gather more data and they’re building an ever-stronger picture that phosphine really is there in the clouds. That would mean either some really fascinating chemistry we’ve never thought of before – or potential life. And this just adds to a list of mysterious features on Venus, from strange particles in the clouds; to gases in amounts very different from what we’d expect; to something unexplained that is absorbing huge amounts of energy from the solar radiation hitting the planet...

Jane and I chat about her latest results, and what she thinks about the chances of life elsewhere, as well as the importance of going against the grain sometimes, to explore questions others might think are too crazy to ask.

Jane Greaves at Cardiff University

https://profiles.cardiff.ac.uk/staff/greavesj1

Jane and team’s 2020 paper reporting phosphine in Venus’s clouds

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1174-4

The team’s response to criticisms of the 2020 paper

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-021-01424-x

Guardian story on 2024 evidence for Venus phosphine & maybe ammonia

https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/ast.2023.0082

2024 review of unexplained features on Venus

https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/ast.2022.0060

2024 paper showing amino acids are stable in sulfuric acid

https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/ast.2023.0082

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Listen to some clips from Jo Marchant's new science podcast in which she interviews scientists who are asking deep questions, chasing outrageous dreams, and exploring the world in completely new ways.

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