Regular readers will be familiar with the X-ray technology used to read the Ein Gedi Leviticus scroll (on which more here and links). But the new terahertz imaging technology also sounds promising. It was recently used in an experiment to read the text on nine pages of stacked paper.
This technique is still being refined, but the team anticipates that it could be applied to ancient books too fragile to open and other artifacts as well. As technology improves so that we can measure smaller and smaller differences in the arrival time of terahertz pulses, the quality of the images should get better and better. This work was published in September 2016 in the journal Nature Communications.
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