Lost ‘Gospel’ Needs Interpretation

via eurbweb.com *MSNBC reports that scientists are recruiting thousands of armchair archaeologists to help them decipher a “lost” gospel and other fragments of texts from ancient Egypt.

The Ancient Lives project draws upon the same type of people power that drives citizen-science projects such as Galaxy Zoo, Planet Hunters, Foldit and EteRNA.

In all these cases, legions of human eyes and brains can do a better job of sifting through massive databases than supercomputers. For this particular project, however, the monster database that needs to be tamed does not consist of sky-survey data or molecular combinations — rather, they’re ink letters, scrawled in Greek on centuries-old bits of papyrus. click here to read more