An update on that piece: Archaeologist Vito Mocella and his collaborators have since discovered lead-based ink in the scrolls, which should speed up the reading process immensely. His team has been working fragment by fragment and trying to decode the impressions, which is a very slow thing.

Mocella's team will begin x-raying the scrolls this July, calibrating the machines to look for lead. This will make the writing pop out instead of being dim outlines. What's exciting is that the scrolls have been very jealously guarded for a very long time - an earlier request to scan the scrolls last year was rebuffed. This will be the first real test of the technology based on the proof of concept from your article.

The really exciting thing is that most of the Herculaneum scrolls are all by one man, a minor writer named Philodemus, whose works were discovered in a small room 250 years ago. It's believed by many that the room could merely be an annex of a much larger library, which is resting just next to the excavated room untouched. If the scanning team turns up excellent results later this year, that could increase pressure to restart excavations and hunt for more scrolls. If these artifacts are only part of a much larger library, we could potentially be on the verge of the biggest archaeological discovery since Göbekli Tepe.

For a longer treatment, see this New Yorker piece from November 2015. For news, follow Vito Mocella on Twitter at @VitoMocella.