Skip to content
  • Happy Health
  • Happy Mindset
  • Animal Wonders
  • About Us
    • Team
  • Subscribe
Menu
  • Happy Health
  • Happy Mindset
  • Animal Wonders
  • About Us
    • Team
  • Subscribe
Happy News

A Joke That Led To A 1000 Year Old Discovery

It started as an offhand joke between colleagues, but what French researcher Victor Gysembergh actually stumbled upon turned out to be one of the most remarkable manuscript discoveries in recent memory. While casually searching an online archive for ancient texts in the central French city of Blois, Gysembergh spotted something that made him look twice: a tenth-century Greek manuscript sitting quietly in the collection of a local art museum. After comparing it against photographs taken in 1906, he confirmed beyond any doubt that he had found one of three pages long believed to be permanently lost from the Archimedes Palimpsest, a legendary ancient manuscript containing the only surviving copies of several mathematical works by one of history’s greatest minds. The page contains a passage from a treatise in which Archimedes first described the surface area and volume of a sphere with extraordinary mathematical precision, accompanied by geometric diagrams that are still clearly visible today.

The story of how this page ended up in a French art museum is almost as astonishing as the discovery itself. The palimpsest was copied by scribes in the tenth century and later scraped and reused as a Christian prayer book in the Middle Ages, a common practice when animal-skin parchment was too costly to waste. Over the following centuries it changed hands many times, and during those transfers three of its pages went missing. The newly found page has two layers of mystery: one side is partially covered by medieval prayers written over the ancient Greek text, while the other was painted over in the 1940s by a former owner who added a religious illustration apparently to boost the page’s value. Scientists plan to use advanced X-ray and imaging techniques within the next year to read what still lies hidden beneath those layers, and the team hopes this find will help lead them to the two pages that remain missing.

Source: https://www.france24.com/en/culture/20260312-lost-page-from-archimedes-palimpsest-resurfaces-in-france

PrevPreviousScientists May Have Found a Way to Actually Reverse Osteoporosis
NextA Hidden Web Of Galaxies Just Came Into View For The First TimeNext

Recent Articles

Happy News

Communities Across America Are Banning AI Data Centers And The Number Just Jumped From 8 To 78

May 10, 2026

According to the U.S. Data Center Moratorium Tracker, communities across the country have been pushing back against the rapid expansion of AI data centers with growing success, with the number of active bans and moratoriums jumping from just 8 in May 2025 to 78 today, including 50 active restrictions and

Read More
Happy News

An Alaska Animal Shelter Lets You Borrow A Dog For 48 Hours And It Is Leading To More Adoptions

May 10, 2026

The Anchorage Animal Care and Control shelter in Alaska launched a program in spring 2025 called Tails on Trails that has since become one of the most talked-about shelter initiatives in the country, pairing volunteers with a shelter dog for 48 hours and sending them out to explore the trails

Read More
Happy News

Scientists Gave Monkeys A Reward-Free Video Game And They Played Nearly 100 Rounds Anyway

May 10, 2026

Researchers at Kyoto University’s Institute for the Evolutionary Origins of Human Behavior set out to test whether curiosity in Japanese macaques follows the same pattern observed in humans, and what they found should resonate with anyone who has ever gone down a late-night internet rabbit hole for no practical reason

Read More
« Previous Next »
  • Privacy Notice
  • Accessibility Notice
  • Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information
  • Unsubscribe
  • Terms and Conditions
  • Privacy Policy
  • Privacy Notice
  • Accessibility Notice
  • Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information
  • Unsubscribe
  • Terms and Conditions
  • Privacy Policy
Copyright © 2026 HappyNews.