Seales's 2016 En-Gedi Scroll paper explicitly cites and characterizes Mocella et al.'s rival phase-contrast-tomography claim

Brent Seales's primary publication on the En-Gedi Scroll result directly names and engages a concurrent rival group's work rather than proceeding as if it did not exist: "The work of Mocella et al. (12) claims that phase-contrast tomography generates contrast at ink boundaries in scans of material from Herculaneum" (Seales et al. 2016, Science Advances, PMC5031465).

The timing made a hidden-precursor story plausible on its face — Mocella et al.'s phase-contrast-tomography paper (Nature Communications, 2015) predates Seales's En-Gedi publication by only months, the same shape as Linnainmaa's uncited priority over Rumelhart, Hinton & Williams. It did not produce one. Seales's group and French collaborator Delattre had already co-published in 2013, before Mocella's paper appeared, and no citation gap or dispute turned up in a targeted search for one. The two groups working on tomographic reading of carbonized papyri were reading each other's output in real time, not independently reinventing the same result in separate silos.

This directly narrows the vault's ML/AD mutual-unawareness claim and its flagged, false-friend pairing with the En-Gedi note (observation-ml-ad-en-gedi-cosine-pairing-is-embedding-false-friend): where machine learning and automatic differentiation genuinely did not read each other for decades, Seales and Mocella did — the two notes share temporal-arc vocabulary, not a common mechanism. See entity-vito-mocella for the rival researcher.