Man's brain turned to glass by hot Vesuvius ash cloud
57 comments
·February 27, 2025bell-cot
yndoendo
There some life forms on earth that will never become preserved. Squids for example are a high ammonium based life form. The Ammonium prevents fossilization. If humans didn't exist while they do, we would have never known about them. [0] There would have been no preserved record.
[0] https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/squid-empire-danna-staaf/11...
calibas
From the study itself:
> Moreover, exceptionally well-preserved complex networks of neurons, axons, and other neural structures have been revealed by Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) investigation of the brain remains and those of the spinal cord
iuyhtgbd
It was preserved in the sense a fossil is preserved. The object was destroyed but some of it's structure remains. (Which is ludicrously cool. The world is so strange and wonderful. Though it's also a world where a volcano can erupt in your vicinity.)
stronglikedan
LPT: A volcano can only erupt in your vicinity if you're in the vicinity of a volcano.
yard2010
Also, it's a great lesson in randomness - that day when that mountain erupted, the wind was blowing away from Naples, essentially sparing the disaster for its residents. Imagine if it was the other way around?
bhickey
Would wind direction have made the difference for pyroclastic flows? I thought flow direction was largely driven by local topology.
csomar
Lots of glass brains?
MadnessASAP
> The scientists believe the skull gave some protection to the brain.
I don't think we're on the same page about the word protection either.
GTP
It did provide some protection, as it wasn't burned like the rest of the body. They're not saying that it provided perfect protection, only some protection.
qingcharles
I would have said the same if I discovered those scrolls charred to a crisp too, but here we are reading them like it wasn't sci-fi.
So, can we start an X Prize to read the contents of this brain?
Talanes
A key difference is that we did know how to read non-burnt scrolls before that.
intrasight
In 1000 years perhaps we will understand how the mind works and scientists will take out this glass brain and read it.
bell-cot
Many parts of the charred scrolls are readable...but those are in vastly better physical shape (comparing "before" & "after") than the few pea-sized cinders remaining of this brain.
Plus - information storage in the brain is both distributed, and micro-scale.
At some point, you are trying to recover compressed data from a HD where only one or two bits can be still read from each 512-byte sector - basic information theory says that the only good-enough tech to do the job would be a time machine.
ETH_start
Decoding any part of his memories would be the greatest archeological coup in history, by a massive margin.
By some estimates, the cerebral cortex can store hundreds of terabytes of information. Recovering even 0.1% of that would amount to possibly hundreds of GB of information about life in a major Roman urban center.
nkrisc
Or hundreds of GB of “how to stand up without falling” or “what fish taste like” or “don’t grab thorny bushes”.
intrasight
I developed a theory a few years ago (probably during the pandemic when I would go on a lot long walks alone) that there are many human information artifacts that are preserved that we haven't yet discovered.
Take sound waves. When they come into contact with matter, most of the waves energy turns into heat, yes? But might a mechanical imprint be made onto a surface? For example tree sap that hadn't yet completely solidified. Could we resurrect the roar of a dinosaur?
thom
It's not clear that enough information really survives:
jcims
That's a fun one! And the reality is that there almost certainly *is* information out there, it's just a function of us figuring out how to pull the signal out of the noise. (No pun intended :P)
ineedasername
It would lend to some very FAA-style euphemisms. Civilization-Scale Cold Storage Archival Backup == nuclear winter
kazinator
Supposedly this vitrefied brain is mostly carbon and oxygen.
Interestingly, there is a glass-like form of carbon (just carbon):
unwind
Thanks, this was the sentence that was missing from the article and made me confused knowing that humans are basically made of carbon, but glass is not.
Someone
The article should have said “a glass”, not “glass”. The former is a term from physics that is different from the lay-mans’s “glass”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_transition:
“The glass–liquid transition, or glass transition, is the gradual and reversible transition in amorphous materials (or in amorphous regions within semicrystalline materials) from a hard and relatively brittle "glassy" state into a viscous or rubbery state as the temperature is increased. An amorphous solid that exhibits a glass transition is called a glass.”
The Nature article is clearer. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-88894-5: “Glass forms when a liquid is fast cooled preventing crystallization, across a reversible process known as the glass transition.
[…]
Here we demonstrate that material with glassy appearance found within the skull of a seemingly male human body entombed within the hot pyroclastic flow deposits of the 79 CE Vesuvius eruption formed by a unique process of vitrification of his brain at very high temperature”
The layman’s term includes such things as safety glass, which may have polymer layers.
So, confusingly, not all glass is “a glass”, and not all glasses are glass.
byyoung3
i wonder if this guy ever imagined he would be on hacker news
intrasight
He'll know after his avatar is a resurrected from his preserved brain.
thom
The true Roko's Basilisk: being subjected to social media scrutiny thousands of years after one's death.
keepamovin
Well if he didn't back then - he did now.
riffic
there's nothing to wonder. He never would have imagined that, it is entirely impossible.
keepamovin
Are the neurons preserved in a recoverable way, like 5D optical glass-based data-storage? Also Chinese (and probably other languages) has a common derogatory expression "Glass heart" by which they mean "I think you are too sensitive to what I see as valid criticism of you" - this glassy brain preempted that slur at an intellectual level.
jbreckmckye
It's "preserved" in the same way an atom bomb "preserves" your shadow if you're stood at ground zero.
Think more "something remained" than "some thing remained"
keepamovin
Hehehe - Nice distinction!
thund
Nature article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213563
mook
And Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/02/study-hot-vesuvian-a...
gosub100
Once fell down, from volcanic gas.
Soon turned out, I had a brain of glass.
867-5309
there must be millions of glass dinosaur brains deeper than their already mustered bone fragments
GTP
Now, this is a fossil I would like to have!
lupusreal
Reminds me of the brain of a man that went down with the Swedish warship Vasa that was found preserved (turned into soap.)
create-username
Crystallising his memory and mental processes
jmyeet
There was a Tiktok trend where (typically) women were shocked to discover the (typically) men in their lives thought about the Roman Empire as much as they do, often on a daily basis. The question is why.
To me, it comes down to Rome not being the oldest or even the necessarily the largest or longest-surviving empire. It's that it's the most well-documented ancient civilization. Sites like Pompeii and Heculaneum provide a time capsule into ordinary existence that is often missing from ancient accounts that typically talk about kings, emperors, wars and so forth. In addition, we have a ton of texts from that time, including the direct writings of the likes of Julius Caesar.
Rome continued to influence European history beyond the fall of Constantinopole up until the 19th century through the Holy Roman Empire.
But the impact is still felt today. Classics such as Marcus Aurelius have arguably been co-opted into the alt-right pipeline.
There's also interesting psychology at play here. People like to imagine themselves in such a world. Where in the real world they might be just an average working Joe, people rarely imagine themselves as being peasants or slaves or a grunt in the army despite those being the majority of people.
I find that last point needs highlighting because there is an effort to reshape our current society, driven by real yet misplaced legitimate anger. Human ego being what it is, nobody acknolwedges the statistical likelihood that if you're suffering or oppressed in the current organization of society, you're probably going to be oppressed or otherwise suffer in a new society, particularly one built around an autocrat.
But when the central organizing principle becomes cruelty, perhaps aspiring to being a Brownshirt is the goal.
> ... scientists have discovered that his brain was preserved when it turned to glass in an extremely hot cloud of ash.
> The pea-sized chunks of black glass were found inside the skull of the victim, aged about 20, who died when the volcano erupted in 79 AD near modern-day Naples.
> ... a cloud of ash as hot as 510C enveloped the brain ...
I don't think I'd use the word "preserved" to describe there being a few glassy cinders left over, after someone's brain was incinerated.