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Man's brain turned to glass by hot Vesuvius ash cloud
- bell-cot 2y ago> ... 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.
- iuyhtgbd 2y agoIt 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.)
- yard2010 2y agoAlso, 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 2y agoWould wind direction have made the difference for pyroclastic flows? I thought flow direction was largely driven by local topology.
- bell-cot 2y agoNot a volcanologist, and vastly simplified, but... After the collapse of the eruption column, when it's roaring down the volcano's flanks and incinerating/burying everything in its path, it is driven by the local topography. But before that collapse - especially toward the end, when it's getting seriously unstable - the wind can have huge effects on the direction in which it "fall down". And the wind (at altitude) pretty much controls which way the ash fall goes. That's technically not pyroclastic flows - but often just as deadly for a major eruption. EDIT: Add Wikipedia's account of the eruption - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruption_of_Mount_Vesuvius_in_79_AD#Nature_of_the_eruption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruption_of_Mount_Vesuvius_in_... - And note that descriptive terms for volcanic eruptions (Plinean, Pelean, Vesuvian, etc.) are subject to "it's all constantly-changing shades of gray" caveats.
- bhickey 2y agoThanks for the explanation. The wind _positions_ the ash cloud and then the terrain channels it once it falls. I suppose I'd been thinking of a Mount St Helens style flow where the mountain gave way.
- csomar 2y agoLots of glass brains?
- stronglikedan 2y agoLPT: A volcano can only erupt in your vicinity if you're in the vicinity of a volcano.
- glenstein 2y agoI don't think that phrasing implying there was a whole brain instead of a part fares any better by tying it to a definition of fossil. It's not essential to the definition of fossil that what is recovered is a smaller subset of the whole thing. A fossil can be a fossil of an entire organism. I think the that commenter's point is that the article makes numerous unqualified references to "the brain" which on a most natural reading would imply the whole brain when it's some (albeit very interesting) individual shards.
- qingcharles 2y agoI 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 2y agoA key difference is that we did know how to read non-burnt scrolls before that.
- intrasight 2y agoIn 1000 years perhaps we will understand how the mind works and scientists will take out this glass brain and read it.
- deadbabe 2y agoWhat an incredible journey it would be if it were possible for a man’s glass brain to yield enough data to reconstruct his consciousness and awaken him in the far future! There must be some sci-fi story like this.
- intrasight 2y agoAlmost every week there's a discussion on hacker news that leads to a great idea for a sci-fi story and this is one of them.
- deadbabe 2y agoAny compilations of such ideas?
- intrasight 2y agoI have jotted some of them down over the years. But I bet searching the full catalog of hacker news comments would yield a bunch of entries.
- MadnessASAP 2y ago> 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 2y agoIt 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.
- ineedasername 2y agoIt would lend to some very FAA-style euphemisms. Civilization-Scale Cold Storage Archival Backup == nuclear winter
- yndoendo 2y agoThere 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/1125995365 https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/squid-empire-danna-staaf/11...
- moondrek 2y agoBeing entirely naive to squid prehistory, the wikipedia page for squid shows two apparent-to-me squid fossils [0]. Is there some nuance here that I'm not aware of? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squid#Evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squid#Evolution
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- fermisea 2y agoNot sure about squids in particular, but the easiest way isn't necessarily to find remains, but to see negative prints on sediments.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y agoTons of fossils are "negative prints on sediments". GP's assertion that "If humans didn't exist while they do, we would have never known about them" is clearly wrong.
- justinclift 2y agoIs there a marine equivalent of amber that things can be trapped in and preserved? Apart from ice I guess.
- SapporoChris 2y agohttps://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Lab-Preserved-Specimen-Dissection/dp/B09J1M8NJ1?th=1 https://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Lab-Preserved-Specimen-Dissec...
- calibas 2y agoFrom 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 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-88894-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-88894-5
- thund 2y agoNature article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213563
- mook 2y agoAnd Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/02/study-hot-vesuvian-ash-cloud-really-did-turn-a-brain-to-glass/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/02/study-hot-vesuvian-a...
- kazinator 2y agoSupposedly this vitrefied brain is mostly carbon and oxygen. Interestingly, there is a glass-like form of carbon (just carbon): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glassy_carbon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glassy_carbon
- unwind 2y agoThanks, 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 2y agoThe 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 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 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.
- kergonath 2y ago> humans are basically made of carbon, but glass is not A glass is something that underwent a glass transition (that looks like a liquid at the atomic scale but behaves like a solid microscopically, resulting from cooling a liquid too fast to let it crystallise). It can be made of a huge diversity of things: pure elements (like carbon or sulphur), some metallic alloys, oxides, sulphides, fluorides, polymers, etc.
- create-username 2y agoCrystallising his memory and mental processes
- byyoung3 2y agoi wonder if this guy ever imagined he would be on hacker news
- keepamovin 2y agoWell if he didn't back then - he did now.
- intrasight 2y agoHe'll know after his avatar is a resurrected from his preserved brain.
- riffic 2y agothere's nothing to wonder. He never would have imagined that, it is entirely impossible.
- rossant 2y agoMaybe not, I think hacker news didn't exist at the time.
- zakki 2y agoIs it why in Stargate advanced alien computer/memory is from a crystal?
- taneq 2y agoNope, that's because glowy crystalline or glassy things look super fancy and futuristically high tech.
- rsynnott 2y agoThere was also a certain amount of hype about 3d optical data storage at the time. In practice, this is at this point more or less a dead issue, but it was very much The Future in the 90s. Also shows up in Star Trek TNG and on.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y agoWhy is it dead
- ben_w 2y agoFlash and streaming. Flash because it's cheap enough, high density, arbritarily scalable for whatever storage is needed. Streaming because the difficulty making any optical rewritable (especially with respect to write speed) meant the niche overlapped with bluray and DVD, but why bother with yet another optical disk for films and games when bandwidth becomes more important than single-disk capacity. There's also a bunch of technical difficulties, but when there's no market for the result, R&D efforts are often less well funded: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_optical_data_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_optical_data_storage
- rsynnott 2y agoSome combo of flash and spinning rust storage really makes the market for very high capacity optical storage a bit niche. It might still have a place as archival media (and multi-layer optical disks, which are 3d optical storage of a sort, though not to the level of sophistication imagined in the 90s, are used in that role to some extent), but it's just really hard to see it rivalling flash for mainstream applications at this point. In particular, flash is really, really, _really_ fast.
- keepamovin 2y agoAre 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.
- zero_shift 2y agoIt'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 2y agoHehehe - Nice distinction!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rsynnott 2y ago... Oh, in the Pompeii eruption, not, like, breaking news. Given the general surreality of 2025 news thus far, would not be surprised.
- lupusreal 2y agoTo be fair, it is a very active volcano.
- GTP 2y agoNow, this is a fossil I would like to have!
- lupusreal 2y agoReminds me of the brain of a man that went down with the Swedish warship Vasa that was found preserved (turned into soap.)
- 867-5309 2y agothere must be millions of glass dinosaur brains deeper than their already mustered bone fragments
- jmyeet 2y agoThere 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.
- error_logic 2y agoWhen the only perceived means of winning is making others lose, most people are going to lose. The US should never have used plurality voting. It functions as the inputs to the Nash Equilibria decision matrix, our individual votes being against a perceived evil rather than for a value which supports civilization. If instead of {+1, 0, 0, 0...} we used {+1, +0.5, -0.5, 0, 0, 0...} with each non-zero value used at most once and without duplication of candidate, we would be able to vote for the outputs of the decision matrix--our combined decision--and avoid the tragedy of the commons. I believe the coordination problem is the Great Filter, and going interplanetary won't solve the underlying math of shooting first being incentivized by winner-take-all, and the risk of mutually assured destruction. The Partial Vote system as I call it would still be one voter one vote, it would just be easier to express it in separate components rather than listing all permutations. Edit: Also, try applying ranked choice to a nash equilibrium matrix. There are some pathological cases to using rankings for a single-seat (result) selection process, where a voter might have had a better result for them if they hadn't voted. That can't happen with the partial votes described above.
- dudeinjapan 2y ago[dead]
- gosub100 2y agoOnce fell down, from volcanic gas. Soon turned out, I had a brain of glass.
- senectus1 2y agodammit, now I have that tune stuck in my head. thanks
- Detrytus 2y agoSomeone should have shown that to the "Rings of Power" screenwriters, because in that show Galadriel comes out of the volcanic ash cloud with just her hair messed up :-D
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mjd 2y agoSounds awesome, where do I sign up?
- az226 2y agoNat Friedman circa 2048: we were successfully able to extract the man’s last thoughts (“oh shit, my boss is going to be so mad when he hea”)
- rossant 2y agoOh yeah, I'm going to end up on hacker n..
- SideburnsOfDoom 2y agoI learned a while ago that more than half the population of Pompeii and Herculaneum fled and survived the destruction of their homes. And the ensuing refugee problem lasted a while in nearby settlements, including Napoli. So it's likely that the ones who remained and died were either stubborn or disadvantaged somehow, as well as those just unlucky.
- LuciOfStars 2y agoNow he's definitely smoothbrained.