Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. A unique, dark-colored glass found inside the skull of a Roman killed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius is his brain—cooked into a fossil by an ash cloud. This is the horrific revelation of an international team of researchers who analyzed the glass to determine what conditions would have been needed to produce it. Archaeologists first unearthed the remains of the poor young man—estimated to be in his twenties—in 1960; the black...

Nearly 2,000 years ago, Mount Vesuvius erupted, swallowing the nearby Roman towns of Herculaneum and Pompeii in a superheated cloud of ash, dust, and volcanic material. The environment was so hot that a team of researchers say it turned at least one resident’s brain into glass. Not only did the individual’s once-squishy, pinkish-white organ get vitrified into a hard, sparkly black material, but the glassy remains contain preservation down to the microscopic level—that is, the Roman’s axons and neurons were preserved by the extreme conditions of the volcanic eruption. The...

Archeologists have previously discovered human brains preserved in a variety of ways, including drying, freezing and tanning. Some preserved brains even resemble soap. But now they've found something new: a brain that turned into glass. In a paper published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, archeologist and volcanologists show that the shards of black glass found in the skull of a young man who died when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD are in fact his vitrified brain. "This is totally counterintuitive," said Guido Giordano, a volcanologist at the Roma...

Nearly 2,000 years after a young man died in the Vesuvius volcanic eruption, scientists have discovered that his brain was preserved when it turned to glass in an extremely hot cloud of ash. Researchers found the glass in 2020 and speculated that it was a fossilised brain but did not know how it had formed. 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. Scientists now believe a cloud of...

For several years now, we've been following a tantalizing story indicating that the high heat of the ash cloud generated when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD was sufficiently hot to turn one of the victim's brains into glass. It remains a matter of debate in the archeological community, but a fresh analysis of the physical properties of the glass-like material found in the remains lends more evidence to the hypothesis, as detailed in a new paper published in the journal Scientific Reports. As previously reported, the eruption of Mt....

The glassy material was found inside the man's skull in Herculaneum. Researchers state that it was created by a super-hot ash cloud from Vesuvius that preceded its pyroclastic flows. In A.D. 79, a man who died in Mount Vesuvius' eruption near Pompeii had a rare transformation: His brain seemingly turned into glass. But scientists have long debated how it happened, because the pyroclastic flows of rock fragments, ash and gas that buried him would not have been hot enough, nor cooled quickly enough, to "glassify" or vitrify the man's brain....