Articles

{"articles":{"total":1,"items":[{"ID":2,"status":40,"author_ID":1,"category_ID":1,"date":"2025-03-01 08:11:44","title":"A brain turned to glass: how the vesuvius eruption preserved a human miracle","featured_media":"https:\/\/data.paperleap.com\/mod_blog\/2\/m_688d0c47f330dlbO.jpg","content":"When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, it didn't just bury the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum\u2014it flash-froze a moment in time. Among the many tragic stories entombed in volcanic ash, one stands out for its sheer, almost cinematic strangeness: the discovery of a human brain that turned to glass.\n\nYes, you read that right. Not fossilized, not mummified\u2014glass.\n\nThis astonishing phenomenon was recently described by a team of researchers from Italy and Germany in a 2025 paper published in *Scientific Reports*. The lead author, Guido Giordano from Roma Tre University, worked alongside experts in volcanology, materials science, and forensic biology to investigate what happened to the brain of a man who died in Herculaneum, one of the towns devastated by Vesuvius.\n\n### A Guardian and his final moments\n\nThe victim in question was likely a young man, around 20 years old, found lying in his bed inside the Collegium Augustalium\u2014a building devoted to the cult of Emperor Augustus.\n\n\n\nArchaeologists had long known that this site was close to the volcano\u2019s deadly pyroclastic flows, but what they found inside his skull was truly shocking: black, shiny fragments resembling obsidian.\n\nThese fragments weren\u2019t just unusual\u2014they turned out to be the vitrified (glassified) remains of his brain and spinal cord.\n\n\n### A one-in-two-millennia find\n\nArchaeologists first noticed something shiny in the victim\u2019s skull back in the 1960s, but only recently did anyone prove it was truly vitrified brain tissue. This winter, an international team led by volcanologist **Guido Giordano** of Roma Tre University published the full story in *Scientific Reports* (February 27 2025). His co-authors span fields and borders: materials scientist **Joachim Deubener** and colleagues at Technische Universit\u00e4t Clausthal in Germany, biomedical researcher **PierPaolo Petrone** at the University of Naples Federico II, and several others in Italy\u2019s national research institutes. ([Nature][1])\n\n### Glass where biology should be\n\nNormally, glass forms when a molten material cools so quickly that crystals don\u2019t have time to grow\u2014think volcanic obsidian or your kitchen windowpanes. Organic tissue is different: it\u2019s mostly water, so scientists only \u201cvitrify\u201d organs by plunging them into liquid nitrogen at \u2013196 \u00b0C. Warm it up, and the glassy solid melts right back into squishy flesh. In other words, you don\u2019t get room-temperature brain glass\u2014unless a volcano rewrites the rules. \n\n### The volcanic recipe: flash-fry, then deep-freeze (sort of)\n\nGiordano\u2019s team reconstructed the horror-movie timing:\n\n1. **A super-heated ash cloud** detached from Vesuvius\u2019 main plume and tore through Herculaneum at **well above 510 \u00b0C**\u2014hot enough to boil bodily fluids in an instant.\n2. **Seconds later,** the cloud dissipated into open air. Temperatures around the victim\u2019s skull plummeted at roughly **1,000 \u00b0C per second**, locking the partially liquefied brain into a glassy state before it could decompose.\n3. **Minutes to hours later,** cooler (yet still deadly) surges buried the city in ash measuring up to 465 \u00b0C\u2014hot, but not hot enough to re-melt the newly formed organic glass. \n\nThat rapid \u201cfire-and-ice\u201d combo is why experts call this the only confirmed case of natural human tissue vitrified and preserved on Earth.\n\n### Peering inside a glass mind\n\nUnder an electron microscope, those midnight-black chips still show delicate neural networks\u2014axons, cell bodies, even the ghostly shapes of neurons. Finding such microscopic detail in a 2,000-year-old specimen is like opening a time capsule far smaller than a grain of rice. Beyond the wow factor, it offers bio-archaeologists a pristine snapshot of Roman-era health and gives materials scientists a brand-new, carbon-based glass to ponder. ([Nature][1])\n\n### Why it matters today\nBeyond the obvious \u201cwow\u201d factor, this discovery stretches across disciplines. For volcanologists, it offers new clues about the dynamics and temperatures of ash clouds. For forensic scientists, it challenges our assumptions about how the human body responds to extreme environments. And for archaeologists, it's a hauntingly intimate look into one person's final moments in the chaos of a historic disaster.\n\n[1]: https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41598-025-88894-5?utm_source=chatgpt.com \u0022Unique formation of organic glass from a human brain in ... - Nature\u0022\n[5]: https:\/\/www.smithsonianmag.com\/smart-news\/mount-vesuvius-boiled-its-victims-blood-and-caused-their-skulls-explode-180970504\/?utm_source=chatgpt.com \u0022Mount Vesuvius Boiled Its Victims' Blood and Caused Their Skulls to ...\u0022","stats_views":11,"stats_likes":0,"stats_saves":0,"author_firstname":"Paperleap","author_lastname":null,"category_name":"General","sID":"2","slug":"a-brain-turned-to-glass-how-the-vesuvius-eruption-preserved-a-human-miracle-2","category_sID":"1","category_slug":"general-1","author_slug":"paperleap-1"}]},"head":{"title":"Articles","description":"Articles"},"theme":{"description":"Articles"}}