February
28
/ 2025
A young Roman man was sleeping peacefully in his bed one night nearly 2,000 years ago, when a cloud of scorching-hot ash descended from the top of the erupting Mount Vesuvius to smother him and turn his brain to glass. This happened in the city of Herculaneum, just down the road from Pompeii, in October of 79 AD. This is the conclusion of a team of Italian scientists, who recently finished their study of an ancient Roman brain extracted during excavations at Herculaneum, a neighbor of Pompeii that was destroyed by the same eruption that doomed the latter city. Their analysis showed that this young man’s brain had indeed been converted into glass, a remarkable outcome that had never been
