This is what a man’s brain looks like after he has been converted into glass has been converted into glass

Don’t worry, he probably didn’t feel it.

The Cataclysmic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius In 79 AD, researchers and historians have fascinated for centuries. Since the early 1700s, engineers have excavated the remains of the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, flash frozen in hills of volcanic axis.

And of all the stories that were drawn from the rubble, a 20 -year -old man whose brains who have melted in glass is the most mystify.

A piece of glass in the preserved skull of the Herculaneum -man was first discovered in 2020 and came from the back of the study that the temperature in the two doomed cities on some points during the cataclysm more than the Cataclysm surpassed.

Researchers were surprised because at that temperature brain material had to melt in Goo, not solidified in glass. Of the approximately 2,000 bodies that were excavated from the Vesuvian ruins, only this brain were stored in this way.

Thanks to a paper published earlier this year in the New England Journal of MedicineWe can even see what this glass -collected brain looks like.

This made the issue of How The head of this unfortunate soul came to keep a piece of glass, something of a flash point for archaeologists and scientists who study the volcanic event. A number of hypotheses have emerged, such as a hypotheses that the man’s brain set was slowly stewed like Osso Buco.

Now a new analysis has found a team of researchers from the Roma Tre University “compelling evidence that these are human brain residues, consisting of organic glass formed at high temperatures, a process of preservation that has never before been documented for human or animal tissue, neither brain or other species.”

The study sheds new light on the process that the man’s brain has saved for thousands of years, what Ars Technica Notes are very unusual.

Researchers state that the man was indeed fried by a stream of Superhot ash while he lay in his bed, which heated his brain to the temperature needed to produce melted glass that fragment it in chunks. Although most brain fragments were badly damaged, some people survived the total destruction thanks to the unique position of the man’s skull and spine at the time of his death – which also explains why he was the only Herculaneumian who won the Glass Lottery.

While the air returned to an ambient temperature, it quickly cooled with hundreds of degrees, that is then one of the remaining brainwells of the young man became a fixed mass.

From there, some of his body was buried by layers of melted ashes, rock and gas that flowed over Herculaneum at lower temperatures than in Pompei, so that the glass brain of the poor man had thousands of years in the future ogle.

It is a fascinating find with enormous implications for a variety of fields, from forensic biology to volcanology to Roman history – and let’s face it, a creepy curiosity, even because of the standards of the horrors of Mt. Vesuvius.

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