[HN Gopher] Man's brain turned to glass by hot Vesuvius ash cloud
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Man's brain turned to glass by hot Vesuvius ash cloud
Author : tartoran
Score : 205 points
Date : 2025-02-27 17:32 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| bell-cot wrote:
| > ... 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 wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| Also, 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 wrote:
| Would wind direction have made the difference for
| pyroclastic flows? I thought flow direction was largely
| driven by local topology.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Not 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://e
| n.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 wrote:
| Thanks 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 wrote:
| Lots of glass brains?
| stronglikedan wrote:
| LPT: A volcano can only erupt in your vicinity if you're in
| the vicinity of a volcano.
| glenstein wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I 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?
| ETH_start wrote:
| Decoding any part of his memories would be the greatest
| archeological coup in history, by a massive margin.
|
| By some estimates, the cerebral cortex can store hundreds of
| terabytes of information. Recovering even 0.1% of that would
| amount to possibly hundreds of GB of information about life
| in a major Roman urban center.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Or hundreds of GB of "how to stand up without falling" or
| "what fish taste like" or "don't grab thorny bushes".
| devmor wrote:
| Or "how to contract muscle here to make lungs intake air"
| throwway120385 wrote:
| I thought a lot of this stuff was basically below
| conscious thought. You can interrupt it but otherwise the
| urge to breathe and the corresponding breathing proceeds
| apace. I've been told that in ventilator-dependent
| patients if the ventilator has too low a breath rate they
| still have the urge to breathe and feel it quite
| painfully until the ventilator takes a breath for them.
|
| If you pass out under water because you run out of oxygen
| you will immediately resume breathing and drown.
| Talanes wrote:
| A key difference is that we did know how to read non-burnt
| scrolls before that.
| intrasight wrote:
| In 1000 years perhaps we will understand how the mind works
| and scientists will take out this glass brain and read it.
| deadbabe wrote:
| What 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 wrote:
| Almost 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 wrote:
| Any compilations of such ideas?
| intrasight wrote:
| I 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.
| akurtzhs wrote:
| Yes, can't remember the name, but there's an old short
| story about alien explorers who find a dead Earth with
| futuristic buildings.
|
| They revive a knight who attacks them and gets killed, a
| hippie who they kill off after questioning, and finally a
| future human with psychic powers who steals the revival
| device.
| glenstein wrote:
| 1000 years? We already have brain to machine interfaces
| that seem able to interpret words with 50%ish accuracy
| and sometimes even beyond.
|
| By no means perfect but it's surprisingly close. Granted
| I think that interpretation is from looking at stuff like
| electrical activation and not just brain structure itself
| and the fossil is the latter.
| freedomben wrote:
| It may be a bit anticlimactic when we discover that he
| was just thinking about food and sex
| dwighttk wrote:
| Roman Empire
| intrasight wrote:
| I developed a theory a few years ago (probably during the
| pandemic when I would go on a lot long walks alone) that
| there are many human information artifacts that are preserved
| that we haven't yet discovered.
|
| Take sound waves. When they come into contact with matter,
| most of the waves energy turns into heat, yes? But might a
| mechanical imprint be made onto a surface? For example tree
| sap that hadn't yet completely solidified. Could we resurrect
| the roar of a dinosaur?
| jcims wrote:
| That's a fun one! And the reality is that there almost
| certainly *is* information out there, it's just a function
| of us figuring out how to pull the signal out of the noise.
| (No pun intended :P)
| intrasight wrote:
| Perfect pun!
|
| This research project therefore entails spreading some
| gooey substance on the trees in a forest, playing some
| known voice recording or songs, letting the gooey
| substance harden, and then training the AI model to look
| for that signal.
|
| You know someone's gonna do this someday.
| thom wrote:
| It's not clear that enough information really survives:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeoacoustics
| intrasight wrote:
| Wow! I had no idea that the concept had been explored for
| over a hundred years.
| glenstein wrote:
| >Take sound waves. When they come into contact with matter,
| most of the waves energy turns into heat, yes? But might a
| mechanical imprint be made onto a surface? For example tree
| sap that hadn't yet completely solidified. Could we
| resurrect the roar of a dinosaur?
|
| I think it's a fascinating idea and something like that
| instinct has a "there" there. I suspect that, as another
| commenter is noting, you probably lose too much information
| in most cases, but it's intriguing enough to merit
| consideration.
|
| I think I'm sympathetic because I have a version of that
| too - I'm curious about the idea that the earth's light,
| sent out into space, may in some instances be recoverable
| due to spacetime curvature sending old light back to us.
| Imagine seeing a stream of light livestreaming what the
| earth looked like millions of years ago! But my
| understanding is that light spreads out more and more the
| further it goes so it's not likely to hold together as a
| decipherable image, but I still wonder about a middle
| ground of what might be partially recoverable.
| jawilson2 wrote:
| This reminds me of the short story Time Shards:
|
| https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/time-shards/
| bell-cot wrote:
| Many parts of the charred scrolls _are_ readable...but those
| are in vastly better physical shape (comparing "before" &
| "after") than the few pea-sized cinders remaining of this
| brain.
|
| Plus - information storage in the brain is both distributed,
| and micro-scale.
|
| At some point, you are trying to recover compressed data from
| a HD where only one or two bits can be still read from each
| 512-byte sector - basic information theory says that the only
| good-enough tech to do the job would be a time machine.
| MadnessASAP wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| It would lend to some very FAA-style euphemisms. Civilization-
| Scale Cold Storage Archival Backup == nuclear winter
| yndoendo wrote:
| There 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/11...
| moondrek wrote:
| Being 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
| fermisea wrote:
| Not 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 wrote:
| Tons 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.
| calibas wrote:
| From 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
| thund wrote:
| Nature article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213563
| mook wrote:
| And Ars Technica:
| https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/02/study-hot-vesuvian-a...
| kazinator wrote:
| Supposedly 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
| unwind wrote:
| Thanks, 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 wrote:
| The 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:
|
| _"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: _"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 wrote:
| > 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.
| gpvos wrote:
| But the article says "glass", not "a glass".
| kazinator wrote:
| However, I've not been able to find much on carbon-oxgen
| based glass. It's possible to make glass out of CO2 gas,
| under high pressure. However, at standard pressure, the glass
| boils off into CO2.
|
| There are definitely some unconnected dots in the story. I
| have a sense that what is needed is to reproduce this
| allegedly vitrefied organic material in the lab.
|
| Could this actually be more like a plastic? Some
| thermoplastics share characteristics with the category of
| glass, like having amorphous structure and a gradual
| softening resembling glass transition temperature.
| Conversely, we could say that glass, such as a common silica
| glass, is a kind of thermoplastic.
|
| In:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoplastic
|
| we have language like _" [a]bove its glass transition
| temperature and below its melting point, the physical
| properties of a thermoplastic change drastically without an
| associated phase change."_
|
| Also:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass#Polymers
|
| _" Many polymer thermoplastics familiar to everyday use are
| glasses."_
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass#Non-silicate_glasses
|
| _" Besides common silica-based glasses many other inorganic
| and organic materials may also form glasses, including [...]
| nitrates, carbonates, plastics, acrylic, and many other
| substances."_
| create-username wrote:
| Crystallising his memory and mental processes
| byyoung3 wrote:
| i wonder if this guy ever imagined he would be on hacker news
| keepamovin wrote:
| Well if he didn't back then - he did now.
| intrasight wrote:
| He'll know after his avatar is a resurrected from his preserved
| brain.
| thom wrote:
| The true Roko's Basilisk: being subjected to social media
| scrutiny thousands of years after one's death.
| happosai wrote:
| That would be Ea-Nasir
| riffic wrote:
| there's nothing to wonder. He never would have imagined that,
| it is entirely impossible.
| byyoung3 wrote:
| you guys really didn't get the joke did you
| tempodox wrote:
| Are you disparaging early Roman hackers?
| zakki wrote:
| Is it why in Stargate advanced alien computer/memory is from a
| crystal?
| taneq wrote:
| Nope, that's because glowy crystalline or glassy things look
| super fancy and futuristically high tech.
| rsynnott wrote:
| There 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 wrote:
| Why is it dead
| ben_w wrote:
| Flash 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
| rsynnott wrote:
| Some 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.
| ben_w wrote:
| And make for nice props that show up well on a 90s CRT, and
| they fit the Stargate aesthetic that lifted many 60s hippy
| occultist ideas including both "pyramids are too advanced,
| space aliens must have built them"[0] and "crystal skull has
| psychic powers"[1].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariots_of_the_Gods%3F
| (hmm, even the book name sounds like two SG-1 episode titles,
| pilot and when thrmey meet Thor)
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_skull
| keepamovin wrote:
| Are 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.
| jbreckmckye wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| Hehehe - Nice distinction!
| rsynnott wrote:
| ... Oh, in the Pompeii eruption, not, like, breaking news. Given
| the general surreality of 2025 news thus far, would not be
| surprised.
| lupusreal wrote:
| To be fair, it is a very active volcano.
| GTP wrote:
| Now, this is a fossil I would like to have!
| lupusreal wrote:
| Reminds me of the brain of a man that went down with the Swedish
| warship Vasa that was found preserved (turned into soap.)
| 867-5309 wrote:
| there must be millions of glass dinosaur brains deeper than their
| already mustered bone fragments
| jmyeet wrote:
| There 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 wrote:
| When 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.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Too complicated. Americans don't even understand the much
| simpler and (IMHO) sufficient ranked choice voting [1].
| Alaska, a deep red state, sent a Democrat to Congress because
| the voters split their votes between 2 Republican candidates
| because they didn't rank both candidates.
|
| While I think RCV would be better, I still don't think it
| solves the problem. There are a bunch of ways in which our
| system is designed to create a two party system, such as what
| constituionally happens if no candidate gets a majority of
| votes in the electoral college [2].
|
| That aside, look at other countries. Has more than two
| parties really helped in practice? Germany, the UK, Israel
| and France all have 3+ parties in their house of
| representatives equivalent and all have swung to the right.
|
| Practically speaking, we could solve a bunch of our problems
| by simply repealing the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929
| [3], which set the number of House members to 435 and a
| district size of 700k+. This would take a simple majority in
| the House and Senate and would revert district sizes back to
| 30,000. This would kill gerrymandering, practically speaking.
|
| [1]: https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-
| room/news/3624553-re...
|
| [2]: https://www.usa.gov/electoral-college
|
| [3]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reapportionment_Act_of_1929
| error_logic wrote:
| Ranked choice for single-seat elections can create
| situations where your ballot backfires, which is why it has
| been tried and rolled back. It works for proportional
| representation, but then you've got people divided
| ideologically rather than by region and their local
| communities.
|
| The divide by ideology (proportional), or into "safe" one-
| party states and "battleground" states (plurality in the
| US) is the biggest issue, the two parts of the human
| experience losing touch with why the contrasting values
| exist in the first place.
|
| That said, good point on the issue of the size limitation
| on the House.
| gosub100 wrote:
| Once fell down, from volcanic gas.
|
| Soon turned out, I had a brain of glass.
| Detrytus wrote:
| Someone 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
| mjd wrote:
| Sounds awesome, where do I sign up?
| ncr100 wrote:
| Read this article while eating breakfast, hoping to be able to
| continue enjoying breakfast. Failed.
| tempodox wrote:
| On the bright side, you didn't have a volcano erupt on you.
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