The ash of a volcano changed the man’s brain into a glass

In 79 A younger man was lying in bed in the city of Herculaneum, when Vesuvius volcano dumped the rock and a huge hot ash cloud. The cities of Herculaneum and Pompej were destroyed, and the man died like thousands of other residents.

However, there is something extraordinary in the young man: his brain turned into a glass in the eruption.

According to Italian researchers, this is the only human tissue ever found that is known to have become a glass.

In the twenties Already in the 1960s, the body of the man was found in Herculaneum near the current city of Naples. The man had been lying in a wooden bed in a building dedicated to an emperor Augustus for worship.

Decades later, in October 2018, an Italian anthropologist Pier Paul He was able to study the remains of the body and noticed something glittering in a broken skull.

The discovery was dark glass.

Scientists report its discovery in 2020 in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine.

At that time However, they were unable to explain how the brain was glazed.

Now The group has taken samples of glass and tells New results in Scientific Reports.

This is a phenomenon called vitrification, where the tissue burned at high temperature becomes a glass or shimmering glaze.

A recent calorimetric analysis that measured the amount of heat in the chemical reaction shows that the temperature in which the brain turned into a glass has been well above 510 degrees Celsius.

According to researchers, this suggests that the body was exposed to a much hotter short -term pyroclastic current. The extremely hot pyroclastic current quickly weakened, and the cooling happened very quickly, researchers write.

The bones of a man’s skull and spine were likely to protect the brain from complete destruction.

Glass rarely occurs in nature because it requires special conditions.

In order to become a glass of glass, its liquid shape must be cooled fast enough to prevent it from crystallizing when it becomes solid. There must be a large difference in temperature of the substance and its environment and the substance must become clearly firmly at a higher temperature than the environment.

Glass The brainbirds are about a centimeter in width.

The group examined the glass of the brain and spinal cord with an electron microscope. The sight was surprised by the researchers, the editor of the study Guido Giordano tells AFP news agency.

The glass was distinguished by “the complex network of nerve cells, axons and other nerve cell structures,” exceptionally well -preserved, “Giordano and his colleagues write in their article.

Axons are nerve cell export branches that carry the impulse forward to another nerve cell.

Herculaneumin The destruction is less unknown to the general public than the nearby Pompej.

The residents of Herculaneum had a little more time to react to the eruption of Vesuvius than Pompej residents. The residents of Herculaneum tried to escape the natural disaster in the Mediterranean.

Researchers suspect that the young man worked as a guard in a building dedicated to the worship of Emperor Augustus.

Because of his responsibilities, the guard may not try to escape, but received the ash cloud in the first wave. That is why it was his brain that could turn into a glass.