The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD froze tragic scenes of life in time. Among them, a rare phenomenon: the vitrification of a victim's brain, preserved as black glass. This discovery, made

The hard skull and spine of the man—whose remains archeologists found still in his bed in the town of Herculaneum—likely protected the brain from complete thermal breakdown, allowing fragments to form into organic glass.

Researchers found organic glass in the skull of a volcano victim, indicating the extreme and unique environment triggered by Vesuvius's eruption in 79 CE.