They show that the eruption of Vesuvius crystallized a brain

In the year 79, the eruption of the Vesuvius volcano covered the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum and its inhabitants with ashes and rocks. Numerous archaeological discoveries have been made in the ruins, including in 2018, the re-examination of some remains and the observation that the brain of a man was preserved in a way unknown until then, as it appeared to be crystallized. A study has shown that the brain has crystallized. The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports in open form, also concludes how this process occurred.

The article confirms that the brain and part of the spinal cord were transformed into organic crystals by the action of heat and ashes. They confirm that this is an isolated event and, based on the results of several physical and chemical tests, they also provide the hypothesis that explains the crystallization process dute.Era, they reject other means of conservation such as saponification.

The brain crystallized inside the skull, and in the images that have been inserted in the article, made by scanning with the electron microscope, neural structures such as axons are clearly distinguished. The researchers believe that the temperature and duration of the first ash cloud caused by the eruption were key to the brain’s crystallization in this way. In fact, it has been experimentally calculated that the temperature was very high, above 510°C, but lasted only a short time. Thanks to the protection of the skull, the structure of the brain changed without being completely burned. On cooling to one, it crystallized.

The researchers emphasize that no other tissues, human or animal, that have been stored in vitrified form are known, so they present their results as hypotheses and do not rule out that future studies better explain how this isolated process occurred.