> 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.
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://en.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.
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.
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.
[0] https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/squid-empire-danna-staaf/11...
Apart from ice I guess.
I don't think we're on the same page about the word protection either.
So, can we start an X Prize to read the contents of this brain?
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.
If you pass out under water because you run out of oxygen you will immediately resume breathing and drown.
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.
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.
But bring to machine interfaces are an entirely different thing altogether and they test it with controls and training unknown examples and then proceeding to prediction based off of training.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/5/4/23708162/neurote...
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.
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?
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.
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.
4 years of Latin in school finally came in useful!
> 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
Interestingly, there is a glass-like form of carbon (just carbon):
“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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> Classics such as Marcus Aurelius have arguably been co-opted into the alt-right pipeline.
What else from Rome (or Greece) is used this way? Is this related to why some SV leaders embrace the Stoics?
Think more "something remained" than "some thing remained"
So it's likely that the ones who remained and died were either stubborn or disadvantaged somehow, as well as those just unlucky.
[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)
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