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Brains turned to glass? Just how hot was the Mount Vesuvius eruption?

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Fragment of glassy black material found in the skull of a victim of Mount Vesuvius. –
 Petrone et al./NEJM

Anything that has the ability to cause the average global temperature to go up instantly, is something worth noting. And that’s just what happened when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE.

There has been some new research come out about just how hot it may have been. In a new short paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, some 100 skeletons that had been excavated were closely examined revealed that one particular victim’s brain matter had been vitrified, i.e., fused into glass.

Usually, according to the authors, such brain matter would be “saponified” by the extreme heat—that is, it turned to soap (glycerol and fatty acids).

While not everyone agrees with the findings in the paper, we do know one thing: Mount Vesuvius was HOT!

Interested in learning more be sure to check out: ars Technica for more.

America, Here Now and Gone Later?

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Many times in history have people talked about how America could be here today and gone tomorrow. One take on it, Niall Ferguson offers his take.

LATimes – America, The Fragile Empire

If empires are complex systems that sooner or later succumb to sudden and catastrophic malfunctions, what are the implications for the United States today? First, debating the stages of decline may be a waste of time — it is a precipitous and unexpected fall that should most concern policymakers and citizens. Second, most imperial falls are associated with fiscal crises. Alarm bells should therefore be ringing very loudly indeed as the United States contemplates a deficit for 2010 of more than $1.5 trillion — about 11% of GDP, the biggest since World War II.

These numbers are bad, but in the realm of political entities, the role of perception is just as crucial. In imperial crises, it is not the material underpinnings of power that really matter but expectations about future power. The fiscal numbers cited above cannot erode U.S. strength on their own, but they can work to weaken a long-assumed faith in the United States’ ability to weather any crisis.

One day, a seemingly random piece of bad news — perhaps a negative report by a rating agency — will make the headlines during an otherwise quiet news cycle. Suddenly, it will be not just a few policy wonks who worry about the sustainability of U.S. fiscal policy but the public at large, not to mention investors abroad. It is this shift that is crucial: A complex adaptive system is in big trouble when its component parts lose faith in its viability.

Over the last three years, the complex system of the global economy flipped from boom to bust — all because a bunch of Americans started to default on their subprime mortgages, thereby blowing huge holes in the business models of thousands of highly leveraged financial institutions. The next phase of the current crisis may begin when the public begins to reassess the credibility of the radical monetary and fiscal steps that were taken in response.

Neither interest rates at zero nor fiscal stimulus can achieve a sustainable recovery if people in the United States and abroad collectively decide, overnight, that such measures will ultimately lead to much higher inflation rates or outright default. Bond yields can shoot up if expectations change about future government solvency, intensifying an already bad fiscal crisis by driving up the cost of interest payments on new debt. Just ask Greece.

Ask Russia too. Fighting a losing battle in the mountains of the Hindu Kush has long been a harbinger of imperial fall. What happened 20 years ago is a reminder that empires do not in fact appear, rise, reign, decline and fall according to some recurrent and predictable life cycle. It is historians who retrospectively portray the process of imperial dissolution as slow-acting. Rather, empires behave like all complex adaptive systems. They function in apparent equilibrium for some unknowable period. And then, quite abruptly, they collapse.