Free Republic

Explanation: A cosmic dust grain plowing through the upper atmosphere much faster than a falling leaf created this brilliant meteor streak. In a serendipitous moment, the sublime night sky view was captured from the resort island of Capri, in the Bay of Naples, on the evening of February 8. Looking across the bay, the camera faces northeast toward the lights of Naples and surrounding cities. Pointing toward the horizon, the meteor streak by chance ends above the silhouette of Mount Vesuvius. One of planet Earth's most famous volcanos, an eruption of Mount Vesuvius destroyed the city of Pompeii in 79...

About 400 years ago, a throng of dusty workmen laid down their shovels and huddled around an ancient painted wall -- a fresco, technically -- unearthed in a tunnel near Italy's Bay of Naples. The men were at work on a massive construction project, burrowing through a hill to build a canal for a local armament factory and mill. No one expected to find fine art. But as the workmen dug deeper into the hill, they encountered wonder upon wonder -- house walls painted blood red and sunflower yellow, fragments of carved inscriptions, pieces of Roman statues. The architect supervising...

Decorated cups and fine silver platters were once again polished and on display Monday as archaeologists unveiled an ancient Roman dining set that lay hidden for two millennia in the volcanic ash of Pompeii.In 2000, archaeologists found a wicker basket containing the silverware in the ruins of a thermal bath near the remains of the Roman city, said Pietro Giovanni Guzzo, head of Pompeii's archaeological office.The basket was filled with the volcanic ash that buried the city when Mount Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79. When experts X-rayed it, they saw the objects preserved in the ash, which killed thousands of...

It's hot storage. Millions of years before volcanic ash entombed the Roman town of Pompeii, a group of dinosaurs succumbed to a similar fate. China's famous feathered dinosaur fossils owe their exquisite preservation to volcanic eruptions between about 130 and 120 million years ago. The Jehol fossils have transformed our understanding of dinosaurs by showing that the relatives of Velociraptor and T. rex had a feather-like body covering, like birds. The Jehol deposits also preserved soft tissue from early mammals and flowering plants. Baoyu Jiang of Nanjing University, China, and his colleagues think they know why the remains are so...