Saturday, November 20, 2010

Freezing Frogs


Freezing to Un-Death

The idea that people could freeze themselves, hoping to stave off death and instead thaw sometime in the future, is at this point an element left to science fiction. While some people have tried to freeze themselves (most notably, this list includes baseball great Ted Williams, and that reportedly went badly) so far, no one has thawed successfully.

The wood frog, pictured right, has found better luck.

Instead of migrating to warmer places or creating a warm place in which to hibernate locally, wood frogs just kind of blend in and let the outside environment take over. When their surroundings freeze, so do the frogs. When the frost thaws, so, again, do the frogs. And wood frogs survive the process.

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