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Re:Biological Miracle – Wood Frog by PhasmaFelis on Friday November 15, 2024 @11:57PM (#42154406)
Interestingly, you can freeze a rat solid in liquid nitrogen--completely solid right through--and then thaw them out in a microwave and they actually survive. Well, many of them survive. For a while. Okay, it's not good for the rats but it's still crazy that it works.
Re:Biological Miracle – Wood Frog by plastic3169 on Saturday November 16, 2024 @02:20AM (#42155016)
Where can I read more about this? If this was a fact I think people would be way more excited about cryonics. Casually browsing wikipedia suggests that we are not there yet with the ability to thawn large animals or even organs.
Re:Biological Miracle – Wood Frog by blue_pants on Saturday November 16, 2024 @03:25AM (#42155246)
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lovelock

"In the mid-1950s, Lovelock experimented with the cryopreservation of rodents, determining that hamsters could be frozen and revived successfully.[14] Hamsters were frozen with 60% of the water in the brain crystallised into ice with no adverse effects recorded. Other organs were shown to be susceptible to damage.[15]"

And there's a Tom Scott's interview with James Lovelock:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tdiKTSdE9Y

Re:Biological Miracle – Wood Frog by mock-possum on Saturday November 16, 2024 @05:22AM (#42155657)
Wouldn’t it be crazy if only worked on hamsters
Re:Biological Miracle – Wood Frog by terribleperson on Saturday November 16, 2024 @02:47AM (#42155115)
I can't source this because I read it years ago, but I believe that there is some science that says that a major factor (not the only major factor, but a major factor) is body mass and volume. Essentially, the speed at which the core organs go from operating temperature to frozen is crucial, and it's also important for them to be deprived of oxygen when that happens. Humans are just... too big.
Re:Biological Miracle – Wood Frog by sriacha on Saturday November 16, 2024 @11:01AM (#42157023)
There are ways to adjust cooling rates... for example route the blood externally and chill it like they do in some kinds of surgery.
Re:Biological Miracle – Wood Frog by tim333 on Saturday November 16, 2024 @06:30AM (#42155875)
I was checking youtube to see if I could see that happen but failed - they were all about thawing rats to feed to snakes. There was however a goldfish dropped in liquid nitrogen briefly and recovering https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwolYFGM9pU
Re:Biological Miracle – Wood Frog by PhasmaFelis on Sunday November 17, 2024 @04:00AM (#42162931)
These experiments are exactly why people were excited about cryonics, until they realized that it doesn't work on anything much larger than a rat.

You have to thaw them right down to the core very quickly; you need to get the heart pumping or the thawed extremities will die with no bloodflow. There's no way to heat a human's core that fast without causing unsurvivable burns to their outside. (Even the rats wound up with nasty, sometimes fatal burns.)