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503 points thunderbong | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.211s | source
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abound ◴[] No.42154107[source]
> Nobody yet understands what starts the wood frog’s heart after being frozen and inert for the entire northern winter.

To me, that's the most fascinating part of the (already quite fascinating) story. Frog is frozen solid, there is no (to our knowledge) heartbeat or brain activity. It thaws and something happens that gets it going again.

I have trouble imagining what that mechanism could even look like. Tiny portion of brain responsible for keeping track of frozen-ness? Some chemical signaling from within the body cavity?

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PittleyDunkin ◴[] No.42154392[source]
The frog is not frozen solid.
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PhasmaFelis ◴[] No.42154406[source]
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.
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plastic3169 ◴[] No.42155016[source]
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.
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1. PhasmaFelis ◴[] No.42162931[source]
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.)