Cryogenics

by Ano Nymous
(Las Vegas, NV, USA)

The Ethics of the Big Chill and Frosty Frontiers - Wonder if you could survive a trip inside a giant freezer or if those animals in Ice Age had a secret trick for staying warm? Here's how the super-cold shapes our world and how you can protect it with your own heart.

Tell us your story, Ano: Many years ago, way before animal rights activists were overly militant, a friend and I decided to try to preserve insects and fish by freezing them. Our goal was to see if any of them could be brought back to life upon thawing.

Our hypothesis was that some insects could survive freezing while vertebrates such as fish could not.

We set out to catch a few crickets, dig for earthworms and trap a few moths. We also picked up a $0.10 gold fish or 2 to test out the Fishy portion of the hypothesis.

We then placed these animals into the freezer section of our kitchen refrigerator. After checking on these critters numerous times, we decided to watch some reruns of Gilligan's Island and eat.

Several hours later, we checked on our experiment. None of the animals appered to be alive.

We slowly thawed them out by putting them in the refrigerator and then setting them on the counter waiting for any signs of life.

Finally, we decided to add in a power transformer from a train set. By hooking up two wires to the crickets, we increased the voltage slowly. The legs twitched but the cricket didn't show any other signs of life. We repeated the shocking part on the fish, the earthwork -- which was very delicate after freezing, but alas not one animal came back to life.

Thus, our hypothesis was proven correct in the case of the fish - would not survive, but false for the other guys.

Barry's Response - Ahh, Ano, the things we do in the name of science.

Ethix has kinda taken the fun outta everything, hasn't it? just kidding

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Curiosity and Cryogenics: The Deep Freeze

Let's be real. Most textbooks treat science like a dusty museum, but real science happens in the messy "don't tell mom" experiments in the garage. In our conversation about freezing crickets and goldfish, we get to the heart of cryogenics—the study of materials at extremely low temperatures.

1. Big Chill Biology In a freezer, you're not just making fish-sicles. You're challenging the laws of entropy. When the legs were shocked with a train transformer, they twitched. It's just electricity jumping through frozen muscle; that's not life.
   
   What happened to them? When water freezes, it expands and forms jagged crystals. The ice knives shred the fish's delicate cell walls. Some creatures (like the Wood Frog) make their own antifreeze from glucose. This is the kind of environmental science that matters-how nature adapts.
2. The sky's freezing Inventors see the atmosphere as a massive cryogenic engine. Temperatures plummet in the stratosphere. Our air is filtered by this cold trap. We'd lose all our water to space if the air didn't get cold.
   • Here's an air quality insight: Cold air is denser. A temperature inversion traps pollution near the ground.
   • While mainstream groups scream about the planet boiling, skeptics point out that cold kills more people (and crickets) than heat ever will. It's important to respect the cold. Preserves. Cleans.
3. Counter-narrative The militant activists mentioned earlier want to bubble wrap the world. The environment is treated like a fragile glass vase. But the Earth is tough and self-healing.
   
   There's a reboot button in the aquatic environment. Think about the Great Flood. Some skeptics say we overestimate our power to break the planet. Let a kid freeze a cricket to understand life! The next generation of air quality consultants and engineers will be curious instead of just protesting.
4. Spark Ethics Is freezing a moth mean? It's possible. Is it meaner to leave a generation of kids scientifically ignorant? We should treat life with compassion, but we also need to poke, prod, and wonder. If you believe in Ice Age movies or the literal Ice Age, the lesson remains: Life finds a way to move.

Cryogenics: Why You Should Care

We've got to stop thinking about fixing the weather and start thinking about harnessing it. Could we purify water with the natural cold of the upper atmosphere? Would it be possible to build ice batteries that store energy without chemicals? The future belongs to the kids who hook up a train transformer to a frozen cricket and see what happens.

How do you feel about it?

Do you think it's okay to experiment on insects for science, or has "Ethix" taken the fun out of it? Have you ever tried to revive something? Let's start a debate below.