Cracking an Icy Mystery -This is the way a wood frog freezes.

washingtonpost.com ^ | Sunday, December 12, 2004 | David A. Fahrenthold

[Twinkie]

Their radar was loused up, though, and they flew in the wrong direction. Didn't you notice that?!?

[CROSSHIGHWAYMAN]

Catching flies with your tongue would be pretty cool also!

Throw in some steroids to the mix and a few professional baseball players could catch pop flies with their tongues.

[Gritty]

Wood frogs were designed to be frozen solid. People weren't.

Good research may yield some useful things but forget about thawing out those cryogenic hopefuls. They're dead, Jim!

[asgardshill]

I'm sure the flies did a lot better than I would have if somebody had dripped water on me and stuck me in a freezer somewhere :)

[The Great RJ]

Good thing John Kerry wasn't elected president since the French habit of eating frog legs would then again be popular in DC and thousand of these little creatures would have become amputees.

[StACase]

I did this with houseflies when I was a kid. They froze solid in the freezer, and I thawed them with Mom's hair dryer the next day; they buzzed off with no apparent ill effects.

Me too, except I tossed them into a spider's web. Great show that.

[asgardshill]

I haven't fished for crawdads with a strip of raw bacon in a long, long time. Used to spend hours down by the crick doing that.

[Riley]

Maybe this is where 'Crunchy Frog' candy comes from.

[spinestein]

hilarious.

[nuconvert]

"The bonus might be basketball superstars "swamping" the sport because of improved jumping ability."

Yes, but they'd never make it as attractive spokesmen because they'd be all warty and have a tendency to croak. *ribbit*

[tricky_k_1972]

From what I have read, water seems to be the key, if the cells drop to less than 60% of their normal water level than the ice crystals that for naturally in the blood stream outside the cells begin damaging the cells and major organs.

You don't have to use the DNA; you need to duplicate the chemical and cooling process that happens naturally in the wood frog. This seems simple enough and straight forward when you are dealing with the organs rather than the entire body.

The problem seems to be getting enough glucose to each cell while bringing down the temperature to about -7 DEG C.

Unlike what we use to believe that you had to immediately cool the entire body or organ to a low enough temperature to prevent the ice crystals from forming (think -1000 DEG C) to prevent ice from crystallizing, these folks are doing the opposite. A gradual cooling to slightly below freezing while stuffing enough glucose to each individual cell thru ought the organ to prevent them from freezing.

A much more detailed explanation here:

http://www.exploratorium.edu/frogs/woodfrog/

[nothingnew]

"Here's an amphibian that has solved the problem of cryo-preserving its organs -- all of them, simultaneously,"

Uhmmmm...the amphibian didn't solve anything. It's Creator did.

FMCDH(BITS)

[festus]

The normally pliant and slimy amphibian becomes for lack of a better word -- slushy.

Yum. a Frog Slushy !!!

Beats the heck out of a Cherry Coke Slushy. And Apu agrees with me on that !

[Verginius Rufus]

It's not easy being green.

[Libertina]

LOL Never thought of that experiment! Pretty creative ;)

[AdmSmith]

The problem seems to be getting enough glucose to each cell

It is much better with Trehalose; the disaccharide composed of two glucose molecules.