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Reanimated Lobsters?
SYFer writes "Trufresh, a Connecticut-based frozen food company claims that lobsters frozen with its special freezing process sometimes come back to life when thawed.
If these claims prove true, will the dubiously regarded field of "cryonics" finally get some respect?" If people were more like lobsters, maybe. The company's success rate at reviving lobsters after short-term freezing (at -40 degrees) is 12 out of 200.
LOBSTER STICKS TO MAGNET
I used to go ice fishing as a kid. We'd just throw the fish on the snow. They'd freeze solid. At home we'd toss them in water and they all came back do life, only to die minutes later. Clearly the article is about something quite different, but I'm not stunned.
If true they could do some selective breeding and increase the survival rate...
Of course, that presumes the ones that survive can still breed, or that usable reproductive material is extracted before freezing.
I worked in Alaska on a crab processing ship, & we used to do the same thing to crabs all the time. You'd toss them in the brine (salt water cooled well below freezing) for a few minutes & they'd come back to life pretty consistently. Crab's (& presumably lobsters as well) are pretty simple life forms, so they respond just fine to the freezing.
Well, as far as practical uses go (with the lobster) this could revolutionize the cooking industry! Imagine being able to have live lobsters available at an instant's notice! No more having to worry about keeping the little buggers alive, just freeze 'em til you need your customer to pick out his lobster, then kill him and cook it!
...
The blurb reminds me of this classic. Only six percent of the lobsters survive being frozen.
On the other hand, I seem to recall watching a PBS "Nature" show which included a bit about a species frog (or toad?) that survived the frozen winter through some sort of hibernation, and I have to wonder if that's similar to what is going on with these lobsters.
In the mean time, I'm going to stay away from the lobster ice cream.
~UP
Eat the Path.
Frozen to death, reanimated, then boiled to death.
just freeze 'em til you need your customer to pick out his lobster, then kill him and cook it!
But if you kill your customer, who will pay for your delicious lobster dinnner?
(Comment is particularly disconcerting coming from a user named "Meneudo"...)
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
It's called flash freezing and it works...in theory...
Problem is, ice crystals form in the soft tissue...in humans, ice crystals form inside of the brain tissue and cause brain damage. This is the problem with cryogenics...
If we fix the ice crystal problem, we still can't fix the damaged tissue in those folks that have frozen their bodies/heads/etc before...
This is why it's pretty dumb to pay to be frozen until we can reverse the process and revive a person...
Well, as far as practical uses go (with the lobster) this could revolutionize the cooking industry! Imagine being able to have live lobsters available at an instant's notice!
The fact that they don't tend to live very long after being unfrozen indicates that they're not nearly "as good as fresh".
NO CARRIER
Martha Stewart, of course!
...
Subject "En1arge y0ur manh0od - then free2e it so it's redy when u are!"
-Adam
12 in 200 is better odds than you apparently get stuffed into an incinerator or the more traditional 6ft under.
--
"we live in a post-ideological world..." - Billy Bragg.
by Lewis Caroll
Tis the voice of the Lobster: I heard him declare
"You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair."
As a duck with its eyelids, so he with his nose
Trims his belt and buttons, and turns out his toes.
When the sands are all dry, he is gay as a lark
And will talk in contemptuous tones of the Shark:
But, when the tide rises and sharks are around,
His voice has a timid and tremulous sound.
I passed by his garden, and marked with one eye,
How the Owl and Panther were sharing a pie:
The Panther took pie-crust, and gravy and meat,
While the Owl had the dish as its share of the treat.
When the pie was all finished, the Owl as a boon,
Was kindly permitted to pocket the spoon:
While the Panther received knife and fork with a growl,
And concluded the banquet by--
Leela: "There, good as new. Except that we're 3 miles below the surface, we don't have any food and the ship won't work under water."
Bender: "Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody."
Hermes: "The important thing is that we don't panic. There are rules for situations like this. Now, the first order of business is lunch. I suggest a nice lobster Zoidberg. I mean, err... lobster Newberg. I mean... Doctor Zoidberg."
Why, that's almost 6 percent!
Whaaaat? Oh man, it sucks to be Walt Disney then. And to think that Disney Corporation has been going through all this effort just to make sure he still has copyright on all his original characters when he is thawed out in the year 2303!
Incidentally, Timothy was totally correct in saying -40 degrees without specifying Celsius or Fahrenheit, because -40 degrees Celsius is the same temperature as -40 degrees Fahrenheit.
If you froze goldfish in liquid O2, we had a surprising amount of success reviving them. I believe the mitochondria were shattered due to ice crystals, so they only lasted for a bit. The tricky bit is keeping them alive. Did a fair amount of b-cell cloning - separate out the white blood cells, add enormous quantities of EBV, toss in nuked whites as feeders, and isolate the interesting ones. You could freeze down a single blood cell if you were careful (and used a bit of dimethyl sulfoxide to help with the crystallization problem)
I hear we missed out on the real fun however. Guess lighting charcoal was where the real action was. Picking up shattered goldfish bits got old fast....
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
I doubt public outcry will be so large. If there was a way to keep lobsters live before reaching the store by simply freezing them, I'd be surprised if we didn't see a bumper crop of cheap live lobster. The public doesn't have to see the reanimation process, so they would be nonethewiser.
As you said, we're cruel enough to the tasty critters already. What's one more freezing going to do?
The ______ Agenda
Back in school we did an experiment on mud crabs with the similar results. We progressively cooled them down and measured their responses (forget how). Soon got bored and left them in the freezer. Remembered next day and found them (unsurprisingly) frozen completely solid in a block of ice. Thawed them out and the little buggers walked away. Our teacher nearly fell over in surprise!
Same thing happens with alpine Wetas (Native NZ crickets). In heavy frosts they freeze solid overnight and thaw out the next day. Research shows they have an antifreeze in their blood which helps to prevent ice xtals forming.
don't got no stinkin sig
And there's no REAL reason to believe we could fly in space. After all, everyone knows there's no air, so flapping your wings would have no effect.
Yep. It's pretty dumb to imagine they they'll be able to do things in the future that we don't know how to do already.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
welcome our new zombie lobster overlords
No, that's the only good part.
your melted butter frightens me!
The latest Slashdot meme.
I'm confused...
-Christopher Wu
http://www.christopherwu.net/
The main problem with human cryogenics is that the freezing process destroys the cell lining, but certain frogs have enough glucose in their cells to maintain the shape of the cell lining even when frozen. I'm not sure if this is the case with the lobsters.
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"Those who quote others are more likely to one day be quoted" -Tom Planter
At work we freeze mammalian cell lines for weeks at a time. A good percentage of the cells do survive process. I heard that a some of the researchers where taking this a step further to whole organisms. Though that hasn't been very successful.
Am I the only one who read the headline and thought maybe, just maybe, it had something to do with bringing back Futurama? :P
"Each time you smile, it'll only last awhile. Life may be scary, but it's only temporary."
Soltuion: Clone yourself 25 times.
Then at one, and maybe two of you will be reanimated! If you're lucky enough for two, you get a free slave out of the deal. Its a win-win more situation!
To freez to death only to be revived and boiled to death, again, for the only crime of being tasty? If this isn't cruel and unusual punishment I really don't know what is...
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
.. but i'd love to know why.
There is no such thing as a degree Kelvin. They are simply kelvins. Also, there is no such thing as a negative kelvin. The kelvin scale starts at 0.
--
"Insert witty quote here."
12 out of 200 ain't bad odds if you're dead.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Eh, Dr. Zoidberg, unfortunately there is only enough oxygen for the rest of us left on the spaceship .. I'm sure you won't mind helping us by staying in the freezer. *Push*
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
This means you won't have to go through expensive layoffs and re-hiring phases during economic cycles.
When it turns out you have too many employees, just send a couple of them into the freezers under some pretext, and thaw them out when things get busy again.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
The real problem I am afraid isn't tech. It is why. Why should we want to unfreeze these people in a hundred years? It is not like we are running out of people.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
in soviet russia...lobster freezes you!
And thus, I placed the 200 frozen lobsters into the icy permafrost.
The foolish humans of the future will not know what hit them!
A blog I run for the wealth
Ever seen a goldfish freeze in a pond over a cold winter? You can look through the ice and see dozens of fish frozen with stupid looking expressions of surprise...
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