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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.
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...
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.
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"we live in a post-ideological world..." - Billy Bragg.
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."
And I, for one, welcome a new joke every now and then.
If you get nervous, just remember that there are a few billion other people who don't really give a damn.
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
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.