More than one animal -- asleep baseball brilliant Ted Williams, for archetype -- has wondered whether freezing your physique if you die ability acquiesce you to be active in the future.
Perhaps Japanese scientists are alpha to acquisition an answer.
As the Wall Street Journal reports, advisers at Japan's National Institute of Polar Research accept resuscitated two tardigrades -- sometimes accepted as waterbears or moss piglets -- from a 30.5-year abysmal freeze.
It seems odd that animal-namers can't adjudge whether these tiny eight-legged creatures attending added like pigs or bears. I'm traveling with waterbears.
The advisers aboriginal calm two waterbears in 1983 from an Antarctican moss sample. They again stored them at minus-20 degrees C (roughly minus-4 degrees Fahrenheit). They defrosted them in 2014.
After defrosting, it took one of the waterbears 29 canicule to acknowledgment to what the advisers declared as a accustomed condition. The added died afterwards 20 days.
This isn't the aboriginal time waterbears accept been active from frozen. One agreement saw them brought aback to activity afterwards nine years in abysmal freeze.
Waterbears are accepted as "extremophiles." They are able to shut down their metabolism and survive in acutely adverse altitude for continued periods.
The researchers' address offers this account for the waterbears' survival: "This ample addendum of the accepted breadth of abiding adaptation of tardigrades recorded in our abstraction is interpreted as getting associated with the minimum oxidative accident acceptable to accept resulted from accumulator beneath abiding arctic conditions."
They admit, though, that they don't absolutely apperceive how these beings -- beneath than 1mm continued -- survive as continued as they do.
Perhaps if they do, we will apprentice something about the affairs for animating humans. Or conceivably waterbears are artlessly appropriate beings. And we're not.
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