CAUTION: DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME! LIQUID NITROGEN CAN CAUSE TERRIBLE BURNS! (Death of living tissue caused by the extreme cold.)
Liquid Nitrogen can be scary. We call it a cryogenic fluid because it can rapidly cool substances down to temperatures around -321 degrees Fahrenheit. Unprotected human body parts are not immune to the danger at all. The water in our body will cool down rapidly and cause them to freeze solid, to the point where they could potentially break. That’s where we got the idea to pull this little maneuver, but with a banana in the glove instead of a finger. Just be warned though, we are professionals that know the limits of liquid nitrogen and how far to keep it away from our bodies. Please do not try this at home!!
But in science fiction, cryogenic substance like liquid nitrogen have a long and storied history; mostly being used to put humans into a deep freeze from which they can awaken many years in the future. Cryostasis as it would be called, could be very convenient for a couple of reasons: it could preserve astronauts on interstellar voyages that would normally last longer than a human lifespan, or perhaps preserve a person dying of a terminal illness until the cure is discovered. This type of technology could be very useful if it ever proves feasible. Studies have shown that if the cooling is done slow enough living cells can be preserved using this method. So perhaps we’ll see the first cryogenic human in our lifetime. Sorry to disappoint the conspiracy theorists out there, but Walt Disney is not currently frozen in liquid nitrogen. That’s just a rumor.
In “The What to Freeze Series” we will experiment with freezing different objects. What do you want to freeze next?
