Today I Learned: The Alaskan Tree Frog Hoax
There's this viral image that's been circulating for a while and it cropped up in my Twitter feed yesterday posted by an account called "Learn Something".
Cool story bro, pity it's a hoax and that the frog in the pic appears to be a garden ornament. What makes the story cooler though, is there actually is a frog that can do almost this.
Meet Rana sylvatica, the American Wood Frog.
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This unassuming little fellow can survive winter with up to two-thirds of its body water frozen, by packing its cells with glucose which prevents them drying out and collapsing when they thaw. According to Don Lawson of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, wood frogs tracked in the wild proved able to endure below-zero temperatures for as many as 218 days straight with a 100 percent survival rate. Learning how this process works will have impact on the ability to safely freeze organs for transplant.
You can read the full article here.
The moral of this story of course, is that if you really want to learn something, don't rely on Twitter for your sources.
Cool story bro, pity it's a hoax and that the frog in the pic appears to be a garden ornament. What makes the story cooler though, is there actually is a frog that can do almost this.
Meet Rana sylvatica, the American Wood Frog.
This unassuming little fellow can survive winter with up to two-thirds of its body water frozen, by packing its cells with glucose which prevents them drying out and collapsing when they thaw. According to Don Lawson of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, wood frogs tracked in the wild proved able to endure below-zero temperatures for as many as 218 days straight with a 100 percent survival rate. Learning how this process works will have impact on the ability to safely freeze organs for transplant.
You can read the full article here.
The moral of this story of course, is that if you really want to learn something, don't rely on Twitter for your sources.