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This picture was taken yesterday in Mirabel, Quebec. There was some discussion of its location at reddit, where we are assured that in France, stop signs say “Stop” instead of “Arret.” Link -via reddit
(Image credit: benim ergani)
One way to make yourself feel warmer this winter is to watch a movie in which people are even colder than you are. Unreality magazine has some suggestion you may not have considered, like the 1965 film Dr. Zhivago.
This classic epic about the Russian Revolution from Davide Lean is winter on steroids — frozen lakes, fur coats, and a palace encrusted in ice. This movie also features Obi-Wan Kenobi and one of cinema’s finest mustaches. You really can’t argue with that.
Plus Omar Sharif was really easy on the eyes. Link
The Awl has some great charts detailing how the common cold is transferred, profiling the one guy who infects your entire workplace, and a flow chart to determine whether you will catch a cold. That’s in addition to these handy tips for avoiding a cold. Link -via Nag on the Lake
Clifton Vial of Nome, Alaska, set out in his Toyota Tacoma to see where a road went, but ended up stuck in a snowdrift on a deserted road that doubles as a snowmobile track. He was 40 miles from town, out of cell phone range, without provisions or much in the way of emergency equipment. Vial wrapped himself in a sleeping bag liner and waited, turning on the car occasionally for warmth. After three days, he was almost out of gasoline. On the second day he didn’t show up for work, his boss called emergency services.
The Nome Volunteer Fire Department was alerted and Vial’s co-workers and volunteer rescuers drove surrounding roads in search of the Toyota.
One searcher drove 41 miles along Kougarok Road — just a few miles from where Vial sat shivering and stranded in his pickup — but saw no tracks. The searcher turned back as daylight disappeared and the road conditions worsened, Handeland said.
Troopers joined the search. Rescuers looked for Vial on the ground and from the air, in planes and from a helicopter.
“When we get called on situations like this, it’s a needle in a haystack,” said Jim West Jr., a Nome fire department captain and search and rescue coordinator.
For Vial, the cold was worse than the hunger, he said. Still he scoured the pickup in vain for food.
His only provisions: Snow, and a few cans of Coors Light that had frozen solid in the cab.
Vial ate the beers like cans of beans. “I cut the lids off and dug it out with a knife,” he said.
Vial lost 16 pounds, but showed no signs of frostbite. Link -via Breakfast Links
Brrr! Is it cold where you are? Well, probably not as cold as inside this Ohio Lighthouse on Lake Erie, which is covered in ice.
Melissa Bell of The Washington Post’s blogPOST has more: Link
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Until very recently, biologists believed that once a virus enters a cell, a person’s immune system cannot combat that virus because antibodies cannot enter cells. But researchers at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, have uncovered evidence that antibodies can, in fact, enter cells. This opens up the possibility of attaching antiviral components to antibodies that can kill viruses inside cells:
Once inside the cell, the presence of the antibody is recognised by a naturally occurring protein in the cell called TRIM21 which in turn activates a powerful virus-crushing machinery that can eliminate the virus within two hours – long before it has the chance to hijack the cell to start making its own viral proteins. “This is the last opportunity a cell gets because after that it gets infected and there is nothing else the body can do but kill the cell,” Dr James said.
“The antibody is attached to the virus and when the virus gets sucked inside the cell, the antibody stays attached, there is nothing in that process to make the antibody to fall off.
“The great thing about it is that there shouldn’t be anything attached to antibodies in the cell, so that anything that is attached to the antibody is recognised as foreign and destroyed.”
Leo James, the lead researcher, speculated that this discovery could lead to effective treatments for cold viruses, among others.
Link via DVICE | Image: Clipart.com
Those who work in the freezing weather of Antarctica are already members of a very exclusive club, but with an initiation stunt, they can join an even more exclusive club. The traditional “nudie run” takes a slightly different shape for different nationalities, according to Dr. Chris Cormick.
He said Australians based at all three stations, Davis, Casey and Mawson, take part in the traditional “Bliz Run”, which obliges the loser of any bet or dare to strip off and run a lap of the accommodation block.
“It’s only about 100m, but even 10m would seem like a long run in the conditions,” Dr Cormick said.
New Zealanders at their summer station go skinny dipping in Lake Vanda, with a plunge in the chilly water earning membership of the Royal Lake Vanda Swim Club.
The group is rumoured to include former NZ Prime Minister Helen Clark, who gained membership before she was elected.
Americans at the Amundsen-Scott base can regularly be seen emerging from the sauna to run a naked lap of the South Pole.
The deed earns membership of the 300 Club, but only if it’s done when temperatures have plunged to below -100F.
“The idea is to run from the 200F sauna, outside, so they go through 300 degrees (F) in seconds,” Dr Cormick said.
The nude pictured is an American. Link -via Fark
The temperature at Russia’s Vostok research station in Antarctica read -128.6F (-89.2 C) during the winter of 1983. This is the coldest temperature ever recorded on earth. The winter temperature at Vostok averages a mere -54F. Why the mercury dipped so low has puzzled scientists for 26 years.
But scientists at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) in Russia were able to solve the mystery with a computer model developed to simulate the future evolution of the Antarctic climate, along with weather charts and satellite imagery of the area.
They found that relatively warm air that normally flows over the Southern Ocean onto the high Antarctic plateau almost came to a halt during this period. A flow of cold air circling Vostok was preventing the mixing of this warmer air from lower latitudes, isolating the station and causing near optimum cooling conditions.
Adding to this was the absence of a heat-trapping cloud cover and the presence of a layer of tiny particles of ice suspended in the air (known as diamond dust), allowing more heat from the continent’s icy surface to be lost to space.
The process of freezing to death is presented in horrifying detail in this classic article. It’s not just a matter of getting cold and dying. For example, just before they freeze, people with hypothermia tear their clothes off in a fit of what’s called "paradoxical undressing."
At 85 degrees, those freezing to death, in a strange, anguished paroxysm, often rip off their clothes. This phenomenon, known as paradoxical undressing, is common enough that urban hypothermia victims are sometimes initially diagnosed as victims of sexual assault. Though researchers are uncertain of the cause, the most logical explanation is that shortly before loss of consciousness, the constricted blood vessels near the body’s surface suddenly dilate and produce a sensation of extreme heat against the skin.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by McJohnny.
[YouTube - Link]
Last year we had posted a really cool time lapse video “The Southern Lights” filmed by Anthony Powell who works at a base in Antarctica which really wowed us all. Now allow me to present to you folks another time lapse video which is just a sample of a larger video that Anthony and his wife Christine (who also lives in Antarctica) are working upon together.
Time-lapse video filmed in Antarctica, in and around McMurdo Station and Scott Base. Each year the sun is below the horizon for 4 months in the middle of winter, and above the horizon for 4 months in summer. During the couple of months in between we have more-or-less normal days.
Includes shots of auroras and the very rare polar stratospheric nacreous clouds, which form when ozone depleting gases crystallize in the upper atmosphere in the intense cold.
Summer population is about 1200 people, winter about 200.This is just a small sample of an ongoing project to collect time-lapse imagery of Antarctica. I have taken over 1,000,000 individual photos and worn out a number of cameras that make up the collection of footage I have gathered so far over the last 6 years.
Anthony’s Pictures and Video Clips – “Antarctic Images”
His blog regarding life in Antarctica which is very interesting! – “Frozen South“
If the weather is freezing where you are, check this out. Throwing boiling water into the air is going to be the new “mentos and diet coke” meme on the Net.
– via blog
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by JKirchartz.
It’s so cold in Minneapolis (-21), you can pound nails with bananas, both peeled and unpeeled. This meteorologist does the frozen bubble trick as well, and tosses hot water into the air to watch it instantly evaporate. I actually tried the hot water thing myself when I got home from work tonight (it’s -14 right now). It was pretty cool; I felt like Mr. Wizard.
It’s very cold tonight, so we played with bubbles If you blow them upwards enough they have time to freeze on the way down.
Skipweasel took photographs of the experiments in blowing soap bubbles in freezing weather. The pictures are wild -especially when you see a frozen bubble bursting! Link
