Wood Frog: Snow Walker

When the winter begins we all start to warm up our houses and try to stay at the place where it is warm. Many animals try to migrate to warmer climate and some stay deep in the soil to sleep but Wood Frogs stay on the surface and withstand the cold... Doesn't this sound interesting?

Wood Frogs are perfect cryo freezers...they freeze and perfectly turn to a solid during winter and come back to life in spring. Now everyone are excited to know how this is possible ..Here comes the story......When winter starts, the skin of Wood frog starts freezing. Then the frog becomes hard and there are some special proteins called nucleating proteins in its blood which causes the water in blood to freeze and pulls most of the water out of the body. At the same time liver starts secreting glucose which is a sugar solution and this helps in preventing additional water being pumped out of body. This thick sugar syrup enter the cells and now the body is like massive amount of sugar syrup inside the cells and ice outside it. This sugar syrup which is glucose acts as an antifreeze. Its heart stops beating and brain ceases but the cells do not freeze. It remains in this condition for two or three months until the spring starts and weather gets warmer.

They reactivate and thaw themselves when the temperature starts to warm up. Water enters slowly into the organs and blood starts to flow and the frog starts to jump and activate itself. Science is so vast and can perform any experiments such that we can find a way to introduce these genes from the frog into the humans and humans can freeze and then reactivate themselves....Also the doctors have only few hours for transplanting the donated organs to a live person before the the organs get damaged and we cannot freeze these organs as they are dehydrated and are damaged. Scientists are now trying to find a way to apply the long-term freezing process to the donated organs so that we can store them for few days to find an appropriate patient.

Now start thinking how the humans look like if we have the ability to freeze like wood frog....then we can with stand all the freezing winters...good to hear right?

Swine flu

I think everyone has been hearing about swine flu from the last four months. The summer should be generally free of flu but this new H1N1 virus is spreading the flu in summer. I had been watching the news saying that India has been effected with swine flu in the last couple of weeks with 12 deaths reported. Its very sad that most of the cases are NRI s who went to India from Us.

H1N1 is actually more dangerous than other flu virus because this virus emerged due to genetic reassortment from 4 different strains of flu virus(One from birds, one from Human and two that circulate in pigs) and right now we don't have any vaccine available for swine flu. Novavax biotech company has already produced a vaccine for H1N1 but the production and release of drug into the market may take at least 6 more months from now. I also heard that cadila pharma from Ahemadabad,India which has a share in Novavax also produced the drug and use of this drug for two times with in three weeks can save an individual from swine flu virus. However this is a long way to go so everyone should take care and keep yourself out of the virus. One more thing to say here is the virus does not spread from pigs to humans. It spreads from one human to another only. If anyone is infected with virus take care that you do not go out into the crowds and keep yourself isolated from others including your family members. The most effected are the children and old people because the immune system is weak in them. This highly risked category must be at caution and take a lot of care like washing your hands frequently and use a alocohol based sanitizers etc.

Swine Flu is spreading very fast in India, So Indians take care of yourself and get rid of the virus.......