Via wil wheaton

Did they ever reveal how Captain America was thawed? Because I’m picturing a bunch of Shield agents with hair dryers and I don’t think that’s quite right.

I don’t think they’d want to microwave him so hair dryer is really the only remaining option. That’s how I’d do it.
badscienceshenanigans
Do you have a sciency way to accomplish this task?

Well, let’s see.

To thaw a 1.5 metric ton colossal squid frozen in a block of ice (the only way the fishermen who trawled the thing in could bring it home before it went bad), scientists put it in a big vat of brine just above 0 Celsius/32F. That allowed the fresh water to melt while still keeping the squid as cold as possible. Essential, since for a giant corpse with tentacles, certain parts are bound to thaw days before others and could become quite rotten before the rest comes out of the ice block if you’re not careful.

HOWEVER Captain America was still alive, which complicates things. On the other hand, even supersoldiers are significantly smaller than this record-setting colossal squid. This helps thaw logistics somewhat.

Much like the squid, Captain America would have to be kept at a consistent temperature throughout his body in order to be thawed successfully. If his extremities were to thaw more than a minute or two before his heart and lungs were thawed and reactivated, the tissue wouldn’t have any oxygen and would quickly die. What a shame to bring back Steve Rogers only to have him be the poster boy for gangrene. Brain tissue becoming metabolically active before the cardiovascular system began functioning would be even more disastrous— possible permanent brain damage.

And the GH-325 project was born

To keep his temperature as equal as possible across his entire body, something like the squid brine or (more likely) an antifreeze solution would be used. Immerse the Capsicle in brine until the entire unit is within a degree or two of thawing* to begin Phase II.

*Note that due to presence of salts, fats, protein, etc, the freezing point of meat is actually 28-29F. Apologies to non-US readers, sadly I only work with American meat and don’t know the freezing point of corpses/beef in Sane Country Units. That being said, Steve Rogers is 100% American meat. Fahrenheit shall be considered the appropriate unit for this project.

At the thawing point, it’s important to consider life support functions. I don’t know how fast human tissue uses up oxygen at refrigerator-range temperatures, but I’m going to assume that the sooner you have oxygen circulating the better. A heart-lung machine would be needed to oxygenate and move the blood around for a while before the heart gets started back up.

Meanwhile, because Captain America’s last un-frozen moments were spent deep underwater, there may be decompression issues at play. Whatever gas bubbles may have been present in his tissue are currently frozen in place, but when he thaws they can move about and create embolisms —> the bends. Better put him in a hyperbaric chamber just in case.

Since Captain America regained consciousness in a recovery room rather than during the thaw process, it may be safe to assume that he was sedated and/or placed in a drug-induced coma during thaw.

So at this point we’ve got a giant bathtub of brine, a heart-lung machine, oxygen canisters, lots of drugs, plus all the necessary monitoring equipment all inside a hyperbaric chamber. After thawing the antifreeze bath could be replaced with gradually warming water or saline solution in order to bring Captain America back up to normal body temperature. So many machines! This is US medicine at its finest.

Forced warm air blowers (hairdryers) are needed after Captain America is fully thawed, organ systems are reactivated, and he is brought back to normal body temperature. At this point it becomes necessary to dry and style Captain America and put him in period-appropriate jammies to sleep it off in a vintage hospital room. If you think hearing the wrong baseball game tipped him off fast, you should see him wake up with bad hair.

Scientist Brad Lister returned to Puerto Rican rainforest after 35 years to find 98% of ground insects had vanished

Please, stop it with the moon names.

For the record, this is this blog’s origin story:

Wil Wheaton reposted a Tumblr post about this. But it’s a PITA to deal with Tumblr, so let’s go to Newsweek:

A foot fetishist discredited a Reddit post that falsely claimed to show a nude image of New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Vice reported.

An image of legs in a bathtub, with text reading “alexandria ocasio-cortez.instagram.post.9-3-2016,” was posted to Reddit over the weekend. The image and text previously appeared on Twitter, 4chan, and online forums used for revenge porn, according to Vice. The photographer’s breasts are also reflected in the faucet of the bathtub when the image is zoomed, according to Vice.

But foot fetishists from the site WikiFeet, which catalogues photos showing female celebrities’ feet, said the feet pictured on Reddit were not Ocasio-Cortez’s.

Good job, Wikifeetia Brown!

wikiFeet! (their preferred capitalization)

I must know more!

Nervously, I typed ‘wikifeet.com’ into my browser at work. Happily, nothing sketchy showed up on the front page. But, I did learn that Ivanka Trump won wikiFeet’s Feet of the Year 2018!

Congratulations! Now go to jail.

On 9 January 2018, U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer, a Democrat from Oregon, introduced a bill popularly termed the “Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol Act.” The bill “would take marijuana off the federal controlled substances list and establish a nationally regulated industry overseen by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.”

The number assigned to this proposed legislation was H.R. 420, a number frequently referenced in cannabis culture. This number, steeped in legend and rumor, most commonly refers to a time to light up during the day (4:20), or as an informal marijuana holiday on April 20th (4/20).

Tech support was among the many services that Cifuentes said he offered to Chapo. He testified that he sent a Colombian systems engineer named Cristián to set up an encrypted network for the cartel in the rugged mountains of Sinaloa. Cifuentes said Cristián hooked Chapo up with wireless internet and a custom network that offered “secure communications.”

Cifuentes appeared to be vigilant about digital security. Prosecutors showed the jury his detailed accounting records, which included items like “cellular inhibitors” and “microphone searchers” among his expenses. “You turn it on during a meeting and there’s no way anyone can tape it or send out anything,” Cifuentes said, describing one of the devices.

Being the Sinaloa cartel’s tech guru was not an easy job. Prosecutors played the jury excerpts of a taped phone call where Cristián complains about being scolded for the encrypted network being down. Another member of the Cifuentes clan, Jorge’s younger brother Alex, was living with Chapo in the mountains and apparently laying into Cristián about the service outage.

…

The irony was that authorities were only able to obtain the call because the men were forced to use conventional cellphones while their secure network was down. Cifuentes called Cristián “an irresponsible person,” and said the engineer screwed up by forgetting to renew the license on the software they had purchased.