Tag: Freezing

Heathrow Airport is looking at using geothermal heating to combat its runways from freezing in winter.
The British Airports Authority said the underground heating technology could prevent a repeat of last December, when the airport had to be closed for five days and 4,000 flights cancelled due to ice on the runways.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 19, 2009) Using a microscope the size of a football field, researchers from The University of Western Ontario are studying why some insects can survive freezing, while others cannot.

Why is this important? Because the common fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) is one of the bugs that cannot survive freezing and the little creature just so happens to share much of the same genetic makeup as humans, therefore finding a way to freeze them for research purposes is a top priority for geneticists the world over (about 75 per cent of known human disease genes have a recognizable match in the genetic code of fruit flies).