Christmas trees can turn to glass
Here's a party trick not to try without the proper safety equipment: drop a sprig of Siberian spruce (Picea obovata) or Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris) in a vat of liquid nitrogen, at a temperature of -196 degrees Celsius. Providing you've pre-chilled the plant to -20 degrees Celsius or so, the sprig will survive.
"Once the molecules are in this glassy state, they can't move around, and that means they can't react," Strimbeck said. Essentially pre-frozen, the trees' metabolism drops to zero, and their cells aren't damaged by extreme cold. When winter approaches, trees also pull water from their cells to the surrounding tissue, so that the swelling ice crystals don't burst the cell walls.
Read the full article: BBC Earth
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