In a backyard shed in the snowy town of Nederland in the United States lies the frozen corpse of Bredo Morstoel. The Norwegian man died 30 years ago. If plans go accordingly, he may one day walk again. Inside Bredo's timber mausoleum, a man named Brad Wickham throws bricks of dry ice onto a metal casket.

A group of Russian scientists have successfully revived two species of tiny worms that they discovered suspended in an icy chunk of Siberian permafrost. The worms, known as nematodes or more commonly as roundworms, had been frozen for up to 42,000 years, since a time when much of the planet was covered in ice. But they weren't dead - just cyrogenically preserved.

You probably thought it was infinitely cool when Ripley and the crew of the Nostromo first emerged from their cryosleep chambers in Alien, but now that slice of sci-fi could become a reality in our lifetime. By Elizabeth Rayne;

OVER the course of an average winter North American wood frogs, Rana sylvatica, may freeze solid several times. They are able to get away with this by replacing most of the water in their bodies with glucose mobilised from stores in their livers. That stops ice forming in their tissues as temperatures drop. When things warm up again, the frogsicles thaw out, with no evident ill effects.

Aeronautic engineers say long-term cryogenic sleep could be the key to humans travelling long distances through space. A NASA-funded study has found spaceships would be able to cover much longer distances if they didn't have to support human activity, and the technology to make this possible could be available within the next three decades.