• Question: what kind of things do you freeze with liquid nitrogen ?

    Asked by shezza1999 to Carol, Ellie, John, Philip, Rebecca on 25 Jun 2012. This question was also asked by babatunde, blobber, zugarplumfairy.
    • Photo: Carol White

      Carol White answered on 25 Jun 2012:

      Well in my field of science, we use liquid nitrogen to freeze some of the bugs in our experiments – so we can analyse their chemistry later. It’s the perfect way to keep bugs in storage!

      Bet you’ve never heard of that use…!

    • Photo: Philip Glasson

      Philip Glasson answered on 26 Jun 2012:

      Mars-bars, chocolate cakes, flowers, rubber tubes, springs, the foam out of your bath..you name it, we’ve put it in liquid nitrogen,. Just to see what happens.

      You can also use it to help cool materials until they start to do some really weird stuff.

      Liquids that flow up hill.
      Liquids that jump in air like a fountain with out touching them.
      Solids that fly above the ground held there by nothing but a magnetic field
      You can even create tiny traps that can grab and hold a single electron in its electric field just in the same way you would hold a marble in your hand.

      Honestly,
      You can do some really cool stuff !

    • Photo: John Welford

      John Welford answered on 27 Jun 2012:

      I don’t use liquid nitrogen personally, but people sometime have it in the lab if they are doing experiments using superconductors.

      Superconductors have zero electrical resistance at very low temperatures, which means you can do some really cool stuff with them. For example if you can make an electromagnet out of them without using up any energy.

      This is used in MRI machines in hospitals, which use a really powerful magnetic field to scan the human body.

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