Abiotic stress is one of the primary constraints limiting the range and success of arthropods, and nowhere is this more apparent than Antarctica. Antarctic arthropods have evolved a suite of adaptations to cope with extremes in temperature and water availability. Here, we review the current state of knowledge regarding the environmental physiology of terrestrial arthropods in Antarctica. To sur...

Insects that tolerate severe cold during winter may either supercool or tolerate ice forming within the tissues of the body. To compare the relative advantages of freezing and supercooling, we measured rates of CO(2) production and water loss in frozen and supercooled goldenrod gall fly larvae (Eurosta solidaginis). As an important first step, we measured the time required for ice content and m...

Editorial Note: Successful cryopreservation of human ovarian cortex tissues using supercooling Scientific Reports has become aware of irregularities related to authors affiliations and the statement describing IRB approval in this paper. The situation is being investigated.

We obtain estimates for critical nematic liquid crystal (LC) temperatures under the action of a slowly varying temperature-dependent control variable. We show that biaxiality has a negligible effect within our model and that these delay estimates are well described by a purely uniaxial model. The static theory predicts two critical temperatures: the supercooling temperature below which the isot...

Using a realistic united-atom force field, molecular dynamics simulations were performed to study homogeneous nucleation of the crystal phase at about 30% supercooling from the melts of n-pentacontahectane (C150) and a linear polyethylene (C1000), both of which are long enough to exhibit the chain folding that is characteristic of polymer crystallization. The nucleation rate was calculated and ...

The response of woody plant tissues to freezing temperature has evolved into two distinct behaviors: an avoidance strategy, in which intracellular water supercools, and a freeze-tolerance strategy, where cells tolerate the loss of water to extracellular ice. Although both strategies involve extracellular ice formation, supercooling cells are thought to resist freeze-induced dehydration. Dehydri...

Simple observations of evaporating solutions reveal a complex hierarchy of spatiotemporal instabilities. We analyze one such instability suggested by the qualitative observations of Du and Stone and find that it is driven by a variant of the classical morphological instability in alloy solidification. In the latter case a moving solid-liquid interface is accompanied by a solutally enriched boun...