Cryogenic suspension a little closer?

New Scientist has a blog post about a protein made from gelatin that is similar to snow flea antifreeze. They go on about using it to make the perfect ice cream, but it seems this is a step to effective cryogenic suspension for larger animals, like humans.

Getting rid of my audio cassettes

I'd accumulated a lot of audio cassettes over the years. Granted, I haven't generated a new one in a while. But I'm looking to clear up that clutter now and digitize some, and I'm too cheap to buy a dedicated device. The project has begun. I had already managed to digitize a few, basically converting a couple of old children's tapes because neither of our cars has a cassette player, now, so we need CD's, at minimum, to keep our little one entertained in the car. Using Creative's MediaSource Organizer worked for those, but now, about a year later, when I come back to it, I'm finding myself challenged and frustrated, as the various programs I have tried seem to lose full volume after some indefinite period of time which is always shorter than the tape.

The main stuff I need to capture is tapes from when I was teaching and when I would record narration of my meditations. The music, for the most part, if I want to hear it again, I'll just buy the CD's.

Lame keeps dying on my laptop, and every mp3 encoder that doesn't cost me money uses it. I've even tried using the command line in cygwin. So it looks like I'm keeping wav and ogg files, and will convert to mp3 on linux.