Tantric master' breaks record, stands in ice for 72 minutes
NEW YORK - A man who calls himself a "tantric master" has broken his own world record by standing in ice for 72 minutes.
The 48-year-old Wim Hof stood on a Manhattan street in a clear container filled with ice for an hour and 12 minutes Saturday.
He set the world record for full body ice contact endurance in 2004, when he immersed himself in ice for one hour and eight minutes.
Hof says he survives by controlling his body temperature with the tantric practice of tumo.
His feat kicks off BRAINWAVE, a five-month series of events in New York exploring how art, music, and meditation affect the brain.
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Ah, Hof. He was on a Discovery Channel special called "The Real Superhumans". Apparently he has some sort of mutant heat regulation ability and can keep a stable body temperature much longer than most people in similar conditions. He's run naked and barefoot through the northern wilderness and performed various other feats of superhuman skill. He's a biological marvel and curiosity but his abilities don't derive from spirituality.
Note: I'm semi-retired from the board, so if you need something, please be patient.
What? Mutations are always detrimental and never add information to the genome? What?
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Surlethe wrote:What? Mutations are always detrimental and never add information to the genome? What?
According to creationists, that information was "already in the genome" and was just waiting to be "activated". Whatever the fuck that means; I think these people just talk without expecting to explain the mechanisms behind their blathering.
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Surlethe wrote:What? Mutations are always detrimental and never add information to the genome? What?
According to creationists, that information was "already in the genome" and was just waiting to be "activated". Whatever the fuck that means; I think these people just talk without expecting to explain the mechanisms behind their blathering.
I wonder if there are any real drawbacks to this mutant ability.
If not, then - get that man some nookie! We'll populate Antarctica yet!
Surlethe wrote:What? Mutations are always detrimental and never add information to the genome? What?
According to creationists, that information was "already in the genome" and was just waiting to be "activated". Whatever the fuck that means; I think these people just talk without expecting to explain the mechanisms behind their blathering.
I wonder if there are any real drawbacks to this mutant ability.
If not, then - get that man some nookie! We'll populate Antarctica yet!
It's not superbly impressive, but you wouldn't want to take him on in a naked ice-sitting contest. On the initial show, they immerse him in arctic water and not only doesn't he display the normal initial shock to cold water immersion, he doesn't even begin shivering until he's been there a while. There's no conclusive research into the source of his abilities, we only have the observation that his body somehow generates extra heat at times when it's needed.
Note: I'm semi-retired from the board, so if you need something, please be patient.
Still it's pretty cool. Basically he's almost immune to being frozen to death in modest time frames.
You have to realize that most Christian "moral values" behaviour is not really about "protecting" anyone; it's about their desire to send a continual stream of messages of condemnation towards people whose existence offends them. - Darth Wong alias Mike Wong
"There is nothing wrong with being ignorant. However, there is something very wrong with not choosing to exchange ignorance for knowledge when the opportunity presents itself."
Justforfun000 wrote:Still it's pretty cool. Basically he's almost immune to being frozen to death in modest time frames.
Or he at least can suppress standard "cold" responses of the human body. Has anyone ever heard of a doctor looking at him very shortly after his "superhuman" feats? I would be very interested in hearing what a medical professional would find about his body.
Surlethe wrote:What? Mutations are always detrimental and never add information to the genome? What?
According to creationists, that information was "already in the genome" and was just waiting to be "activated". Whatever the fuck that means; I think these people just talk without expecting to explain the mechanisms behind their blathering.
That is funny, because I just read a paper specifically on how to look at an existing genome and know how to tell the difference between adaptations brought about by fixation of alleles that already existed in a population and adaptations brought about by recent mutations by looking at the amount of variation at physically linked neutral loci*
*At the site of an allele fixed from standing variation there is a narrower region with reduced variation due to a longer time span of recombination events that shuffle alleles out of the region and maintain variation. Mutations have a broader region because they have had fewer recombination events that would maintain variation at nearby loci
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BOTM/Great Dolphin Conspiracy/ Entomology and Evolutionary Biology Subdirector:SD.net Dept. of Biological Sciences
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Justforfun000 wrote:Still it's pretty cool. Basically he's almost immune to being frozen to death in modest time frames.
Or he at least can suppress standard "cold" responses of the human body. Has anyone ever heard of a doctor looking at him very shortly after his "superhuman" feats? I would be very interested in hearing what a medical professional would find about his body.
That is true. He might just not react but still goes through all the physical problems associated with being cold.
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BOTM/Great Dolphin Conspiracy/ Entomology and Evolutionary Biology Subdirector:SD.net Dept. of Biological Sciences
There is Grandeur in the View of Life; it fills me with a Deep Wonder, and Intense Cynicism.
This is not entirely without precedent. There is some group of Tibetan monks (I forget which ones, exactly) who, through a great deal of meditation and discipline, also learn to control their reactions and resist cold. Among other things, they will drape themselves with wet clothes in freezing conditions and their body heat will dry the cloth.
I suspect it's an ability inherent to most, if not all, humans but seldom developed.
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Surlethe wrote:What? Mutations are always detrimental and never add information to the genome? What?
According to creationists, that information was "already in the genome" and was just waiting to be "activated". Whatever the fuck that means; I think these people just talk without expecting to explain the mechanisms behind their blathering.
I saw on a program they were talking about these weird little chemicals that make genes become "active" under the right circumstances, which then become passed on to their offspring, so they might be talking about that.
Surlethe wrote:What? Mutations are always detrimental and never add information to the genome? What?
According to creationists, that information was "already in the genome" and was just waiting to be "activated". Whatever the fuck that means; I think these people just talk without expecting to explain the mechanisms behind their blathering.
I saw on a program they were talking about these weird little chemicals that make genes become "active" under the right circumstances, which then become passed on to their offspring, so they might be talking about that.
Um, no, they're not. Those chemicals need other genes to turn them on/produce them. No matter how you look at it, some new mutation would be required.
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Surlethe wrote:What? Mutations are always detrimental and never add information to the genome? What?
According to creationists, that information was "already in the genome" and was just waiting to be "activated". Whatever the fuck that means; I think these people just talk without expecting to explain the mechanisms behind their blathering.
I saw on a program they were talking about these weird little chemicals that make genes become "active" under the right circumstances, which then become passed on to their offspring, so they might be talking about that.
Those are gene regulatatory pathways. Not the same thing... Unless you are talking about epigenetic inheritance, but that only applies IIRC within an organism (dosage compensation of the X chromosome for example)
GALE Force Biological Agent/
BOTM/Great Dolphin Conspiracy/ Entomology and Evolutionary Biology Subdirector:SD.net Dept. of Biological Sciences
There is Grandeur in the View of Life; it fills me with a Deep Wonder, and Intense Cynicism.
There was an Icelander who survived the wreck of a fishing boat in deep winter sometime in the 1980s. Guy was in the water for several hours and actually managed to swim ashore. He did not suffer hypothermia or other detrimental effects from the cold, but his crewmates all died within minutes of hitting the water. He was studied quite extensively at the time.
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Lagmonster wrote:Ah, Hof. He was on a Discovery Channel special called "The Real Superhumans". Apparently he has some sort of mutant heat regulation ability and can keep a stable body temperature much longer than most people in similar conditions. He's run naked and barefoot through the northern wilderness and performed various other feats of superhuman skill. He's a biological marvel and curiosity but his abilities don't derive from spirituality.
I know the scientific advisor for that particular episode.
It's basically that he has an incredible ability to sit very, very still. This produced (IIRC) a warm layer of water around him that acted vaugely like a wet suit. When they put a dummy into the water, because it too was able to sit very very still, it also gained a protective skin of warm water around it so the thermometer inside didn't show the required dramatic temperature they were looking for.
Their solution was to stir the water of the dummy tank so that the currents would disperse the warm water, causing the required temperature drop in the dummy and in doing so, make the guy look more than human. When they tried stirring the water in the guy's tank (which they didn't show on TV, of course) he was only able to stay in for a few minutes.
Spin Echo wrote:I know the scientific advisor for that particular episode.
It's basically that he has an incredible ability to sit very, very still. This produced (IIRC) a warm layer of water around him that acted vaugely like a wet suit. When they put a dummy into the water, because it too was able to sit very very still, it also gained a protective skin of warm water around it so the thermometer inside didn't show the required dramatic temperature they were looking for.
Their solution was to stir the water of the dummy tank so that the currents would disperse the warm water, causing the required temperature drop in the dummy and in doing so, make the guy look more than human. When they tried stirring the water in the guy's tank (which they didn't show on TV, of course) he was only able to stay in for a few minutes.
Never trust the Discovery Channel.
Well, I'll be damned. Goes to show what you get for trusting something that goes to great lengths to appear honest. Does said advisor not have any input on the show results?
Note: I'm semi-retired from the board, so if you need something, please be patient.
Lagmonster wrote:Well, I'll be damned. Goes to show what you get for trusting something that goes to great lengths to appear honest. Does said advisor not have any input on the show results?
Considering he was the one recommending stirring the dummy tank, I'd say he has some input. He was advising them scientifically... just not always in a manner the audience would expect.
The Discovery channel's goal is to make an entertaining show. If they have to take some liberties, then they'll do that.
Lagmonster wrote:Well, I'll be damned. Goes to show what you get for trusting something that goes to great lengths to appear honest. Does said advisor not have any input on the show results?
Considering he was the one recommending stirring the dummy tank, I'd say he has some input. He was advising them scientifically... just not always in a manner the audience would expect.
The Discovery channel's goal is to make an entertaining show. If they have to take some liberties, then they'll do that.
Sounds like we have someone to take on in Randi's foot-steps. Good show for your friend on this.
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