Daniel Blumstein

They were cold, they were hard and stiff, and they were fuzzy.

And I don't know if you've been to the Dead Sea, but it's sort of the same.

This doesn't fit my view of physics.

The Dead Sea, you walk into the Dead Sea and you sit down and you're sitting in the water and floating.

That doesn't fit any physics.

Picking up a living furry stone is not in the physics that I've been taught.

So there are ground squirrels, Arctic ground squirrels, that can get their body temperature below zero Celsius, below 32.

They have antifreeze.

Pretty cool.

People are doing nasty things to groundhogs to understand obesity and how you can be obese without having…

problems of obesity because they get obese every year.

They double their mass.

They have to put on fat and energy in order to not eat for seven or eight months.

Marmots are kings of escape in captivity.

So marmot meetings, you go and you hang out with all these people from all over the former Soviet Union or the Soviet Union at the time, depending upon when you went.

And one guy, and they were using him in Russia,

soviet union for bioweapons research wow because they harbor some diseases a lot of them have plague in europe um but then they have other things as well so this one guy was like oh yeah my kgb colonel came to me one day and said you know if the marmots break out one more time you will be fired you know so when we brought these into captivity to borrow them to hibernate them we put them in stainless steel welded rabbit cages

And the first thing they did was break the stainless steel welds and break out.

So then they're running around this environmental chamber room and we have to catch them and they wouldn't hibernate.

And my colleague, the late Ken Armitage, who started this long-term study that I, I now try to keep going.