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Eleventh Hour: They Only Freeze the Heads!

Explore cryogenically freezing recently dead people with insights on head-only freezing costs and the Alcor Life Extension Foundation.

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Really! Most of us are familiar with the idea of cryogenically freezing recently dead people, right? Companies freeze the corpse shortly after death to very low temperatures, in the hopes of preserving the person until such time as scientists can reverse whatever it was that killed them. At the minimum we know that Ted Williams is chilling out somewhere in California at 77 Kelvin, waiting for science to come up with a way to give him a new body (Walt Disney, by the way, was cremated). But thanks to last night's episode of The Eleventh Hour, I've now learned that some people choose to only have their heads frozen and not the rest of them. It sounds like that scene from Young Frankenstein, right? A little research reveals that it's basic economics: Head-only freezing can cost as little as $80,000, far better than the $150,000 whole-body freezing costs, based on ...

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