4 Crazy Things That Happen In Extreme Cold -- And 1 That's Dangerous

It’s going to be cold this weekend for parts of the country. Very cold.

Parts of the Northeast and Midwest will drop below zero Friday and Saturday nights. Heavy winds are expected to only make things worse.

Even big, bad New York’s not-so-aptly named Ice Festival was canceled because of the cold.

But aside from affecting Valentine’s Day plans, the intense cold could have some side effects that you may not know about — some fun, some dangerous.

Boiling water evaporates before it hits the ground

If you throw boiling water into bitter cold temperatures, you would expect it to freeze and hit the ground, right?

Wrong.

Boiling water creates little water droplets that freeze on their own, but they don’t form together in a chunk of ice. Instead, the tiny frozen ice crystals drift away like mist.

Check out the phenomenon in the video below:

Frozen frogs

The North American Wood Frog, which lives across most of Canada and parts of the Northeast and Midwest United States, freezes almost completely during extreme cold temperatures and thaws up when the weather suits it.

“When you drop it, it goes ‘clink,’” Kenneth Storey, a professor of biochemistry at Carleton University in Ottawa, told National Geographic.

You can blow a frozen soap bubble

When it gets cold enough outside, and you blow a soap bubble, you can watch it freeze right before your eyes.

The outside starts to crystalize. And the pop is more of a shatter. Watch it in action here:

Slushy soda

If you leave an unopened bottle of soda outside in the freezing cold, it won’t immediately become ice. The added ingredients lower its freezing point, LiveScience says.

When the bottle is opened, the bubbles in the soda “serve as the seeds for tiny ice crystals, forming a frosty and delicious slush,” according to LiveScience.

Watch one man demonstrate this here:

The human body in extreme cold (and how to keep it safe)

Our bodies have several defense mechanisms to help us when we’re out in the cold.

Fingers and toes feel the cold first, because the body tries to ration the heat to its center and to critical organs, sacrificing the extremities first.

When skin that isn’t getting its regular flow of warm blood is exposed to the cold, tissue freezes and cracks, causing frostbite.

If your internal body temperature drops below 95 degrees, hypothermia sets in, which can cause heart failure and death.

Some tips to avoid any trouble in the cold:

• Cover up as much exposed skin as possible with scarves, hats and gloves.
• Wear warm, dry layers to keep as much heat in as possible.
• Stay inside and eat pizza instead. That’s way more enjoyable anyway.

Image via YouTube