A few years ago I read how researchers discovered that most cells don’t die from a lack of Oxygen for several hours, which goes against observation – if a person stops breathing for 10 minutes the brain starts to die (damage can start as early as 5 minutes without Oxygen to the brain), 20 minutes and the heart starts to die.
The discrepancy turned out to be that in the brain, heart, and other organs, cells didn’t start dying at 5, 10, or even 20 minutes. Instead they started going into a kind of Oxygen hibernation to help them survive several hours (or more?). What then caused them to die was actually the abrupt re-introduction of Oxygen, they ended up exploding!
And, of course, medicine already knew about the prolonging effects of near-freezing cold. (Can’t go below freezing though, or the expansion of water molecules in the body causes cells to be ripped apart and die.)
All that to say that this article doesn’t surprise me. Instead, I’m glad to see someone’s actually leveraging available technology and knowledge.