D: If you happened to catch our last Moment of Science, you may still be shivering. We      were reading from the Big and Bad file, in which faithful listeners write in to ask us      about record-setting things in nature. One listener wanted to know where the coldest      place in the world was.

Y: You said Antarctica--in particular, the Russian station Vostok, at which a record-      setting low temperature of one hundred and twenty-eight point six below zero      Fahrenheit was recorded in nineteen eighty-three.

D: And you want to tell me there's some place on earth colder than that?

Y: Sure there is--inside physics labs. Cryogenics was pioneered almost a century ago.

D: Cryogenics?

Y: The science of super-cold substances. In nineteen-o-eight the university of Leiden      made history by producing the first super-cooled helium. Guess how cold liquid      helium is?

D: How cold liquid helium is? Um . . . below zero?

Y: Four hundred fifty-two degrees below zero Fahrenheit, to be exact.

D: Minus four fifty-two! That's far colder than Vostok, Antarctica.

Y: Liquid nitrogen, liquid helium and the like are of great use to scientists because      substances at that temperature behave in radically different ways, especially when it      comes to conducting electricity. Thanks to advances in cryogenics, so-called "super-      cooled" substances will be more and more a part of our technology in this century.      So, what it comes down to is that anywhere someone is doing work with super-      cooled materials, that little place is the coldest spot on earth.  

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