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After its successful launch into space recently, the Herschel Space Observatory used cell phone technology to call back home — the first time the technology has been used in spaceflight.

Herschel and its partner Planck were launched in tandem aboard an Ariane 5 rocket from the European Space Agency's (ESA) Guiana Space Centre in Kourou, French Guiana.

Herschel is the largest, most powerful infrared telescope ever launched into space. It will make observations in the far-infrared to sub-millimeter wavelengths of light that will allow astronomers to study cold, dark dust clouds and possibly star formation in action.

At 12:00 GMT (8:00 a.m. EST) on May 16 — just under two days after launch — Herschel switched its telemetry downlink to "high rate mode" and began transmitting, marking the first-ever use of Gaussian Minimum Shift Keying (GMSK) modulation in space. GMSK is commonly used in Global System for mobile Communication (GSM) mobile phone networks due to its very efficient use of bandwidth and power.

So you'd like to spend a few hundred years in dreamland and awake in a transformed world. Who wouldn't?

Unfortunately, the means of doing so are a little inconvenient. You -- or at least your head -- could be shot full of antifreeze and suspended in liquid nitrogen. If that seems a little radical, you could try being drained of blood and then frozen: You might not make it more than a few hours into the future, but to a zombie that'll be plenty.

The current options, then, are few. But maybe that's changing: In a study published yesterday in Anesthesiology, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital used hydrogen sulfide -- the gas that makes rotten eggs smell so bad -- to completely suspend the metabolism of mice, who were revived several minutes later without any apparent side effects.

Source: http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/03/suspended-anima.html