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posted by martyb on Monday January 20 2020, @02:38AM   Printer-friendly
from the you're-as-cold-as-ice dept.

The planet may be warming, but a recent study indicates that mankind is going the other direction.

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have established that people's bodies are now typically cooler than the textbook figure of 37C, first established by German physician Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich in 1868.

The study shows that modern-day men have a body temperature 0.58C lower than their 19th century counterparts, while women's are 0.32C lower.

This decrease has been attributed to "changes in our environment over the past 200 years, which have in turn driven physiological changes". However, the study acknowledges that establishing cause and effect remains "inherently unprovable".

The rate of decline is about 0.03°C per birth decade. Body temperature is a marker for metabolic rate and could partially explain changes in human health and longevity over time.

Journal Reference:
Myroslava Protsiv, Catherine Ley, Joanna Lankester, Trevor Hastie, Julie Parsonnet. Decreasing human body temperature in the United States since the Industrial Revolution, (DOI: doi:10.7554/eLife.49555)


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  • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 20 2020, @03:36AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 20 2020, @03:36AM (#945643)

    Slashdot has a post on this

    https://science.slashdot.org/story/20/01/18/013229/986-degrees-fahrenheit-isnt-the-average-anymore [slashdot.org]

    and the global warming joke was already posted there in the comments.

    Anyways the discussion there is worth going through.

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  • (Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday January 20 2020, @06:46AM (2 children)

    by mhajicek (51) on Monday January 20 2020, @06:46AM (#945696)

    I had forgotten about Slashdot. Buck feta.

    --
    The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
    • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 20 2020, @06:53AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 20 2020, @06:53AM (#945699)

      What is this "Slashdot" of which you speak? Is it a Boomer thing? Was it once as mighty as a Buzzard, or GeoCities, Yahoo, and Pets.com? Oh, how the minty have fallen!

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 20 2020, @02:13PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 20 2020, @02:13PM (#945813)

      Yeah, I stopped reading there when they prevented ACs from posting.

      What did I ever do to them?