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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: 2) by looorg on Monday January 20 2020, @06:16AM (3 children)

    by looorg (578) on Monday January 20 2020, @06:16AM (#945690)

    I gather there is an optimal zone of temperature between say hypothermia (core below 35c) and hyperthermia (core above 37,5c). That said if normal is between 35c and 37,5c with the average being around 36,5c then there is a bit of a span and at least we are not getting hotter. So the question might be how bad is it to be at the top of of the cold meter, perhaps it's good. If the brain is the CPU of the body we can soon start overclocking ...

    After all if you are freezing, to a degree, you can always just put on more clothing, consume hot things, increase the surrounding temperature, move around a lot. Doing things to make you stay warm. Getting colder tho is in my opinion harder -- you can't get more naked then naked, you can only drink so much and unless you want to live in a refrigerator there just is so much you can do.

    That or the alien lizard infiltration has now reach such levels that they are having a significant effect on the averages.

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  • (Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday January 20 2020, @06:43AM

    by mhajicek (51) on Monday January 20 2020, @06:43AM (#945695)

    That's what persperation is for.

    --
    The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 20 2020, @04:39PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 20 2020, @04:39PM (#945877)

    you can always just put on more clothing

    What an absolute fallacy. When I'm cold -- cold to the bone, especially -- I'm _cold_ and I'm not getting warmer. Putting on "extra clothes" just makes me _colder_ (they're room temperature, not warmer), and will reduce my temperature further as my body has to expend additional energy warming them up. The whole problem is I'm _cold_. Adding additional cold layers keeps me colder, and often enough insulates the cold in with me -- it's easier to warm the environment than warm my body.

    Next up, being outside, there are only so many layers that you can put on. Can you wear three pairs of gloves? I currently wear three coats for my bike ride to work. I can't realistically put on more. Leggings, anything too puffed out gets caught in the bike chain. I can't do more than one pair of boots. It has its limits.

    When I'm hot, I can always take things off: when I expose my skin to the environment, my body has a built-in cooling mechanism. Sweat beads to the surface of my skin and evaporates, VERY EFFECTIVELY cooling my body. Without being wrapped in layers and layers of cotton garb, my body has a method to provide for a hot environment, to something far outside core body temperature.

    Cold is terrible. Cold is something that my body cannot provide for. (Maybe yours can, which strikes me as weird, but mine most certainly can not.)

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 21 2020, @03:30AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 21 2020, @03:30AM (#946146)
      Warm your clothes up with a heater or hair dryer first then put them on?

      The fact is humans only have a narrow comfortable operating range. Too hot is also a big problem. Lots of people die in heatwaves too.

      That said it's probably easier to invent better insulation, heating and cold wear vs Antarctic levels of cold, whereas you're going to be stuck in air conditioned areas when ambient is 45C and humidity is high. And keep in mind all those air conditioners are pumping out heat making the area even hotter too...