Shouldn’t it be the most comfortable temperature? 🤔

  • DrQuint@lemm.ee
    1·
    1 year ago

    The internal temperature is whatever you said. That’s the temperature your guts need to live.

    You have a gigantic organ providing insulation between that and the world. It’s called skin. It keeps the heat in and the cold out and can self regulate for the task too. Doesn’t mean your skin won’t be a relatively high temperature but overall, it’s slightly less than your internals. It keeps your internal temperature that way by releasing the same amount of heat that you produce yourself and capture from the outside, and that difference is usually related to how hot or cold is outside. Because see, heat transfers from a hot to a cold object constantly and passively, and the skin has to chase that value according to demand. Your body will release less heat if it’s cold, and way more if it’s hot out (so it feels even hotter than the air).

    Funny detail about fans: Fans don’t actually lower temperatures. Moving air, if anything, should increase it. But it works on us and on electronics for the same reason: We are heat emitters. Pushing air away from an electronic device usually means dragging away the hottest air from the hottest object, so it should overall be cooling down. For us, it also has a bit to do with surface humidity, but that’s because of, again, skin.

    • maporita@unilem.org
      1·
      1 year ago

      Another reason a fan works is because it increases evaporation of sweat. Evaporation involves a phase change which requires energy. That energy is extracted from the body surface. Without air flow the envelope of air next to the skin gets saturated meaning it can’t hold any more water vapor, so evaporation stops.

  • Fonzie!@ttrpg.network
    1·
    1 year ago

    You’ve got a lot of good answers, but I’m missing one important factor why 98F isn’t comfortable for you…

    Your body temperature is too high!

    Okay bear with me, please…
    As I’m sure you’ve already read, your body being 98F/37C needs to get rid of that heat, as well. Your organs like to be 37 degrees, and your body is used to it being colder than that, so it heats itself up for your organs.

    Now, what happens if the environmental temperature is usually already around 30-40 degrees?
    This happens close to the equator, the whole year, even!

    Well, then your body heats up much less.

    This means someone from Java (right below the equator) has a healthy body temperature of around 36C, while someone from a colder area like Norway has a healthy body temperature of about 37.5 degrees. 1.5 degree may not seem like a big deal, but keep in mind that a 1 degree raise in temperature already means you have a fever!

    This is also why my wife, from Southeast Asia, is incredibly cold here in Northwest Europe, and why I couldn’t enter any store in Indonesia during Covid, cause they scanned my body temperature and 37.5C means you’re very sick over there!