Sweatology+SLS

Shelby Smith September 18, 2008 Science-Human Bio

Sweatology Article

(1) Why is sweat like your personal air-conditioner and why is that important? Sweat is our interior coolant, and it is necessary to have something that cools the human body off because if the core temperature of a human gets more than 105 degrees, then it is hard to maintain life, so sweat brings the temperature back down.

(2) The human body can tolerate cooling. How much? Give examples. The human body can tolerate cooling down to 20 degrees below the normal level and an example of this is hypothermia, which you can get from being way too cold like being submerged in the Arctic Sea.

(3) The human body cannot tolerate over heating. How much? Give examples. The human body cannot tolerate overheating to more than less than a dozen degrees above 100. An example of this is extremem fever.

(4) Why do we think humans evolved sweat glands? Give examples. As the hair on evolving humans diminished, sweat glands developed and evolved in order to allow optimal cooling of the enlarging hominoid brain.

(5) Describe some of the variation in the amount of sweat glands. Give examples. Age, sex, genes, weight and shape all contribute to the variation of sweat glands on humans. Some humans have fewer than two million sweat glands, which otheres have as many as four million.

(6) What happens during menopause with respect to sweat? Give examples. During menopause, the sweat glands in the female become enlarged due to the fact that the ‘female thermostat becomes notoriously trigger-happy, [and the female] imagines excess heat where non exists generating unnecessary sweat.’

(7) What happens as we age? Why is that dangeous? Give examples. As we age, we start to sweat less even when we exercise and over heat. This is dangerous because it can lead to a heat stroke.

(8) Is clothing good or bad when it comes to sweat? Why? Give examples. Clothing may be better for one when it comes to sweat due to the fact that the skin absorbs the heat in the air when they have less clothing on, for example in World War ii some men sat nearly naked while other sat fully clothed and the latter sweat 30% less.

(9) Describe what happens during heat acclimation. Give examples. During heat acclimation more is asked of the sweat glands due to the hotter temperature and their internal temperatures climb and they sweat profusely and lose a lot of salt in the sweat, but as over time the human looses less salt, and both skin and internal temperatures drop and their endurance improves.

(10) Who is "Adam"? Why is he being used for scientific experimentation? Adam is a mannequin which is being used at a Lab in Colorado which was invented to devise a way to reduce gas consumption by reducing the use of air conditioning.