How Does Fever Help You Get Better?

Curiosity Weekly

Warner Bros. Discovery

Science

4.6 • 964 Ratings

🗓️ 9 February 2021

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Learn about how a fever helps you get better; why the first reliable and widely available pregnancy test was the African clawed frog; and a potential breakthrough in the shockingly complicated traveling salesperson problem.

How Exactly Does Fever Help You Get Better? by Ashley Hamer

TED-Ed. (2016). The surprising reason you feel awful when you’re sick - Marco A. Sotomayor [YouTube Video]. In YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVdY9KXF_Sg
Mace, T. A., Zhong, L., Kilpatrick, C., Zynda, E., Lee, C.-T., Capitano, M., Minderman, H., & Repasky, E. A. (2011). Differentiation of CD8+ T cells into effector cells is enhanced by physiological range hyperthermia. Journal of Leukocyte Biology, 90(5), 951–962. https://doi.org/10.1189/jlb.0511229

The first reliable and widely available pregnancy test was... a frog? by Cameron Duke

Tyssowski, K. (2018, August 31). Pee is for Pregnant: The history and science of urine-based pregnancy tests. Science in the News. http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/pee-pregnant-history-science-urine-based-pregnancy-tests/#:~:text=The%20late%201920s%20marked%20the
VAITUKAITIS, J. L. (2004). Development of the Home Pregnancy Test. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1038(1), 220–222. https://doi.org/10.1196/annals.1315.030
Wells, G. P. (1978). Lancelot Thomas Hogben, 9 December 1895 - 22 August 1975. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 24, 183–221. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbm.1978.0007
Yong, E. (2017, May 4). How a Frog Became the First Mainstream Pregnancy Test. The Atlantic; The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/05/how-a-frog-became-the-first-mainstream-pregnancy-test/525285/

Traveling salesperson update by Cody Gough

Computer Scientists Break Traveling Salesperson Record. (2020). Quanta Magazine. https://www.quantamagazine.org/computer-scientists-break-traveling-salesperson-record-20201008/
Karlin, A. R., Klein, N., & Gharan, Shayan Oveis. (2020). A (Slightly) Improved Approximation Algorithm for Metric TSP. ArXiv.org. https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.01409
Curiosity Daily: Weirdest Types of Lightning, Spotting Audio Lies Easily, and the Traveling Salesman Problem https://omny.fm/shows/curiosity-daily/weirdest-types-of-lightning-spotting-audio-lies-ea

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes.
0:03.2	With Curiosity Daily from Curiosity.com, I'm Codygoth.
0:06.4	And I'm Ashley Hamer.
0:07.5	Today you learn about how a fever helps you get better,
0:10.3	what frogs have to do with the history of pregnancy tests,
0:13.5	and a potential breakthrough in the shockingly complicated traveling salesperson problem.
0:18.5	Let's satisfy some curiosity.
0:20.5	You probably know that getting a fever is your body's way of fighting off illness,
0:25.0	but here's something surprising. It wasn't until recently that scientists understood how fevers
0:31.0	actually help you get better.
0:32.0	So here's the story of how that happened.
0:35.2	The part that was best understood was how fevers start. When a virus or
0:39.9	bacterium invades your cells, immune cells, called macrophages, gobble up the invaders, and send out
0:46.6	proteins called cytokines to alert the rest of your body that you're under attack.
0:52.4	One place that alert goes is to the
0:54.4	hypotheramus. That's a part of your brain that controls body temperature,
0:58.1	among other things. The hypotheramus is the one that stokes the fires of fever. But why? For a long time people assumed that higher
1:06.8	temperature made it harder for bacteria and viruses to survive. That's what I thought.
1:11.5	But that turns out to be a small part of
1:14.2	fever's power. Another soldier in a fight against infection is the lymphocyte
1:19.9	or white blood cell. Versions of this cell called T lymphocytes
1:24.8	receive pieces of the invader proteins
	...

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