Polling Science, Gar-eat Lakes. Jan 17, 2020, Part 1
Science Friday
Science Friday and WNYC Studios
4.4 • 6.3K Ratings
🗓️ 17 January 2020
⏱️ 48 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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| 0:00.0 | This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Later in the hour, political polling and a look at the fish |
| 0:06.8 | of the Great Lakes. But first, take the back of your hand and touch it to your forehead, |
| 0:12.2 | just like your parents might have when they were trying to figure out if you were sick. Remember, |
| 0:15.9 | just like that? Okay. Do you feel warm? Maybe a little feverish? Hopefully not. Hopefully you feel right about |
| 0:22.7 | average. But what is average for the human body temperature? 150 years ago, the answer was |
| 0:28.7 | 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, 37 degrees Celsius. I'm sure we're all thinking about that now, too, right? |
| 0:34.8 | Well, not anymore. At least in the U.S., body temperatures, |
| 0:39.1 | healthy ones have been dropping for decades, and chances are good that you two are cooler than |
| 0:45.7 | you've been told you should be. What's going on here? Here to help explain the story, |
| 0:50.0 | plus other short subjects in science. Eleanor Cummins, freelance science journalist living in New York. |
| 0:55.5 | Welcome back. |
| 0:56.1 | Thanks for having me. |
| 0:57.4 | Okay, can't still quite wrap my head around this. |
| 1:00.0 | We're getting cooler. |
| 1:01.2 | Yeah, it's crazy to me too. |
| 1:03.2 | So a new study came out this week in a journal called E-Life, |
| 1:06.2 | and some scientists at Stanford evaluated 157 years of American temperatures. |
| 1:12.3 | So they went all the way back to the Civil War, and then they have some more recent data |
| 1:15.5 | sets, and they were comparing them. |
| 1:17.0 | And it looks like with each generation, we've gotten a little bit colder. |
| 1:20.7 | So what this means is that the average guy walking around today, like yourself, would |
| 1:25.4 | probably be about 1.06 degrees Fahrenheit colder than your |
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