I always like pondering questions involving heat and energy. It gives me
more practice understanding BTUs and such. Today I was talking to Tim in
the biology department, and we were discussing which would raise the
temperature of a room more- a person or a computer. As usual when it comes
to questions involving heat and energy, a seemingly simple question has a
fairly complicated answer, because there are a lot of different variables
involved. While looking for the answer, I found
this nice
page on energy flow. It notes that the body produces heat because it
has internal energy. How much internal energy? This leads us to questions
of metabolism. The
body’s metabolism produces heat as a result of chemical reactions. This is
useful, since our body only keeps functioning within a certain range of
body temperatures. So basically, our metabolism keeps our body at roughly
one temperature (37 degrees celsius). Depending on the temperature
differential between that and the environment, our body will lose a
certain amount of its heat at each moment to the environment, which must
then be replaced by the internal metabolic workings of the body.
posted at 11:50 on Thu, 18 Jan, 2007 |
path: /living
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