Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
As in other mammals, human thermoregulation is an important aspect of homeostasis. In thermoregulation, body heat is generated mostly in the deep organs, especially the liver, brain, and heart, and in contraction of skeletal muscles. [1] Humans have been able to adapt to a great diversity of climates, including hot humid and hot arid.
Physiology: Newborns lack the ability of thermogenesis due to underdeveloped shivering mechanism. Body heat is lost through conduction, convection, and radiant heat. [1] Thermoregulation is achieved through several methods: the metabolism of brown fat and Kangaroo care, also known as skin to skin.
The statement of Newton's law used in the heat transfer literature puts into mathematics the idea that the rate of heat loss of a body is proportional to the difference in temperatures between the body and its surroundings. For a temperature-independent heat transfer coefficient, the statement is:
Convection-cooling is sometimes loosely assumed to be described by Newton's law of cooling. [6] Newton's law states that the rate of heat loss of a body is proportional to the difference in temperatures between the body and its surroundings while under the effects of a breeze. The constant of proportionality is the heat transfer coefficient. [7]
Convective heat transfer, or simply, convection, is the transfer of heat from one place to another by the movement of fluids, a process that is essentially the transfer of heat via mass transfer. The bulk motion of fluid enhances heat transfer in many physical situations, such as between a solid surface and the fluid. [10]
There are two types of heat the body is adapted to, humid heat and dry heat, but the body adapts to both in similar ways. Humid heat is characterized by warmer temperatures with a high amount of water vapor in the air, while dry heat is characterized by warmer temperatures with little to no vapor, such as desert conditions.
Human heat-loss mechanisms are limited primarily to sweating (which dissipates heat by evaporation, assuming sufficiently low humidity) and vasodilation of skin vessels (which dissipates heat by convection proportional to the temperature difference between the body and its surroundings, according to Newton's law of cooling).
Diving reflex in a human baby. The diving reflex, also known as the diving response and mammalian diving reflex, is a set of physiological responses to immersion that overrides the basic homeostatic reflexes, and is found in all air-breathing vertebrates studied to date.