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Stanford Device Cools Body Inside Out
polished look 2 writes "This is a way cool invention: Those bright, eager scientists at Stanford invented a device that cools the body by drawing the blood to an extremity (such as the hand) and pulling the heat away it - thus the blood becomes cooler which is then re-circulated through the body. The net effect is that the entire body is cooled via this relativly small device."
Is it me, or does it seem odd to take an IC cooling method and applying it to humans.
Also, why the hell didn't anyone think of this already? Seems pretty obvious to me.
Of course the applications are a bit dodgy... cooling soldiers or getting more performance out of athletes.
You could take peoples excess heat and use it somehow... I suppose. People are great renewable energy sources. So you wear a suit that has a temp control of some kind in, it keeps you at a lovely temperature and you excess heat is siphoned off and used to power stuff. Might need a bit of extra infrastructure engineering though.
The device is external and cools the blood externally. This simply gets more blood to the surface by lowering the air pressure around your hand, then cooling the blood.
Neat, but not revolutionary.
Too many replies entered my head on this one:
- That's cool
- Do we get to pick the body part? I'm thinking: this and a bottle of Viagra.
- Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?
- In Russia...
Ok, not that many...
this isn't a sig. i type this (including the two dashes), every time i post, just to make it look like a sig.
I ran competitively all through school, and all the smart runners knew the quickest way to cool down on a hot day is to put something cold on the inside of your wrists, and your neck... because there's a lot of blood flowing through there near the surface, and it "carries the cold" through the rest of your body and your muscles.
If you spend any amount of time in an ice bath, you can feel this effect, as well. Actually, it's rather unpleasant to feel the cold blood travelling back up your legs (but that's an extreme case).
I'll go RTFA now to check, but are they really talking about anything different?
As a side note -- for runners, it would seem to make sense to try cooling down the major arteries leading into the legs, but somehow I don't remember anyone pouring the ice or cold water into their groin.
now, when geeks build up the courage to meet women, they can blame the sweaty palms on their cooling system.
So the diff is they use a gentle vacuum to draw the blood to the surface in the hand, only. Same concept, but with a little tech thrown in to make it work faster. Presumably there aren't any side-effects of tinkering with the blood-flow like that, like a permanent hickey over the entire hand.
Another side-note: apparently Stanford has already licensed the technology, "to AVAcore Technologies Inc., an Ann Arbor, Mich., firm that Grahn and Heller founded to develop the device for commercial application."
I wonder if they're planning on testing using some of the UMich sports teams here (I live in Ann Arbor)... Football especially is HUGE here -- the whole city practically shuts down on football Saturdays like today. The stadium has a greater capacity than the city population, and no parking, so as you can imagine it's chaos. I'm sure the Wolverines wouldn't mind the little boost during training that this might provide.
I called it beer. It's not only for drinking. You can also rest the glass against a vein in your arm to cool down the bloodstream quite effectively. One downside to this is that your beer gets warm faster, so you have to drink faster, but that in turn leads to drinking more, which cools down your body as well. This also has the positive side effect of getting you sloshed.
I don't recommend this cooler device for long distance driving.
I'd be worried about lawsuits from this. Anything that lowers the body temperature in such an unnatural way should be subject to a full FDA investigation before it is unleashed on the general public. Still under the Bush administration, this is unlikely to happen. I shall not be using this method of cooling any time soon!
Living here in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona where temperatures are 100+ degress for 5-6 months of the year, I can some practical uses for something like this:
- Athletic departments of colleges, high schools, etc; every summer, especially when football programs start up, students are taken to the hospital due to heat exhaustion and heat stroke
- Emergency Medical Response teams
- Anywhere where workers are required to be outdoors during the heat of the day
On average, 29 people a year die of heatstroke in Arizona alone. (That doesn't include the illegal immigration deaths, of which were 172 documented so far in 2004, probably more all told.) Something like this could be very useful, commercially, it just depends on how practical and expensive it would be.
Sig cancelled due to lack of interest
Only difference is this time they're trying to cool people off, while before it was to keep them warm. Seriously, the previous idea was better (simpler concept, cheaper, etc) though it should be used to cool people off rather than keep them warm.
Those Stanford boys should read slashdot more often.
You've got to be kidding. The editors can't be bothered to check for the exact same story being posted twice, on one recent occasion while the old story was still on the front page. You expect them to make subtle links like this?
Couldn't this be used to warm people rather than cool them, by replacing the cooling part with a heating part?
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Doesn't cool the body inside out. If you cool enough of any fluid in your body, you will feel much cooler. But to cool it from the inside out the device would have to be some sort of refrigerating implant. This is more of a cooling by thermodynamic process device. It cools from the outside in, just better.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Yeah wow great science. When I was a kid I had horrendous headaches. So when I couldn't sleep it off or had too many pills that weren't working I....
Laid on the couch with an arm hanging off the side a and wrapped my hand in a cloth that also held ice cubes. It worked. Or I would freeze a compress and lay it on my head.
So instead of a 'subatmospheric pressure environment' I used gravity. And instead of using a special water pumping coil I used, a washcloth and ice. Sure there was bit of a mess, but that was fixed by a mixing bowl.
Last time I listen to anyone who says I'm not good enough for Stanford
A machine to generate ice cream headaches. Just what I needed.
I would consider this method of cooling preferable when working with cryogenics for spaceflight, etc.
The book "Sniglets" describes a more rudimentary version of this.
'Pedaeration, n. The perfect temperature achieved by keeping one leg under the covers and one leg hanging out the bed.'
My personal improvement on pedaeration is to put it under the fitted sheet so it directly contacts the waterbed (waterbed required). Most effective.
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
I've seen stories about using palms etc to cool down a person long ago. Scanning the article, I see that the way they do it is what is new.
They've created a device which creates a low pressure around the hand. This causes the blood to be drawn the surface of the hand, which in turn increases the cooling effect.
The chilled blood then absorbs heat from the body as it travels back to the heart, hence the "inside-out" comment.
That article is about moving heat from the upper-arms (near the torso) to the cold hands (assuming that the individual is in a cold climate of course). It is not the same as this invention, however, as this is like a tiny air-condition for one human body - the heat is moved away from the body similar to what an air-conditioner does. If you look in the photo in the article, you shall see a light-blue tube extending down from the device which I suppose contains some kind of liquid like freon that moves heat well.
I think its really neat personally - no longer will a large air condition be necessary to cool people. Take for example being in a tank in Iraq. Although the tanks have air conditioners, they don't help much in urban settings during the day because they need to keep the holes open for the gunner who sits up top manning a large gun - thus it must become pretty hot for the driver down below. Give that driver a pair of these gloves (hooked up to a heat exchange unit) and he or she will be relativly comfortable although it will be fairly hot directly around him or her (like 120 degrees or so but with this device they won't break a sweat).
Well, if _you_ had read the article, then you would have kinda noticed that the first application from the standford guys was to _warm_ people up after an anestheatic surgery (bringing the recovery time down from 2 hours to 10 min and reducing tremors greatly).
"Don't worry, dear, just bringing down my core temperature."
nuff said. This is a hickey machine, plain and simple. Now, once the software patent is issued...
...except that you put the victim, er, subject's hand in warm water while they sleep. It often leads to lower-torso evaporative cooling.
Theory and practice are the same in theory, but different in practice.