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."

Comments

Is this really new?

[JavaRob]

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.

I invented something like this one summer

[MrHanky]

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.

Preventing heatstroke and heat exhaustion

[jangobongo]

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.