Vsauce!
Kevin here.
Someone on Yahoo!
Answers asked if fresh organs would be too hot to hold.
They must have thought, “Our organs are hot, right?
Like 98 degrees!
If you cut someone open and stuck your hand in right away, would it burn or hurt?”
Uhh… there’s obviously a faulty premise here -- but this question is NOT nearly as
crazy as it sounds.
Here’s why.
We think of temperature scales as being really well-defined, but there’s a lot of different
ones, they’re actually still evolving.
The person asking this question is probably seeing human body temperatures as 98.6 degrees
and thinking in terms of Celsius rather than Fahrenheit -- which would be 1.4 degrees away
from BOILING WATER.
Almost everyone uses Celsius, look at this map -- the green parts use Fahrenheit.
EVERYWHERE ELSE USES CELSIUS.
Everywhere.
On my last video about lightning killing fish, someone commented, “Stop using Fahrenheit.
No one understands that.”
I do, Phobos.
I do.
But there’s also the Newton Scale, the Delisle Scale, the Rankine Scale and more.
And Kelvin in the International System of Units, which tracks with Celsius, but doesn’t
use “degree” terminology.
Kelvin was actually just redefined in 2019 using the Boltzmann constant.
SIDENOTE.
William Thomson, the 1st Baron Kelvin, died in 1907, so he theoretically could have hung
out with John Oliver Hobbes, who died in 1906 and they would have been Kelvin and Hobbes.
Where were we?
Hot organs!
Right.
LET’S TALK THERMOREGULATION… after a little William Osman and Jabrils.
Real quick, thanks to Stereo for sponsoring this episode and allowing me to go LIVE on
Stereo with other YouTubers and YOU.
Podcasts, YouTube videos, they’re both kind of… one-way streets.
But Stereo is a live broadcast platform where listeners submit audio questions and comments
in real-time as the show goes on.
This month I talked to Jabrils and William Osman -- look, check this out:
Jabril: “You can’t even stop at Mario Maker.
A lot of people sleep on Roblox but Roblox is creating so many developers these days.”
Turlock: You need to figure out what the legality is to have a person fight against a BattleBot.
Kevin: What would the human need to fight a Battlebot?
Osman: Bucket of water.
Kevin: Hahaha… a supersoaker?
Osman: Yeah if you had a supersoaker or a 5-gallon bucket of water… you’d win.
So you can listen to those two full episodes right now by clicking the links below, and
be a part of the next one -- live tomorrow March 24th at 6pm Eastern with Jake from Vsauce3.
He just finished production on Could You Survive the Movies?
Season 2, so we’re gonna talk about that and movie science.
So just go to Stereo.com/Vsauce2, download the app for free, and follow me -- get your
questions ready too because you and I are going to talk to Jake together live.
It’s really a lot of fun.
You will enjoy it.
Okay, thanks.
So here’s why Cardiothoracic surgeons don’t scorch their hands when they’re rooting
around in your torso: Homeostasis maintains the optimal conditions for everything in it
to work.
And you’re NOT THAT HOT, whether you’re 98.6 degrees in Fahrenheit or a perfect 37
degrees in Celsius.
And there’s an evolutionary reason for that.
Your liver, brain, and heart actually DO generate a lot of your body’s heat -- and your hypothalamus
makes sure it gets distributed properly and doesn’t get too hot or too cold.
It literally has two sets of thermoreceptors throughout your body, one that responds to
cold temperatures, one that responds to warm, to send temperature data to the hypothalamus
for regulation.
It is WEIRDLY similar to the way the thermostat works in your home.
What about a fever?
That’s when your thermostat isn’t working OR it’s purposely gone into overdrive as
a defensive mechanism.
The important thing is CORE temperature, how hot you are on the INSIDE.
How hot you are on the inside.
Skin temperature can be a lot lower since that organ is exposed… this is why your
mom put the thermometer in your mouth, or in your… not mouth, because they’re both
a little closer to measuring your core.
She probably didn’t have luminescent Zirconia powder that’s used as a non-invasive way
to measure core temperature.
HEY.
DO YOU HAVE A BEARDED DRAGON NAMED GANDALF?
I don’t.
But you know how lizards in hot climates hang out in the sun, or crawl into the shade under
rocks?
It’s because they don’t have a system like this -- they can’t regulate their internal
temperatures, so they absorb or avoid heat to adjust.
Their reliance on ectothermy is what we tend to think of when we hear ‘cold-blooded,’
but there are actually three types of cold-blooded -- like fish, which are poikilotherms dependent
on water temperature.
They’re just kind of stuck with widely varying heat and cold.
There’s ANOTHER type -- Bradymetabolic animals adjust their metabolism to go into hibernation
or estivation until conditions are right to crank it back up again.
And you know how bats hang close together, or several birds will be close together on
a branch?
They’re kleptotherms, either sharing or STEALING heat from each other.
Flying heat thieves!
Humans cranking the organ furnace up or down is one reason we can survive in both Burkina
Faso and Siberia.
But… back to the original question -- even if your hypothalamus is stoking your organ
fires, the organs themselves aren’t getting that much warmer because that heat is being
distributed to the rest of you so quickly.
A degree or two?
Yeah, maybe.
But that’s not gonna burn your hand when you reach into someone’s chest cavity to
rip their heart out during a human sacrifice.
So yeah, if your internal organs were actually 98.6 degrees celsius, which is 209.48 degrees
Fahrenheit, touching them would be like putting your hand in boiling water.
And your entire body would be a medium-rare steak in like…
3 to 4 hours of slow-cooking.
Between the layer of subcutaneous fat and the salt in your body both adding flavor,
you might actually taste okay...
But this leaves my brain wrinkles wondering if at 98 degrees Fahrenheit or 37 DEGREES
CELSIUS your body could actually cook something.
Like cook something inside you.
I’m gonna have to think about this one and get back to you sometime soon.
And as always, THANKS FOR WATCHING.