I’ve been trying to steer clear of heavier social and scientific ideas and issues over the holidays because, although interesting, the holidays are more of a lighthearted time.

That said, here’s a kind of cool scientific “finding”. I write finding in quotes because this is just an interesting idea far from being scientifically proven but science builds on interesting ideas.

Researchers at the Albert Einstein school of medicine have found that our body temperature might have a good reason behind it. Maintaining a high body temperature helps our body ward off the fungus that plagues animals with lower body temperatures but it comes at a price. The higher the body temperature, the more energy required to maintain that body temperature. Using a mathematical model, they calculated that the optimal body temperature of mammals is 98.1 degrees F whereas our actual body temperature is 98.6 degrees F. That’s pretty close. Of course, the model relies on assumptions that compare the relative importance of staying fungus free to cost of having to acquire more energy to stay warm. Still, it’s an interesting finding.

My question is, knowing that not all animals maintain the same body temperature, what causes that variation? Two things I could think of off the top of my head are that the size of an animal changes how easy it is to keep body heat in (the bigger the animal, the easier it is to stay warm) and that maybe animals have other ways of dealing with fungal infections other than directly with body heat.

(via Discoblog)