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Biotech Science

Stanford Device Cools Body Inside Out 44

Posted by timothy from the cuts-to-the-chase dept.
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."
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Stanford Device Cools Body Inside Out More

Stanford Device Cools Body Inside Out

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  • 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.
    • Also, why the hell didn't anyone think of this already? Seems pretty obvious to me.

      Well since this is one of the ways organisms, including humans, cool themselves, yeah, I think it is obvious. Elephants do it with their ears. What did these guys major in, Applied Obviousness?

  • Cool (Score:1)

    by JensR ( 12975 )
    Of course the applications are a bit dodgy... cooling soldiers or getting more performance out of athletes.

  • Plug in Baby. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Different Tan ( 784289 ) on Saturday October 09, 2004 @02:09PM (#10480111)
    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.

    • Re:Plug in Baby. (Score:4, Funny)

      by UrgleHoth ( 50415 ) on Saturday October 09, 2004 @02:41PM (#10480289) Homepage
      Yeah, you take a whole bunch of people, tap them for heat and equip them with VR gear, then you network them together in to a mass simulation, like some kind of matrix...
      • I wonder what you could call it... No, I'd try to be kinder and let my batteries wander around. They make more heat that way. Obviously, this helps discourage laziness as your TV wont work if you sit and watch it all day, unless you are viewing certain kinds of viewing...

    • You could take peoples excess heat and use it somehow

      Idea: Put programmers under intense deadlines, generate heat (warming the building) and perspiration (could be used to cool processors). Another possible useful output of the human body would be excrement and urine as ejected. This can be easily spontaneously created by doubling the workload and halving the schedule.

      And you know babies whose craniums haven't yet stitched together yet? When they get aggravated, the brain pumps up and down through th
    • People are not a "great renewable energy source." We don't create energy, we consume it and convert it. You might be able to convert our body heat into another form of energy, or even use the heat directly to do work, but it's certainly one of the least efficient sources of energy.

  • Technically, from the outside - in (Score:3, Insightful)

    by binaryspiral ( 784263 ) on Saturday October 09, 2004 @02:09PM (#10480114)
    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 possibilities (Score:3, Funny)

    by tomsuchy ( 813628 ) on Saturday October 09, 2004 @02:14PM (#10480137)
    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...

  • Is this really new? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JavaRob ( 28971 ) on Saturday October 09, 2004 @02:16PM (#10480146) Homepage Journal
    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.

    • Okay (Score:4, Interesting)

      by JavaRob ( 28971 ) on Saturday October 09, 2004 @02:32PM (#10480220) Homepage Journal
      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 remember, as a child, my parents advising me to run cold water over the inside of my wrists to cool down on a hot day (insted of begging for an ice cold soft drink). There were many free-flowing fresh water streams at their property in the country -- some of them tapped to pipes to make filling watter bottles easy (amazing what a little gravity will do), and I'd routinely take a drink of the almost ice cold flowing water via cupped hands as well as cool my wrists on a hot day.

  • I invented something like this one summer (Score:5, Funny)

    by MrHanky ( 141717 ) on Saturday October 09, 2004 @02:36PM (#10480249) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • As drunk driving laws "get tougher", I wouldn't recommend it for short distance driving, either...

      I live in central Ohio and I'm seeing more and more of those yellow/red plates...
    • Or you can drink brandy (or most liquors), which has the effect of dilating the capillaries near the surface of the skin (IIRC). This carries heat away from the core of the body where it can more effectively be transferred to the outside air.

      All they did was do this technically and put the person next to an air conditioner, really.

      As an aside, this is the reason you don't want liquor when you're battling the cold - St. Bernards should have their flasks filled with wine instead, which has the opposite eff
  • 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!
    • Presumably you don't mind entering air-conditioned buildings or driving air-conditioned automobiles ... those are both unnatural ways to cool the human body. An electric fan is unnatural. Drinking alcohol is another unnatural way to cool the human body. A wet T-shirt contest will also cool the human body, although one might argue that the results are even more natural, so perhaps that's a bad example.

  • Preventing heatstroke and heat exhaustion (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jangobongo ( 812593 ) on Saturday October 09, 2004 @03:19PM (#10480532)
    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 [azdhs.gov] alone. (That doesn't include the illegal immigration deaths, of which were 172 [azcentral.com] 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.

  • DUPE! (kinda) (Score:4, Informative)

    by menscher ( 597856 ) <menscher+slashdotNO@SPAMuiuc.edu> on Saturday October 09, 2004 @03:34PM (#10480642) Homepage Journal
    Anyone else notice that this is the same idea as reported in the Anti-Frostidigitation: Heatpipe Gloves [slashdot.org] slashdot article?

    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?

    • 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 w

  • In soviet Russia.... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by NetNifty ( 796376 )
    Couldn't this be used to warm people rather than cool them, by replacing the cooling part with a heating part?
  • 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.

  • Science Catches Up With Home Remedies (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Uosdwis ( 553687 ) on Saturday October 09, 2004 @06:30PM (#10481753) Journal
    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
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • So this device...
    "cools the body by drawing the blood to an extremity"?
    Ummm...Haven't these devices [utexas.edu] already been available for some time?
    "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.

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