They have greatly restricted blood flow due to their structure, and very close proximity to the most important organ in the human body. And I wanna take a minute to appreciate how much of an evolutionary novelty sight must have been. Producing photo transferring chemicals and seeing your mate for the first time.
While sight is great, if you think of it as a electromagnetic wave sensors, natured has evolved that feature in several ways.
For example, you skin can feel infra red radiation in the form of heat. Our ancestors evolved specialised cells that detected visible-light radiation and those cells became increasingly sophisticated organs. But the ability to detect light intensity has existed for a lonnnng time. Even in the primordial puddle, it was useful to know where the sun was shining.
Another comparison I saw was that eyes are electromagnetic sensors and touch is a nuclear force sensor. Smell is just a special kind of sense of touch that only reacts to certain molecules.
there are actually a few other cases of this in the body and it’s because your eyes aren’t actually a part of your bloodstream so the eyes are treated as foreign objects along withthe others I mentioned being thyroid follicles ovarian follicles and sperm inside testicular ducts the last 2 being they only have one set of chromosomes so are biologically different to you
Once had the flu with a fever of 106-107(almost 42c)…I was taken to the hospital and the doctor literally threw me into an ice bath… I was crying and he said “I’m sorry but you will be dead soon unless we drop that fever”
I had to continue taking ice baths at home because the fever kept creeping back up to that range. They’re not fun…
“I can’t survive above 38.0 C for very long as well.”
OP must be weak. I had a fever above 38.0 °C for over a week once. Finally went to the hospital and my fever was gone by the time I arrived. Our bodies do some weird sh*t sometimes.
It feels so weird to me that the small change in degrees might actually kill a virus. I mean, wouldn’t all viruses by now have become accustomed to “warmer climates”?
Or is it a cat / mouse game, our bodies being able to heat up more and them getting more fire resistant by the year. Was a fever less hot a couple of hundred years ago?
I am not an expert but I believe the temp threshold is for when proteins denature due to the ambient heat overcoming the strength of the bonds (mostly h-bonding i believe) that hold the protein in its specific tertiary structure and when you exceed it the proteins unfold/break
I read that this is a common misconception: the high heat is not enough to denature any proteins (else it would kill you too) and, what’s more surprising, it actually makes viruses/bacteria more active. But it also makes your immune system more active, with an overall win in effectiveness over the microbes, which is what makes it useful.
Yep - our bodies turn the thermostat up, increasing metabolism/cellular functions, which increases body temperature. Fatigue slows us down as our bodies redirect resources towards supporting our immune systems and producing cells to fight off the infection, vs spending that energy on being mentally and physically active.
Once our bodies get a handle on things, the fever “breaks” and we start recovery and return to homeostasis.
Viruses do adapt and mutate though. Look at all the various strains of H1N1 and SARS-COV-2.
Just because they don’t reproduce without a host cell doesn’t mean evolution doesn’t happen. If a trait emerges that is beneficial to future generations, viruses carrying that trait can infect more cells and spread further.
Usually it’s evolution itself that people give too much agency to. Mutations are a crapshoot. They can be beneficial or they can cause birth defects, sterility, prevent reaching sexual maturity, or make finding a mate excessively difficult. Or all of the above.
Seeing the edit, yes, but that is also wrong. As the first line of the link says, radiation therapy uses ionizing radiation and not microwaves
It is possible to use microwaves for treating cancer (see www.bmc.org/content/microwave-ablation), but the two aforementioned methods do not use them (with the caveat that both “chemotherapy” and “radiation therapy” are very broad categories)
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