plants produce a literally electrical voltage across cell membrane when collecting sunlight. The solar panel is very much a technological copy of plant leaves.
biology can be incredibly efficient sometimes. storing information in DNA takes just about 40-50 atoms per bit, and DNA is about 2.5 nm in diameter. For comparison, the finest structures in modern computers are 3-5 nm in size.
since powering the whole thing is incredibly important, animals have one specialized cell (mitochondria) inside every normal cell, simply for the purpose to convert the energy from sugar into a usable form. Plants have two of these specialized cells, with the other one’s job being simply to collect sunlight and turn it into usable energy. That, in my opinion, makes them more advanced than animals. ;-)
It’s always strange to me how the body prefers 72 to 75 degrees F on the outside but 98 F on the inside. Anything approaching equalizing of interior with exterior temperature results in heat-related illness.
We basically run on tiny combustion engines. Exothermic reactions.
We aren’t a passive 98 degrees, we would be hotter if it wasn’t cool enough outside. Higher heat would cause different cellular structures to become misshapen, leading to system breakdown. I’d be like trying to run a cpu cooling loop with boiling water.
And I’d add to that that if our thermal dissipation is overwhelmed, our internal heat build up. To do that heat dissipation, we need to have an environment that suck out more heat out of us than what we produce. If the environment is too hot, the heat build up and as Deadrek says, our internal inner workings beak down.
That why we sweat. Water suck out a lot more heat than air, because it wants to saturate the ambiante air, and to do that it suck up our body heat to become steam. Rince and repeat (literally).
But once the air is to humid, it gets more and more difficult for our sweat to evaporate, which makes it ineffective. That why we can kinda survive in a 90°C + sauna (albeit not for long, but for a different reason), but not in a 37°C (98°F) 100% humidity place like some tropical rainforest. At least, not without specialized acclimatation and survival techniques.
There’s actually theoretically an endothermic reaction we do. E coli can undergo an endothermic reaction if it has enough zinc. It’s entirely possible this is why we have an appendix. I’ll link studies if anyone is interested
As shown in Fig. 2A, Zn2+ titrations began with an exothermic heat reaction, which was followed by a late endothermic reaction. This characteristic exothermic-to-endothermic transition suggests the presence of at least two sets of independent Zn2+ binding sites, accounting for the exothermic and endothermic heat reactions, respectively.
Escherichia coli was the most commonly identified microorganism in the appendiceal lumen (83.4%; 34.7% as a single entity)
E. coli was found in 76.2% of the cultures of the appendiceal lumen in patients with uncomplicated appendicitis (35.7% as the only pathogen) followed by P. aeruginosa (21.5%) and K. pneumoniae (14.3%) (Table 3).
E. coli was also the predominant microorganism in complicated appendicitis (96.4%; 63.1% of them in combination with other bacteria).
Our findings indicated that dietary Zn supplementation significantly increased the feed-to-weight ratio of broilers during the experimental period under heat stress.
Basically, not only should we all be supplementing with zinc during hotter months, but also this has indications for the purpose of the appendix and possibly a way to make air conditioning out of our feces.
I mean, thats kind of like arguing that the exhaust is the cooling system for the car, which, undoubtedly much heat is lost through the exhaust. But that isn’t the princpal way it loses heat; the radiator is, and the radiator is much more akin to say, our ears, which are external, and the fluid moves through (rather than being ejected).
Yeah, but my point was that its a fundamentally different kind of heat transfer.
Its the difference between how an oven cools itself and how a power plant cools its self. With an oven, you vent the hot gas that is created through elsewhere, moving the gas and the heat away from its source. That gas (fluid) isn’t re-used. In a radiator, the fluid is re-used in the cooling loop.
A car or a power plant or the human ears are that second example. We’re heating a fluid (blood, radiator fluid, water, etc), to transfer heat to secondary fluid (air, more water, etc…). With a power plant, you have fluids in a circuit, transferring heat from one to the other. The primary cooling fluid doesn’t leave the circuit.
In the first example, we’re ejecting the hot gasses directly, and not re-using them as a fluid. This is more like a car exaust, or an oven, or human breathing.
Its in-out cooling versus around-and-around cooling. Humans (afaik) are primarily cooled through in-out cooling. We do radiative heat transfer and have organs adapted for that specifically, but its a very small amount of heat transfer compared to what we get from in-out cooling.
A car also has both radiative and in-out cooling. But it gets far more of its cooling from its radiator than it does through ejecting hot gasses.
Human cooling is mostly us throwing away hot gas, and we don’t reuse it. We get some cooling through our blood, but less than what we get through breathing.
Radiation (similar to heat leaving a wood stove). This normal process of heat moving away from the body usually occurs in air temperatures lower than 20 °C (68 °F). The body loses 65% of its heat through radiation.