Lie down; you look hot!

One by one, the myths of our childhoods are being destroyed. Chocolate does not cause acne. All aspirin are alike. Lightning certainly can strike the same place twice (why not?) The color red does not drive bulls crazy.

And the average human body temperature is not 98.6°F.

If you can believe it, this was the accepted norm since the 1850s, when a doctor in Germany collected the thermometer readings from 25,000 people, added it up and divided by 25,000 and came up with 98.6.

Recently, they stuck thermometers into 35,000 British people, did the same kind of math (but with a computer instead of an abacus) and came up with a new normal of 97.88°F.

So, is the average body temperature decreasing, because look at how cool we all are?  Might be! Scientists out at Stanford University looked at temp data from Civil War veterans, from people in the 1970s, and some more from the span of 2007 - 2017.

And the numbers didn't lie! Men born back in the day were 1.06°F warmer on a average than today's modern man, and 19th Century women came in at 0.57°F warmer than women today.

Catherine Ley, a Stanford researcher, says we don't know why we're all so cool now. “It’s just an observation,” she says, but “we think it’s a marker for the health of a population.”

And there is no dispute that we humans are healthier than we were in the Civil War era.  We owe this to vaccinations, antibiotics, better hygiene, and the simple fact that we don't have to worry about being shot at by Confederates.