What Doesn't Kill Us: How Freezing Water, Extreme Altitude, and Environmental Conditioning Will Renew Our Lost Evolutionary Strength

by Scott Carney

Cypess deduced that the very examination rooms where the PET/CT scans happened were ideal for activating BAT. They were abnormally cold, and patients wore only thin hospital gowns when they were in the confines of the machine. Under these conditions BAT was simply doing its job to keep people warm: sucking up fats and sugars from the bloodstream and producing enough heat to light up the PET/CT readouts. More important, the discovery showed that BAT wasn’t a vestigial tissue at all, but that even adult humans might reap benefits from its presence. And thus, BAT might not only help explain the mysteries of how Neanderthals survived through ice age winters, but also how modern humans could use it to get through their own winters as well. Oncologists now note that PET/CT scans taken in the winter months have more instances of BAT than in the summer, suggesting that it comes and goes with the seasons.