Love of heat is in our genes. A recent study compared temperature and air moisture levels in thirty-seven US homes to outdoor climates around the world. They found that in all but three of the homes, the preferred temperature was 72 degrees, with low humidity, a combination that most closely resembled the temperature and humidity in East Africa—the same region of the continent where the first humans lived hundreds of thousands of years ago. As Mark Maslin, a paleoclimatologist at University College London, observed, the findings suggest that even when people can set the temperature and
...more
