← Royal Institution Christmas Lectures · 2007: Back from the Brink, the Science of Survival

Grilled and Chilled

S42 · E3 · 26 Dec 2007 · 36 min

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How the body copes with extremes of temperature. Humans live in some extraordinary places, from the middle of the Sahara desert to the frozen wastelands of Alaska. Take a snake to the North Pole, and it will stop moving in minutes; take a cat to the desert and it will be dead in hours. So how can some humans survive such extremes, and could anyone?