Heat: v5

CRAZY SHIVERING: Shivering is ingenious. Some insects even shiver. Bees
shiver to keep their hives warm.

CRAZY SHIVERING: When you or bees contract actin-myosin proteins in
muscle cells, a tiny bit of heat is released. Heat grows as more muscle cells are
contracted. This can heat hives or bodies.

CRAZY SHIVERING:  When your core of your body gets too cold,  your temperature-controlling brain stem kicks into action.  It sends out messages to muscles to contract.

CRAZY SHIVERING: In shivering, muscles fire one direction with a quick twitch, then ten seconds later, the opposing muscles are fired. You might shiver eight shakes a second!

CRAZY SHIVERING: If you get really cold, your brain will begin to shiver you all over your body–a body-quake! Life-saving heat is generated. But this is no simple process.

Millions of messages are sent in split-second timing to muscle cells everywhere!

This keeps your insides toasty warm!

SURPRISING WINTER SHIVERS: Animals shiver, too. The 500-pound Alaskan black bear hibernates over 5 months. They’re unusual in that they don’t let their bodies cool much in hibernation. When ground squirrels, bats and marmots hibernate, they can get cold as icicles, plummeting to near freezing temperatures.

BEAR SHIVERING: The black bears instead maintain a toasty 86º-96ºF while snoozing away. How do they do this? When they start getting too cold, their temperature controlling brain stem kicks in shivers and the big beast shakes away his coolness and ups his temperature while he’s still snoozing away.

BEAR SHIVERING: When it’s time for black bears to come out of their cave, shivers kick in one more time getting him up to temperature and off he charges into a new season trooping around in the woods!

SHIVERING OFF EXCESSES:  When you shiver, your muscles give off a chemical called irritatedsin that they don’t give off near as much when you exercise.

SHIVERING OFF EXCESSES: This molecule (ir…) does the wildest thing. It converts some of your white fat cells to thermogenic brown fat cells. These brown fat cells burn fat to up your temperature.

Fat eating fat. Now, this is wild! Scientists are exploring the idea of shiver-shaking to roll off the pounds!