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Map of the USA (not to scale). Each state represents one study home (n = 37). State fill colour represents the country (Angola, aquamarine; Australia, salmon; Brazil, light purple; Ethiopia, magenta; Namibia, green) that was identified as most frequent from a subset of the 100 global grid cells with most similar climate to each study home. States not included in the analysis are shown in white. Map was generated with R (version 3.3.2; http://www.R-project.org) packages ggplot2 (http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=ggplot2), mapproj (version 1.2-4; https://cran.r-project.org/package=mapproj), rgdal (version 1.2-7; https://cran.r-project.org/package=rgdal) and sp (version 1.2-4; https://cran.r-project.org/package=sp). State boundaries (5 m resolution) were obtained from the US Census Bureau (https://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/cbf/cbf_state.html).
Source publication
Human engineering of the outdoors led to the development of the indoor niche, including home construction. However, it is unlikely that domicile construction mechanics are under direct selection for humans. Nonetheless, our preferences within indoor environments are, or once were, consequential to our fitness. The research of human homes does not u...
Citations
... People typically spend 90-95% of their lives indoors (see [11]). At the same time, however, the evidence suggests that the indoor temperature (e.g., in our homes) has been rising as the decades have gone by ([12]; see also [13]). Additionally, while the consequences of spending so much of our time on reduced energy expenditure (and hence an increased likelihood of being overweight/obese) have already been highlighted [14], the potential effects of the increased likelihood of inadequate hydration have not been, as far as I am aware. ...
This narrative historical review considers the various routes to nudging consumers towards drinking more, given self-reported evidence that many people are often not adequately hydrated. This review builds on the related notion of ‘visual hunger’. Interestingly, however, while many desirable foods are associated with distinctive sensory qualities (such as an appetizing smell), that may capture the consumer’s (visual) attention, it is less clear that there is an equivalent sensory attentional capture by hydration-related cues. One of the other important differences between satiety and thirst is that people tend to overconsume if they use interoceptive satiety cues to decide when to stop eating, while the evidence suggests that people typically stop drinking prior to being adequately hydrated. What is more, the increasing amount of time we spend in consistently warm indoor environments may also be exacerbating our need to drink more. A number of concrete suggestions are made concerning how people may be encouraged (or nudged) to imbibe sufficient water.
... Nevertheless, it still makes sense for the hotel manager to pay careful attention to temperature/thermal comfort and make an informed choice about how to meet one's guests' needs. Interestingly here, when researchers assessed the indoor climate that people chose for their own homes, regardless of where in The States people lived (N = 37; e.g., all the way from Alaska to Florida), the settings in terms of temperature (M = 27.3°C) and humidity (M = 16.15 hPa) most closely matched the west central Kenya where humanity emerged several million years ago (Just et al., 2019). According to my Oxford University colleague, the sleep expert Russell Foster suggested that keeping the temperature at 18-22°C should help guests to sleep better (Delahaye, 2020). ...
This narrative review discusses the literature on contemporary sensory marketing as it applies to hotel design. The role of each of the guest’s senses in the different stages of the customer journey are highlighted, and the functional benefits (to the guest’s multisensory experience), and likely commercial gains, of engaging more effectively with the guest’s non-visual senses, both individually, and in combination, are reviewed. While the visual elements of hotel design are undoubtedly important, the hotelier neglects the non-visual senses at their peril, given the negative effect of poor design on the customers’ overall multisensory experience (and ratings). A number of the crossmodal effects and multisensory interactions that have been suggested to modulate the guest’s experience of hotels (and resorts) are discussed. Mention is also made of the nature effect/biophilic design and how it is increasingly being incorporated in total design to help deliver on guest/customer well-being; the latter is a theme that has grown rapidly in relevance for those working in the hospitality sector. Taken together, there are numerous opportunities for hotel managers to ‘sensehack’ their guests’ multisensory experiences through environmental psychology The originality of this review stems from the analysis of the hierarchy of the guest’s senses and an explanation of how multisensory interactions affect sensory marketing in the design of hotel experiences for guests.
... troglodytes) and Bornean orangutans (P. pygmaeus) have body temperatures nearly equal to that of humans (Just et al., 2019). Thus, perhaps the most parsimonious hypothesis is that the mean body temperature has not undergone alteration during the course of hominin evolution. ...
Many models have posited that the concomitant evolution of large brains and body sizes in hominins was constrained by metabolic costs. In such studies, the impact of body temperature has arguably not been sufficiently addressed despite the well-established fact that the rates of most physiological processes are manifestly temperature-dependent. Hence, the potential role of body temperature in regulating the number of neurons and body size is investigated by means of a heuristic quantitative model. It is suggested that modest deviations in body temperature (i.e., by a couple of degrees Celsius) might allow for substantive changes in brain and body parameters. In particular, a higher body temperature may prove amenable to an increased number of neurons, a higher brain-to-body mass ratio and fewer hours expended on feeding activities, while the converse could apply when the temperature is lowered. Future studies should, therefore, endeavor to explore and incorporate the effects of body temperature in metabolic theories of hominin evolution, while also integrating other factors such as foraging efficiency, diet, and fire control in tandem.
... However, this indoor transmission study was specific to China and thus may or may not accurately represent transmission dynamics in the United States. Note also that indoor temperatures do tend to follow seasonal patterns, albeit with a lower degree of variation than outdoor temperatures (42)(43)(44). Contact rate is related to population density (15), and so it is unsurprising that population density was a significant factor in our analysis (Fig. 1A). We stress that temperature was not a driver of transmission under lockdown, and the effects of population density were lessened (Fig. 1B): Climate effects matter little when contact rates are severely diminished through policy interventions (45). ...
Significance
There is still much to be understood about the factors influencing the ecology and epidemiology of COVID-19. In particular, whether environmental variation is likely to drive seasonal changes in SARS-CoV-2 transmission dynamics is largely unknown. We investigate the effects of the environment on SARS-CoV-2 transmission rates across the United States and then incorporate the most important environmental parameters into an epidemiological model. We show that temperature and population density can be important factors in transmission but only in the absence of mobility-restricting policy measures, although particularly strong policy measures may be required to mitigate the highest population densities. Our findings improve our understanding of the drivers of COVID-19 transmission and highlight areas in which policy decisions can be proactive.
... The approach also builds on the growing evidence of the nature effect (Williams, 2017) and the fact that we appear to benefit from, not to mention actually desire, the kinds of environments in which our species evolved. As support for the latter claim, consider only how it has recently emerged that most people set their central heating to a fairly uniform 17-23°C, meaning that the average indoor temperature and humidity most closely matches the mild outdoor conditions of west central Kenya or the Ethiopian highlands (i.e., the place where human life is first thought to have evolved), better than anywhere else (Just, Nichols, & Dunn, 2019;Whipple, 2019). ...
Traditionally, architectural practice has been dominated by the eye/sight. In recent decades, though, architects and designers have increasingly started to consider the other senses, namely sound, touch (including proprioception, kinesthesis, and the vestibular sense), smell, and on rare occasions, even taste in their work. As yet, there has been little recognition of the growing understanding of the multisensory nature of the human mind that has emerged from the field of cognitive neuroscience research. This review therefore provides a summary of the role of the human senses in architectural design practice, both when considered individually and, more importantly, when studied collectively. For it is only by recognizing the fundamentally multisensory nature of perception that one can really hope to explain a number of surprising crossmodal environmental or atmospheric interactions, such as between lighting colour and thermal comfort and between sound and the perceived safety of public space. At the same time, however, the contemporary focus on synaesthetic design needs to be reframed in terms of the crossmodal correspondences and multisensory integration, at least if the most is to be made of multisensory interactions and synergies that have been uncovered in recent years. Looking to the future, the hope is that architectural design practice will increasingly incorporate our growing understanding of the human senses, and how they influence one another. Such a multisensory approach will hopefully lead to the development of buildings and urban spaces that do a better job of promoting our social, cognitive, and emotional development, rather than hindering it, as has too often been the case previously.
... Hence, we can find published papers in high reputation journals which are the outcome of R's assisted analysis. Focusing mainly on the human biometeorological discipline, we can find papers dealing with health [23][24][25] or human behaviour [26,27] besides some core issues about the behaviour and calibration of thermal comfort indices and human thermal perception [28][29][30][31][32] along with the biometeorological conditions in urban or other complex environments [31,[33][34][35][36][37][38]. The objective of the present article is the presentation of the research workflow linked and empowered by a data-analysis-oriented scripting R language. ...
R is an open-source programming language which gained a central place in the geosciences over the last two decades as the primary tool for research. Now, biometeorological research is driven by the diverse datasets related to the atmosphere and other biological agents (e.g., plants, animals and human beings) and the wide variety of software to handle and analyse them. The demand of the scientific community for the automation of analysis processes, data cleaning, results sharing, reproducibility and the capacity to handle big data brings a scripting language such as R in the foreground of the academic universe. This paper presents the advantages and the benefits of the R language for biometeorological and other atmospheric sciences’ research, providing an overview of its typical workflow. Moreover, we briefly present a group of useful and popular packages for biometeorological research and a road map for further scientific collaboration on the R basis. This paper could be a short introductory guide to the world of the R language for biometeorologists.
... De nuevo, se podría objetar que las concentraciones de personas se producen fundamentalmente en lugares cerrados, donde la presencia de aerosoles respiratorios es mucho mayor, y que las climatologías de lo que ocurre "al aire libre" nos valdrían poco para interiores, pero, como ya se ha explicado, la humedad absoluta es una magnitud que se ve mucho menos afectada 7 por el cambio de exterior a interior que la humedad relativa o la temperatura. Según un estudio sobre clima de hogares americanos, llevado a cabo por Just et al. (2019), la presión de vapor en el exterior se correlaciona bastante bien con la registrada en el interior, siendo, la presión de vapor media registrada en el interior en verano el doble que la registrada en el invierno, algo parecido a lo que ocurre puertas afuera. La forma en que la humedad absoluta modula la supervivencia, tanto en interior como en exterior, sería el mecanismo según el cuál, mediante un mecanismo de resonancia, se produciría el marcado ciclo estacional de la gripe (Shaman y Kohn, 2009). ...
En este artículo se hace un estudio sobre la posible modulación estacional de la transmisión delo COVID-19 en España. En primer lugar, se hace una descripción de los posibles mecanismos de transmisión de la gripe y su relación con la meteorología de interior y exterior para tratar de comprender, mediante analogía, como podrían afectar dichos mecanismos al COVID.19. Posteriormente se hará referencia a la investigación de Sahadi et al. sobre la relación entre variables meteorológicas y brotes de importante transmisión comunitaria del COVID-19 a nivel mundial. En base a los resultados del estudio anterior, se harán unas consideraciones sobre como puede afectar el ciclo estacional al COVID-19 en nuestro país.
... troglodytes) and Bornean orangutans (P. pygmaeus) have body temperatures nearly equal to that of humans [80]. Several species of Euarchonta (which encompasses primates) evince body temperatures < 35 • C [60]. ...
A number of models have posited that the concomitant evolution of large brains and increased body sizes in hominins was constrained by metabolic costs. In such studies, the impact of body temperature has not been sufficiently addressed despite the well-established fact that the rates of most physiological processes are manifestly temperature-dependent. Hence, the role of body temperature in modulating the number of neurons and body size is investigated in this work by means of a simple quantitative model. It is determined that modest deviations in the body temperature (i.e., by a few degrees Celsius) might bring about substantive changes in brain and body parameters. In particular, a higher body temperature might prove amenable to an increase in the number of neurons, a higher brain-to-body mass ratio and fewer hours expended on feeding activities, while the converse applies when the temperature is lowered. It is therefore argued that future studies must endeavour to explore and incorporate the effects of body temperature in metabolic theories of hominin evolution, while also accounting for other factors such as foraging efficiency, diet and fire control in tandem.
The costs of climate change are often estimated in monetary terms, but this raises ethical issues. Here we express them in terms of numbers of people left outside the ‘human climate niche’—defined as the historically highly conserved distribution of relative human population density with respect to mean annual temperature. We show that climate change has already put ~9% of people (>600 million) outside this niche. By end-of-century (2080–2100), current policies leading to around 2.7 °C global warming could leave one-third (22–39%) of people outside the niche. Reducing global warming from 2.7 to 1.5 °C results in a ~5-fold decrease in the population exposed to unprecedented heat (mean annual temperature ≥29 °C). The lifetime emissions of ~3.5 global average citizens today (or ~1.2 average US citizens) expose one future person to unprecedented heat by end-of-century. That person comes from a place where emissions today are around half of the global average. These results highlight the need for more decisive policy action to limit the human costs and inequities of climate change.
The article presents an experimental study of the effect of scent marketing on consumer behaviour when choosing products of regional origin. The research methodology includes the theories of congruence, relevance, and thematic relevance, as well as the approaches to assessing the perceived quality implemented on the basis of neuromarketing research methods. To obtain verified results, economic and statistical methods of analysis were applied. The information base of the study covers biometric data on the oculomotor behaviour of 32 participants, collected as part of a laboratory-based neuromarketing experiment focused on examining nine groups of regional products. Data visualization and statistical calculations were performed using SPSS 22.0 software package. OGAMA software was applied to analyse oculomotor behaviour and establish heat maps and gaze movement patterns. The experiment was planned and conducted in EventID. The research results showed that scent marketing significantly affected consumer choice – the desire to make a purchase increased by 60 %. There is gender asymmetry in the receptivity of fragrances: women exhibit stronger consumer loyalty and involvement. The findings confirm the efficiency of promoting autochthonous regional products (wine, cosmetics, and essential oils) with the help of scent marketing. The paper provides new data on the influence of scent marketing on visual attention. It is also statistically proved that the use of mountain lavender scenting increases the number of visual fixations, their duration and speed, which can lead to a proportional rise in the amount of time a customer spends in a store and, consequently, to an increase in the number of purchases.
