Goodbye, 98.6

When I learned that you didn't have to use a No. 2 pencil on standardized tests, it shook my world. I don't remember how old I was when I found out you could use a No. 1 pencil — which is darker — with results that were just as readable by the OCR scanners. You just couldn't use a lighter No. 3 pencil. Finding out about base 10 in math class had a similar effect on me. Numbers were no longer just numbers, a natural thing: they were something people had devised. They were pretend, in a sense, as my child self thought of it.

And now I've just found out that humans' average body temperature is no longer 98.6°F (37°C). We've been cooling off since the 1860s, according to researchers who analyzed data from over 670,000 temperature readings:

“The most likely explanation in my view is that, microbiologically, we’re very different people than we were,” says [the lead researcher]. Modern people have fewer infections, thanks to vaccines and antibiotics, so our immune systems are less active and our body tissues less inflamed.

You heard it hear first, hot (or not quite as hot) off the presses.