Mondo Knows Facts
Sweating cools you through latent heat
Each gram of evaporating sweat carries away a large amount of body heat Turning liquid water into vapour takes about 2,260 joules per gram, drawn from your skin. That energy leaves with the vapour instead of staying in the body. In very humid air evaporation slows, which is why hot damp days feel worse than dry ones. It sits in Mondo's science collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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Geysers need a narrow underground plumbingTrapped water superheats until pressure suddenly releases it as a jet of steamWater needs a lot of heat to warm upWater has one of the highest specific heat capacities of any common substanceMicrowaves heat food by agitating waterThe oven flips polar molecules back and forth, and friction does the restThe dew point marks when condensation startsCool air below this temperature can no longer hold all its water vapourOceans circulate driven by heat and saltCold salty water sinks near the poles and draws a slow global conveyorWater exists as solid liquid and gas at its triple pointAt zero point zero one degrees Celsius and specific pressure water coexists in three states
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Tags: biology, heat, water
Sweating cools you through latent heat: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- Each gram of evaporating sweat carries away a large amount of body heat. The figure is taken from World Health Organization, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a science fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Science shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.