Health

Your tricks for beating the heat might be making things worse

When you stop sweating, start worrying.

Reaching for the box fan when the heat index climbs feels like the obvious move. Sometimes it is. But once the air in your house crosses a certain temperature, that same fan stops cooling you and starts doing the opposite, dragging hot air across your skin and speeding up the exact problem you're trying to solve. There's a specific number where a fan flips from friend to liability, and most people have never heard it.

In this rundown by Brian Bossak, a public health professor who studies health risks in a warming climate, the warning signs span a spectrum, from mild cramps and a rash to the emergency you actually need to clock. The counterintuitive kicker: as someone slides into heat stroke, they often stop sweating altogether, right when their body needs the cooling most. From there, a core temperature can rocket past 106 degrees and start going after the brain, heart, and kidneys fast.

The reassuring part is that almost none of the fix requires anything fancier than shade, water, and knowing when to get indoors. Staying ahead of it is mostly timing and attention, the same scrappy instinct that led one Spanish town to crochet its way out of dangerous summer heat and pushed engineers to build a jacket that pulls drinking water straight out of the air. Bossak's piece lays out the signs to watch, the mistakes to skip, and why 95 degrees indoors is the line where that trusty fan can become a problem.

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Previous Results

In Monday’s issue of the Daily GOOD, we shared the story of a mother whose good intentions at a skatepark almost went very wrong. It got me thinking of wheels.

Which human-powered joy machine do GOOD readers love the most? It was, perhaps ironically (ahem), a blowout! We don’t ever get unanimous agreement, but this was close, with over 80% of you showing up for the classic bike.

• The bike. Practical. Iconic. Undefeated. (81.1%)

• Roller skates. Classic two-by-two chaos with a proper toe brake. (9.4%)

• Skateboards for the win. What's better than surfing sidewalk? (4.7%)

• Inline skates. The joy of ice skating year-round. (4.7%)

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Research

The case for swearing your way through leg day

Researchers found a free, calorie-free way to squeeze a little extra out of your body.

GOOD news to the over 70% of our readers who blow off steam with a choice four-letter word. It might feel like a lapse in composure, but researchers now suspect it's closer to a technique, and one your body might actually thank you for.

A study in American Psychologist, co-authored by teams in the UK and Alabama, tested the idea with one deceptively brutal little endurance exercise. The volunteers who swore their way through it held on meaningfully longer than the ones stuck repeating a polite, neutral word. As Erik Barnes explains, the scientists think the reason has nothing to do with grit and everything to do with the caution system your brain runs in the background, the same set of mental brakes that keeps most of us from ever reaching our full strength.

On July 7, 1930, work began on the Hoover Dam site, a project so massive it seemed almost mythological for its time. Built during the depths of the Great Depression, the dam turned a violent stretch of the Colorado River into a source of electricity, irrigation, flood control, and city-building power for the American Southwest. Its ripple effects were enormous: Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and millions of acres of farmland all grew in the shadow of this concrete giant. Nearly a century later, Hoover Dam still feels like a monument to the idea that human ingenuity can bend impossible problems into lasting public infrastructure.

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