It has recently been demonstrated in week-old rats that extreme cold challenges that lead to significant bodily cooling result in decreased cardiac rate. To determine whether pups are able to maintain arterial pressure in the face of decreasing cardiac rate in extreme cold, we measured blood pressure in unanesthetized week-old rats. Instrumented pups were thermally challenged and thermoregulato...

Previously, it was reported that week-old rats exposed to air temperatures that elicited submaximal levels of heat production (designated moderate cold exposure) remained asleep and did not vocalize (Blumberg & Stolba, 1996). In contrast, pups exposed to air temperatures that elicited maximal levels of heat production (designated extreme cold exposure) woke up and emitted ultrasonic vocalizatio...

There are a few national position stands/guidelines that address environmental conditions in athletics, yet they do not govern all outdoor sports. Extreme heat and cold, lightning, and severe wind can all be fatal, yet the majority of outdoor sports have no published guidelines addressing these conditions in relation to activity. Available research on extreme heat and cold conditions in athleti...

Competition at elite level can require athletes to perform optimally in extreme environmental conditions. This review focuses on mood responses in such conditions and proposes practical guidelines for those working with athletes. Different environments are considered, including altitude and extreme heat and cold. Performing in extreme heat, cold or at altitude can produce a stress response char...

The high accumulation rate and negligible amount of melt at Eclipse Icefield (3017 m) in the Saint Elias Range of Yukon, Canada, allows for the preservation of a high-resolution isotopic and glaciochemical records valuable for reconstruction of climatic variables. Each of the three Eclipse ice cores have a well-constrained depth–age scale with dozens of reference horizons over the twentieth cen...

BACKGROUND Associations between ambient temperature and cardiovascular morbidity have been well studied worldwide; however, few studies determined the cardiovascular disease burden attributable to temperature. We aimed to assess the risk attributed to temperature based on the exposure-lag-response relationship between temperature and circulatory diseases. METHODS AND RESULTS We collected dail...

Accidental deaths due to exposure to extremely low natural temperature happen every winter. Exposure to extreme cold causes injury of multiple organs. However, early responses of the bodies to acute extreme cold exposure remain incompletely understood. In this study, we found that hepatic glycogen was rapidly reduced in rats exposed to -15°C, and the key enzymes required for glycogenesis were u...

BACKGROUND Many studies have found extreme temperature can increase the risk of mortality. However, it is not clear whether extreme diurnal temperature range (DTR) is associated with daily disease-specific mortality, and how season might modify any association. OBJECTIVES To better understand the acute effect of DTR on mortality and identify whether season is a modifier of the DTR effect. M...

Extreme environmental perturbations offer opportunities to observe the effects of natural selection in wild populations. During the winter of 2013-2014, the southeastern United States endured an extreme cold event. We used thermal performance, transcriptomics, and genome scans to measure responses of lizard populations to storm-induced selection. We found significant increases in cold tolerance...

Cognitive function defines performance in objective tasks that require conscious mental effort. Extreme environments, namely heat, hypoxia, and cold can all alter human cognitive function due to a variety of psychological and/or biological processes. The aims of this Focused Review were to discuss; (1) the current state of knowledge on the effects of heat, hypoxic and cold stress on cognitive f...