Rocketman: I like the way you think, and I certainly don't have all the answers. Nevertheless, some comments.
Originally Posted By Roocketman
Stephensen says this:

"Humans have a problem which we are told other animals don’t have: the moisture IN our skin evaporates in dry air, thus losing heat and water. That moisture loss is called “insensible sweat”,This isn't really true. Experiments in the medical field on insensible sweat have been done with rats.

If the bag and the water bowl are pretty much the same temperature, whatever water vapor streaming there is is diminished. At a small enough temperature difference, we can say that the evaporation-condensation water vapor transport system effectively stops. Yes, but if the skin is 98.6F I doubt the bag can ever be that warm without an external heat source. What I mean is, you are going to have lower ambient temp outside the skin and hence you would have evaporation.

Replace water bowl with water containing flesh and repeat the argument about water vapor transport to the bag wall. [color:#FFFF99]However, at least one medical journal reported experiments that showed that the insensible perspiration rate was not proportional to the difference between the ambient vapor pressure and the vapor pressure of the liquid in the skin of humans. I don't think the physics of it can explain the empirical data for this.
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One other issue I ran into in the medical journals was that one study found that it wasn't as easy to tell insensible sweat from sensible sweat. this puts some doubt on our knowledge of sweating in general. For example, perhaps we do produce some so called sensible sweat (from skin glands) all the time that has been mistaken for insensible sweat. But perhaps the most damming research (ie, conflicts with VB theory) was that Sweat (no matter what kind) seems to always be measurable in human skin, no matter the humidity. And it increases with an increase of ambient temp.




Edited by Pliny (10/23/09 11:51 PM)
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Jim M