A Valentine's Day bouquet for Temperature readers: pleasing with prizes, searching for the right words, and keeping things mysterious

Abstract

This editorial tells its readers that the journal Temperature awards its first prizes for best papers to Boris Kingma and Assaf Yacobi. It also discusses the use of several thermoregulation-related terms and expressions, including “cold temperature,” “thermoneutral temperature,” and “warm-sensitive” and offers, arguably, better alternatives. The editorial also contains a new puzzle: how can color affect temperature perception?

What feels warmer? A red skin versus a red object

“…This is a reply to the puzzle published in your recent editorial. 1 Blue objects have been reported by Hsin-Ni Ho (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, Japan) and her colleagues 2 to feel warmer to the touch than red ones at the same temperature. However, when the hand in contact with an object is colored red or blue -rather than the object being colored red or blue-, the effect is reversed, with red hands making objects feel warmer.…”

Impact of hand and object colors on object temperature perception

“…This is our reply to the letter by Prof. Maria V Sanchez-Vives, 1 which answers the riddle published in the recent editorial. 2 This riddle asks the readers of Temperature to explain 2 unexpected effects of color on object temperature perception that we recently discovered. 3 One is that blue objects are more likely to be judged as warm than red ones of the same temperature.…”

Award-winning papers published inTemperaturein 2014

“…Two Young Investigator prizes ($700 and $300) have been awarded to Boris Kingma from Maastricht University Medical Center (Netherlands) and Assaf Yacobi from The Hibru University in Jerusalem (Israel) for their 2014 Temperature papers, 3,4 as announced in an earlier editorial. 5 The awardees were determined by the Organizing Committee of the 5 th International Symposium on the Physiology and Pharmacology of Temperature Regulation (Skukuza, Kruger National Park, South Africa, September 7–12, 2014).…”