Telling a lie may not make your nose grow like Pinocchio but it does send its temperature soaring, according to Spanish scientists. 
 
 A rise in anxiety will see the tip of the nose heat up - while making a 'great mental effort' will help in cooling it down - says the University of Granada's Emilio Gómez Milán and Elvira Salazar López. 
 
 They have dubbed the newly-found phenomenon, discovered by using thermal imaging cameras on volunteers, 'The Pinocchio Effect'. 
 
 It is an homage to Italian writer Carlo Collodi's 19th century literary wooden character whose nose grew when he came under stress - especially when he failed to tell the truth. 
 
 The pair's doctoral thesis research, released yesterday, indicated the temperature of the nose increases or decreases according to mood, as does the orbital muscle area in the inner corner of the eyes. 
 
 They claimed that thermal imaging can detect sexual desire and arousal in both men and women, evident by an increase in temperature in the chest and genital areas. 
 
 And their work also demonstrated that, at a physiological level at least, men and women become aroused at the same time, although women subjectively indicate that they are not. 
 
 They made their conclusions after finding that, when people lie about their feelings, the brain's insular cortex is altered. 
 
 The scientists' statement said: 'The insular cortex is involved in the detection and regulation of body temperature, so there is a large negative correlation between the activity of this structure and the magnitude of the temperature change. 
 
 'The more activity in the insular cortex (the higher the visceral feeling), lower heat exchange occurs, and vice versa.' 
 
 Part of the results of their study have been published in scientific journals, while others have not, reported El Mundo newspaper. 
 
 The pair also found thermal footprints (that is body patterns with specific temperature changes) for aerobic exercise and distinct types of dance, such as ballet. 
 
 Salazar said: 'When someone dances Flamenco, the temperature in their buttocks lowers and it rises in their forearms. This is the thermal footprint for Flamenco, although each type of dance has its own.' ||||| Feeling the heat? Why a hot nose is the tell-tale sign of a liar 
 
 
 
 Scientists from the University of Granada used thermal imaging to prove anxiety makes the nose heat up 
 
 The academics claim the technique can also detect sexual desire and arousal in men and woman 
 
 
 
 Feeling the heat: Anxiety caused by telling lies makes the tip of the nose grow warm, the scientists claim 
 
 Contrary to what you may say to your children, telling a lie doesn’t, of course, make your nose grow like Pinocchio’s. But it does make it hotter. 
 
 Scientists claim that a rise in anxiety produced by lying will increase the temperature of the tip of your nose. 
 
 And if you’re worried that your fib will be uncovered, they also suggest a way of cooling the nose down – making ‘a great mental effort’. 
 
 The scientists, from the University of Granada, discovered the phenomenon by using thermal imaging cameras to monitor volunteers. 
 
 They have called it ‘The Pinocchio Effect’, in honour of the 19th century Italian tale of the wooden puppet whose nose grew when he failed to tell the truth. 
 
 In their doctoral thesis, released yesterday, Emilio Gómez Milán and Elvira Salazar López suggest that the temperature of the nose increases or decreases according to mood, as does the orbital muscle area in the inner corner of the eyes. 
 
 The scientists also claim thermal imaging can detect sexual desire and arousal in men and women, indicated by an increase in temperature in the chest and genital areas. 
 
 And the technique also allowed the pair to produce thermal footprints – body patterns with specific temperature changes – for aerobic exercise and distinct types of dance, such as ballet. 
 
 The Pinocchio effect: Researchers at the University of Granada found that the temperature of the nose rises as a person becomes anxious 
 
 They explained: ‘When someone dances Flamenco, the temperature in their buttocks lowers and it rises in their forearms. 
 
 ‘This is the thermal footprint for Flamenco, although each type of dance has its own.’ 
 
 The pair reached their conclusions after discovering that when the volunteers lied about their feelings, the brain’s insular cortex was altered. 
 
 They said: ‘The insular cortex is involved in the detection and regulation of body temperature, so there is a large negative correlation between the activity of this structure and the magnitude of the temperature change. ||||| Photo Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
 
 Summers are hot in Omaha, where heat indexes can top 100 degrees. But Molly Mahannah is prepared. 
 
 At the office, she bundles up in cardigans or an oversized sweatshirt from her file drawer. Then, she says, “I have a huge blanket at my desk that I’ve got myself wrapped in like a burrito.” Recently, “I was so cold, I was like ‘I’m just going to sit in my car in like 100-degree heat for like five minutes, and bake.’” 
 
 Ms. Mahannah, 24, who posted on Twitter that at work she felt like an icy White Walker from “Game of Thrones,” said a female co-worker at her digital marketing agency cloaked herself in sweaters, too. But the men? “They’re in, like, shorts.” 
 
 Right. It happens every summer: Offices turn on the air-conditioning, and women freeze into Popsicles. 
 
 Finally, scientists (two men, for the record) are urging an end to the Great Arctic Office Conspiracy. Their study, published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, says that most office buildings set temperatures based on a decades-old formula that uses the metabolic rates of men. The study concludes that buildings should “reduce gender-discriminating bias in thermal comfort” because setting temperatures at slightly warmer levels can help combat global warming. 
 
 Photo 
 
 “In a lot of buildings, you see energy consumption is a lot higher because the standard is calibrated for men’s body heat production,” said Boris Kingma, a co-author of the study and a biophysicist at Maastricht University Medical Center in the Netherlands. “If you have a more accurate view of the thermal demand of the people inside, then you can design the building so that you are wasting a lot less energy, and that means the carbon dioxide emission is less.” 
 
 The study says most building thermostats follow a “thermal comfort model that was developed in the 1960s,” which considers factors like air temperature, air speed, vapor pressure and clothing insulation, using a version of Fanger’s thermal comfort equation. 
 
 PMV = [0.303e-0.036M + 0.028]{(M – W) – 3.96E-8ƒ cl [(t cl + 273)4 – (t r + 273)4] – ƒ cl h c (t cl – t a ) – 3.05[5.73 – 0.007(M – W) – p a ] – 0.42[(M – W) – 58.15] – 0.0173M(5.87 – p a ) – 0.0014M(34 – t a )} 
 
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 It is converted to a seven-point scale and compared against the Predicted Percentage Dissatisfied, a gauge of how many people are likely to feel uncomfortably cool or warm. 
 
 Seems simple enough. 
 
 But Dr. Kingma and his colleague, Wouter van Marken Lichtenbelt, write that one variable in the formula, resting metabolic rate (how fast we generate heat), is based on a 40-year-old man weighing about 154 pounds. 
 
 Maybe that man once represented most people in offices. But women now constitute half of the work force and usually have slower metabolic rates than men, mostly because they are smaller and have more body fat, which has lower metabolic rates than muscle. Indeed, the study says, the current model “may overestimate resting heat production of women by up to 35 percent.” 
 
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 “If women have lower need for cooling it actually means you can save energy, because right now we’re just cooling for this male population,” said Joost van Hoof, a building physicist at Fontys University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands, who was not involved in the study. 
 
 “Many men think that women are just nagging,” he said. “But it’s because of their physiology.” 
 
 Physiology and clothing. The authors also note that the model is not always calibrated accurately for women’s summer wardrobes. Dr. van Hoof, who wrote a commentary about the study, observed that many men still wear suits and ties in the summer but many women wear skirts, sandals and other lighter, more skin-baring clothes. 
 
 “The cleavage is closer to the core of the body, so the temperature difference between the air temperature and the body temperature there is higher when it’s cold,” he said. 
 
 So for the planet’s sake, men should “stop complaining,” Dr. Kingma said. “If it is too warm, the behavior thing you can do is take off a piece of clothing, but you can only do that so much. You could also say let’s keep it a very cold building and women should just wear more clothes.” 
 
 But his study offers another solution: Change the formula. 
 
 The researchers tested 16 women, students in their 20s, doing seated work wearing light clothes in rooms called respiration chambers, which track oxygen inhaled and carbon dioxide exhaled. Skin temperature was measured on hands, the abdomen and elsewhere. A thermometer pill the women swallowed reported internal body temperature. 
 
 Researchers found the women’s average metabolic rate was 20 to 32 percent lower than rates in the standard chart used to set building temperature. So they propose adjusting the model to include actual metabolic rates of women and men, plus factors like body tissue insulation, not just clothing. For example, people who weigh more get warmer faster, and older people have slower metabolic rates, the study reported. 
 
 How much warmer an office would become would vary, of course, but the study cites research finding as much as a five-degree difference in women and men’s preferences. Dr. Kingma said a woman might prefer a 75-degree room, while a man might prefer about 70 degrees, which Dr. Kingma said is a common current office temperature. 
 
 Some experts doubt the proposed formula would be easily adopted. 
 
 Khee Poh Lam, an architecture professor at Carnegie Mellon, said even if the industry accepted a change to the longstanding model, buildings often house different businesses or “squeeze more people in” than they were designed for and partition offices so thermostats and vents are in different rooms. Given these improvisations, he added, “whether this actually affects energy, I think that’s a big leap.” 
 
 Still, he said, “we need to keep pushing” for improvements because “the phenomenon of women getting cold is very, very obvious,” and cold or hot employees are less productive. 
 
 Individualized temperature controls are the eventual answer, said Dr. Lam, who helped design a “personal environmental module” in the 1990s that was deemed too expensive for commercial development. Now others are developing systems to let workers make their cubicles warmer or cooler. 
 
 Kimberly Mark, 31, would appreciate that. This summer, at a software company in Natick, Mass., she and female colleagues are using space heaters. The thermostat is in the office of “the guy next to me,” she said, “and I’m the only woman in the offices that he controls.” 
 
 Phoebe McPherson, 21, said she sometimes wears thick leggings, a long-sleeve shirt, a sweatshirt and motorcycle boots to work at a health technology startup in Reston, Va. She often adds a tartan blanket, wraps “a blanket around my legs,” and despite the glaring fashion faux pas, wears a Snuggie backward to seal off any openings. 
 
 “I wore a dress once and had to go change,” said Ms. McPherson, who attended college in New Hampshire. While male colleagues wear T-shirts, “I’m bringing all my New Hampshire clothes to work.” And when that and hot coffee fail, she nuzzles against a white fake-fur wall in the office, just to “feel my skin warming up against the fur.”
– So Pinocchio wasn't that far-fetched after all: The nose may not grow when we lie, but two Spanish scientists say it does get noticeably warmer. Using thermal imaging cameras on volunteers, Emilio Gómez Milán and Elvira Salazar López found that nose temperature changed depending on their mood, the Daily Mail reports. The reason: Part of the brain called the insular cortex is altered when people lie about their feelings, and the insular cortex detects and regulates body temperature. Milán and López found other things that heat up, too. Their thermal imaging detected male and female sexual arousal in the chest and genital areas, and found that women and men became excited at the same time—even when female volunteers indicated they were not aroused, the Daily News reports. The scientists also associated "thermal footprints" with different dances: "When someone dances Flamenco, the temperature in their buttocks lowers and it rises in their forearms," they wrote. "Each type of dance has its own."