İs your bedroom really hot? İf it is, it may be affecting your memory and other thinking skills. Heat waves sometimes kill people who are very old, very young or in poor health. But new research shows that sleeping in a hot room can affect the thinking ability of even healthy young adults.

This finding comes from Harvard University's T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Researchers there looked at 24 students before, during and after a Boston-area heat wave. Of the 24 students, four slept in rooms with air-conditioning, also called “AC” for short. And 20 slept in rooms without AC.

The experiment lasted 12 days. The temperature of the room without air conditioning, or AC, averaged 26 degrees Celsius (78.8 F). The temperature in the rooms with AC averaged 21 degrees Celsius (70.5 F).

Jose Guillermo Cedeno-Laurent led the study. He is a professor and researcher at Harvard’s School of Public Health. He says he and his team considered several conditions in the rooms.

"We measured very intensively, every five minutes, several environmental factors, which include temperature, relative humidity, carbon dioxide and noise, in each of the bedrooms of the participants throughout the duration of the study."

He said they also used devices that recorded physical activity, including heart rate, perspiration, or sweat, and some sleep conditions. The researchers also noted how much water and caffeine the students drank and how much time they spent outside.

Aliqismet BADALOV,
“Khalq qazeti”