The Great Outdoors

WINTER HATS

KEEPING WARM with a cosy hat is common sense, isn’t it? Well, yes and no. For example, I was today years old when I learnt that the folk wisdom of us losing ‘most’ of our body heat via our heads originates from a US Army survival manual and has since been disproved. Our heads are (mostly) round – a good shape for retaining heat – and we lose about as much heat from them as anywhere else exposed: about 7-10%, not the 40-50% claimed in the past!

However, a Canadian researcher called Thea Pretorius delved further, and she found that while we may

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