Your tongue will stick to the cold metal

If someone challenges you to stick your tongue against a cold flagpole, don't do it. Your tongue will stick to it, and it will take a long time to think about the thermal conductivity of metal while waiting for the rescue team to arrive.

Explain why your tongue adheres to cold metal

Your tongue is covered with a moist layer and it will harden if the temperature falls to 0 degrees C. Your body is protected against this freezing by pumping hot blood onto the tongue.

Heat from the blood will warm the tongue through a process called heat conduction. Energy from the blood stimulates the atoms in the tongue. These atoms will absorb energy and vibrate. The more they vibrate, the higher the temperature increases. This in turn stimulates vibrations in the surrounding atoms, energizes, transmits heat and eventually warms the entire wet surface.

So why does the tongue stick to cold metal?

Photo: Livescience

" That's because of the high thermal conductivity of the metal column ," explains Frank J. DiSalvo, director of the Cornell Fuel Cell Research Institute, USA. " The metal conducts heat better than the tongue (400 times higher). The metal receives heat faster than your body can compensate ."

Metal atoms lie close to each other and transmit energy much faster. They also have free electrons that promote heat transfer. Free electrons move from one atom to another. They suck up heat and move back and forth across the flagpole, stirring up other atoms moving.

When your tongue touches the flagpole, the moisture on the tongue is immediately deprived of heat . The temperature of the moisture layer will drop dramatically. Water is frozen in tiny holes and on irregular surfaces of tongue and flagpole. And finally you get caught up in it.

You think you will try to pull out? Yes and you will also lose a piece of the tongue.

A lifeguard has come up with a temporary measure, which is: " Pour warm water into the place where your tongue sticks to the column, your tongue will separate ".