The Glove

I read this article in Wired magazine a few months back and was discussing part of it with Rick and Cali today (which is Rick's birthday, by the way). Specifically, I was talking about "the Glove," developed by the two Stanford researchers shown in the picture holding the device. As this other article states,

The idea is to engorge confluences of arteries and veins located [in the the hands] by mechanically drawing blood into them. The technology was used by some athletes during training for the Olympic Games in Athens, and it may soon find its way into attire for military personnel and others who work in extreme heat.
"We literally cool the body from the inside out, rather than from the outside in, which is the conventional method," explains Senior Research Scientist Dennis Grahn, who developed the cooling device with H. Craig Heller, the Lorry I. Lokey/Business Wire Professor in Human Biology and Environmental Biology.
The device works by creating a local subatmospheric pressure environment, Grahn says. "We stick the hand in a rigid chamber with an airtight seal around the wrist, and then we draw a bit of the air out of the chamber," he explains. "This causes blood to be pulled into the hand. Then we cool the overlying skin surface of the palm of the hand [by circulating cool water through a closed system on which the palm of the hand rests], which cools the blood in the hand's vascular heat-exchange structures. Arteries deliver blood directly from the heart to these vascular structures, and veins then carry the blood from these structures back to the heart."

Pretty cool, huh?