I've spent years shivering behind computer monitors, battling annoying co-workers and merciless middle managers over control of the ambient temperature of office space. I'm not the only one: The thermostat wars in our nation's offices cost us billions of dollars in extra heating and cooling energy every year. Now researchers at Berkeley's Center for the Built Environment have hit on an idea that could bring peace to the cubicles and cut office energy use for temperature control up to 25 percent.

I'm curious about how their plan will work, so I head down to Wurster Hall and volunteer to become a guinea pig for this experiment. Research specialist Hui Zhang ushers me into the "Controlled Environment Chamber." The room is office on the inside -- decorated to make the cubicle dweller feel right at home --and science on the outside -- sealed off from the world and hooked up to oversize heating and cooling units. I willingly change into the clothes Zhang provides but balk when she instructs me to swallow a large pill.

"It's a thermometer," she says. "Transmits core temperature readings."

"If I take it, how do I get it out?"

"You will pass it." I suffer a moment of doubt. "Don't worry," Zhang says, "we don't reuse."

Zhang and visiting scholar Elena Buchberger attach heat sensors to my face, hands, and feet, then put me in a cubicle and set me to work. In this case, my "work" is the Graduate Record Examinations, or GRE. Studies have shown that workers are between 1 and 5 percent more productive when their offices aren't too hot or too cold. The rate at which I answer questions (and get them right) will provide a measure of how the temperature affects me.

The first half of the experiment goes like any day at the office: I suffer quietly in near-arctic conditions. Then Buchberger shows me how to work a controller for heaters in a footpad and in the keyboard. Buchberger designed the keyboard heater -- a platform any keyboard can rest on, which blows warm air up over the keys. It also has a palm-rest laced with wires-like the defroster on the back window of a car. The heaters are set not to get too hot, Buchberger assures me.

"So it doesn't melt the keyboard?"

"And so no one will fry," she says gravely.

I turn both heaters all the way up and go back to my GRE analogies: Worship is to sacrifice as prediction is to …? The temperature in the room does not change, but my hands warm up and my feet turn toasty. Now comfortable in my skin, I start to whip through the rest of the analogies. The body's extremities-head, hands, and feet-are more sensitive to cold than other body parts, explains Fred Bauman, another researcher working on the project. By focusing heat directly on the hands and feet, workers can adjust their own perceived temperature without affecting their neighbors. The researchers also have proposed a solution for hot offices: dual vents built into cubicles that waft cool air at workers' heads.