The Joy of Sweat: The Strange Science of Perspiration - Sarah Everts

Category: Adults, Science
Language: English
Keywords: Biology Bodily Function

Written by Sarah Everts
Read by Sophie Amoss
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Books on Tape
File size: 261074 KB
Release date: July 13, 2021

A taboo-busting romp through the shame, stink, and strange science of sweating.

Sweating may be one of our weirdest biological functions, but it’s also one of our most vital and least understood. In The Joy of Sweat, Sarah Everts delves into its role in the body—and in human history.

Why is sweat salty? Why do we sweat when stressed? Why do some people produce colorful sweat? And should you worry about Big Brother tracking the hundreds of molecules that leak out in your sweat—not just the stinky ones or alleged pheromones—but the ones that reveal secrets about your health and vices?

Everts’s entertaining investigation takes readers around the world—from Moscow, where she participates in a dating event in which people sniff sweat in search of love, to New Jersey, where companies hire trained armpit sniffers to assess the efficacy of their anti-sweat products.

Along the way, Everts traces humanity’s long quest to control sweat, culminating in the multibillion-dollar industry for deodorants and antiperspirants. And she shows that while sweating can be annoying, our sophisticated temperature control strategy is one of humanity’s most powerful biological traits.

Deeply researched and written with great zest, The Joy of Sweat is a fresh take on a gross but engrossing fact of human life.

“If you feel kind of gross when you sweat, Sarah Everts will make you realize how cool it is that we humans regulate our body temperatures this way. Narrator Sophie Amoss channels the author’s wry humor with impeccable timing and a slightly scratchy timbre. … Amoss is pitch-perfect at capturing the right tone every time. She won’t let your attention falter during the scientific explanations either. After learning that elephants flap their ears, bees vomit on themselves, and pigs roll in the mud to cool themselves down, maybe sweating isn’t so bad after all.”— Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award