Some places are still roasting after the summer. We've all been feeling the heat with people around the world.
The salty liquid oozing from your skin is the key to keeping you cool. There's more to the briny stuff than the eye can see.
The NPR science staffers braved the heat to get dirt on their sweat. The lessons are based on their reports.
The basics are what we're going to start with. Water and salt are the main ingredients of sweat. The coiled loops of those glands help move some of the liquid through the spaces between your cells, bones and organs.
When the sweat on your skin becomes a gas, it takes some heat from the blood to make it. The now-cooler blood goes around your body and back to your core to help keep your body temperature correct.
Sweat dripping from your forehead and arms after a run is mostly odorless, as perspiration is mostly odorless. There is something different about the sweat on your body. The apocrine glands in those places release a form of perspiration that is good for you. The body odor is caused by the byproduct of thesebacteria feeding on your sweat.
If you're worried about your sweat, don't use antibacterial soap to clean yourself. Body odor is caused by the microbes that give rise to body odor.
It is possible to knock down the stink with a light sudsing with soap and water.
Let's be transparent. You are the one who sweats the most. Not just you but all humans.
The sweat glands of our ancestors are thought to have evolved between 1.5 million and 2.5 million years ago.
Most other animals don't sweat, and they need to find other ways to stay cool if they can't find shade, a river or a pool. lions in a Maryland zoo this summer got frozen bloodsicles to help lower everyone's temperature, as NPR's Rebecca Hersher recounts in her rhyming exploration of the ways various creatures stay cool.
It may seem counterintuitive, but when you get out of a warm bath, the water will evaporate from your skin, cooling you down before you sleep. Scientists told Joe Palca that the best time to use this life hack is about an hour before bed.
Mosquitoes are attracted to human sweat. Like the rest of us, insects need salt in their food and our salty perspiration is what they need.
It is thought that millions of years ago, some ancestors of mosquitoes discovered that there was more to our body than sweat. The nonbiters had an evolutionary edge over the bloodsuckers.
In a low-gravity environment, sweat doesn't evaporate from the skin without gravity, so perspiration can be a problem. It sits there and pools up, which can disrupt electronic equipment and make spacewalks even more uncomfortable.
On spacewalks, astronauts wear special underwear with cooling tubes that keep the heat out. In a space station, any sweat that gets into the air is recycled into fresh water for the astronauts to drink.
Our summer series on sweat was the basis for the reporting. Are you still thirsting for more sweat science? The hosts of NPR's science show Short Wave sat down with the three men to discuss what they have learned.
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