Best Science Books of 2022

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These general science books would make great stocking stuffers for your reading friends this year!

The Joy of Sweat. By Sarah Everts, a science read.

Sweating is one of our oddest biological activities, yet it’s both crucial and poorly understood.

Sarah Everts explores sweat in The Joy of Sweat.

Sweat is salty—why? Why sweat while stressed? Why is some sweat colored? Should you worry about Big Brother tracking the hundreds of molecules in your sweat—not just the stinking ones or purported pheromones—that indicate your health and vices?

Everts’s amusing inquiry takes readers from Moscow, where she attends a matchmaking event where people sniff sweat to find love. To New Jersey, where corporations engage expert armpit sniffers to test their anti-sweat products.

In Finland, Everts enjoys the famed smoke sauna and the health advantages of a good sweat. She joins the sauna theater scene in the Netherlands with costumes, special effects, and towel dancing.

Everts follows humanity’s long struggle to manage sweat to the multibillion-dollar deodorant and antiperspirant industry. She shows that while sweating is bothersome, our excellent temperature management system is one of humanity’s most potent biological characteristics.

The Joy of Sweat is a lively, well-researched look at an unpleasant but fascinating human trait.

One of the most famous writers in the world, who wrote the New York Times bestseller The Body and A Walk in the Woods, starts his final journey into some of science’s most difficult and puzzling questions.

A Short History of Nearly Everything. By Bill Bryson

How did things start? What are they doing now? What happens to everything in the future? Those are the questions in this book. His biggest problem is trying to understand and, if possible, answer the oldest and most important questions we’ve ever had about the universe and ourselves. This is what his largest book is about.

Bryson tries to figure out how we came from nothing, starting with the Big Bang and ending with the rise of civilization. To do this, he has visited the offices, research facilities, and camps with some of the world’s best (and often most obsessive) scientists. 

He has read (or tried to read) their books, bugged them with questions and tried to learn from their sharp minds. He distills it all in just under 400 pages. Each one of which you’ll want to turn.

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