Sweating through summers

Unlike my life in the old country where I experienced only two seasons--hot, and rainy--my life here in the Pacific Northwest is defined by four seasons.  The changes are gradual at first, and then dramatic enough for us to wonder when the season changed.

Summer begins on the longest day of the year--June 20th--and the weather is forecast to reach a high of 97 degrees on the 21st.

97?

It is only a matter of time before we begin to complain about the bright sun and the heat.  And, of course, I will lead that chant!

I have acclimated to the temperate conditions in this part of the world. Every year, as the temperature rises, I wonder how it can be possible for a boy who played outside under hot and humid conditions to become a wuss who cannot bear even the much lower temperatures.

During my visits to India, it is always a struggle within when it comes to having coffee in the afternoon.  Should I have a hot drink when it is warm all around, or have something cooler?

Of course, such a question never came up when I was young.  Hot coffee or masala tea on a hot afternoon was what we had.  Was it because we didn't have a fridge for the longest time?  Or, is it because it really helps drinking something hot on a hot day?

While having hot coffee on summer afternoons might sound strange, it is not stranger than people licking ice cream on cones while walking on cold winter evenings here in my adopted home.  So, if having ice cold stuff in winter is ok, is there any benefit in drinking hot coffee in the summer?

This has been a matter of scientific inquiry, too.

There are all sorts of receptors in all sorts of nerves, but the nerves in the tongue have a lot of one particular receptor that responds to heat. It's called the TRPV1 receptor, if anyone wants to know.

So when you eat or drink something hot, these receptors get that heat signal, and that tells the nerve to let the brain know what's going on.

When the brain gets the message "It's hot in here," it turns on the mechanism we have to cool ourselves off: sweating.

Yes, the hot drink makes you hotter ... but it does something else, too.

"The hot drink somehow has an effect on your systemic cooling mechanisms, which exceeds its actual effect in terms of heating your body."

Aha!

But, what if the conditions are also so humid that the sweat doesn't vaporize and cool the body but instead sticks around?

This is the nightmarish scenario that Kim Stanley Robinson describes in the opening chapters of Ministry for the Future.   Robinson emphasizes the wet-bulb temperature, which translates the effect of the thermometer reading after accounting for evaporative cooling.  This cooling does not happen at 100% relative humidity. 

So, if the temperatures are rising in the old country, with humidity levels the same as they were when I was a kid, then sweat as a cooling mechanism doesn't really work as it once did.  Instead, sweating adds to the misery.  As Wikipedia puts it, "Even heat-adapted people cannot carry out normal outdoor activities past a wet-bulb temperature of 32 °C (90 °F), equivalent to a heat index of 55 °C (130 °F)."

Here in the Pacific Northwest, the summer months are practically drought times, and the humidity levels drop.  While we never experience terrible wet-bulb temperatures, we begin sweating at the first report of forest fires, which are becoming more and more frequent.

The (f)art of science

As even the occasional reader of this blog finds out, there is no pretentious highfalutin crap here.  I am genuinely interested in many aspects of life and the human condition, and I try to understand it in the simplest possible ways.  I even suggest to students all the time that the key is on understanding and articulating that understanding.  The rest is fluff.

An interest in the human condition includes everything from life to death.  Emotions, of course.  Work, heck yes.  Sex and shit, too.  Even sweat; after all, it is human to sweat, right?

Yep, sweat.

I even quoted an uncle who had a quick retort, as he always did, when my brother complained about sweating and the stink. "Tell me when the sweat smells like a perfume and I will collect a bottle of it," he said.  We laughed.

Of course, we know that sweat itself does not have any smell.  The bacteria in places like our armpits are the ones that create that odor, which apparently is like pheromones to some.

An artist who focuses on science has taken this to a whole new level.  Get this: He "worked on an elaborate scent-based art installation called “Labor” to recreate the odor many people associate with sweat and give audiences a new way to “see” and understand smell."

We try to understand the human condition in many different ways.

So, how did he approach this project?

There is an unusual laboratory in Helsinki, Finland, founded to host creative interdisciplinary practices called “bio-art.” As part of an artist’s residency, I worked at Biofilia at Aalto University to recreate the scent people associate with sweat. For inspiration and perspiration, I used myself as a laboratory subject, spending plenty of time in the legendary Finnish saunas.

How fascinating!

My research began by defining human skin bacteria associated with odors and learning how to grow them. The scientific literature is sparse, as much of this research is carried out by deodorant and antiperspirant industries, which often don’t publish their results.

I tell ya, it is hard work trying to understand the human condition.  One can, of course, live a life without ever examining it.  But, that does not appeal to me.

Next, I isolated my sweat by capturing bacteria from my armpits in sterile gauze, filtering it and incubating it in dozens of heat and atmospheric conditions. Then I designed a bioreactor, similar to fermenters that brew beer, except they are built to enable more varied types of biochemical reactions with microbes. Finally, I experimented with liquid cultures that encouraged bacteria to thrive and produce fragrant waste products.
The concept of my artwork “Labor” is that microorganisms create the “vulgar odors” of sweat

So, at this point you begin to wonder where the "art" is because he is describing a scientific process, right?  Here it comes:

The exhibit contains several large glass bioreactors, each populated with one of three strains of bacteria. The soup in each container produced the smell of sweat, odors that collected in a central glass enclosure where a white T-shirt hung. From there, the smell drifted into the room.

What a piece of installation art!

He ends with this:

It has been said that deep human attraction is often premised on our scents. If bacteria are responsible for our scent, then are we attracted to a person or their bacteria? Perhaps bacteria help steer human sexual selection and evolution.

I wonder what bacteria are there in Love Potion Number 9 ;)