It's Science Friday! Or what passes for it around here. . .
For your amusement (and mine), from the book The Secret House (The Extraordinary Science of an Ordinary Day), by David Bodanis:
Anti-perspirants do not work by jamming little particles into the openings of the sweat pores in the armpits. . . Aluminum flecks, which are the key ingredient, are negatively charged. That means the extra furry cloud of negative electrons they carry around with them counter-balances the normal positive charge on the skin surface. There's a crackle, some static, the equivalent of sparks, and the whole system is shut, short-circuited, and out of operation for hours. The sweat caught inside dissolves back into the body, crumbling through cracks in the sweat tubes like water from a leaky hose.
For the deodorizing effect. . . a little perfume is mixed in. There's also a nice dose of insecticide and bactericide, chemicals that are near-identical to the poisons in your garden shed, and which here are murder on any soft, unshelled creatures in their way. (They) are as acid as lemon juice. The furry. . .bacteria in your armpits are wiped out, whole colonies coated with poison and left to suffocate where they rest hugging the armpit hairs. Most go in 30 minutes. . .it's their defecation of ammonia that produces the smell we're trying to avoid in using these armpit slaughtering agents.
Perhaps you'd just as soon I stopped there? :)
Who figures this stuff out??
IT'S FRIDAY!! What's gonna make you snap, crackle, and pop this weekend?
Update: Don't miss Rick's story in the comments. It's wonderful.