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The Story of Boogers and Other Gross Things: The Science of Snot, Poop, Pus, Vomit, and Everything Else Your Body Makes
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 20 2026
Pages: 152
Weight: 0.31
Height: 0.38 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
Your body is running a factory that never closes. Right now it is trapping dust in slime, dissolving the roots of your own teeth, dismantling millions of worn-out blood cells and dyeing the results brown on the way out. It is hosting roughly as many bacteria as it has cells of you, and those bacteria are making most of your smells for you. Not one bit of this stops while you sleep.
This is a science book about the parts of the human body that make kids say ewww - and it takes them apart with three questions. What is it made of? Who made it? What was it for?
The answers are stranger than the grossness:
- Poop is brown and pee is yellow for exactly the same reason, and it has nothing to do with food
- The green in your snot isn't the germ - it's the color of your own dead defenders, piled up
- Fresh sweat has almost no smell at all
- One tiny gene decides both what kind of earwax you have and how much your armpits stink
- Some white blood cells fight by throwing their own DNA out of their bodies as a sticky net
- Your stomach makes acid strong enough to damage itself, and the only thing protecting it is a layer of snot
Along the way, it kills off a pile of facts that turn up in almost every gross-science book and are simply wrong. Sneezes don't travel a hundred miles an hour. Household dust isn't mostly dead skin. Blackheads aren't dirt, and scrubbing won't remove them. You don't have ten bacteria for every human cell.
And underneath all of it sits one idea worth carrying around: gross and dangerous are not the same thing. Snot is normal. Earwax is normal. Farts are unavoidable. Learning which disgusting things mean something is wrong - and which ones mean everything is working exactly as designed - is a genuinely useful skill, and it's the one this book is quietly teaching the whole time.
Written for curious readers ages 9 to 12.
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