Jeffrey belo, age 9, of pittsburgh, pa o, for his question:
What causes goose pimples?
You are likely to get goose pimples if you venture out into a chilly day without a warm coat, a dark and spooky cave may also cause a rash of white goose pimples on your skin, these little white bumps pop up by themselves when your body becomes cold and sometimes when you get a sudden scare.
Summer is almost here, and the time has come to let off steam with outdoor games and long hikes to explore new places. These joyful adventures tend to cover a young person with patches of dirt and corners of stubborn grime. This is fine and part of the fun. But when a nine year old boy gets home, he is sure to wash his skin shiny bright, naturally, he scrubs hard and rubs the foamy soap behind his ears and under his fingernails.
As he scrubs, he may wonder about the strong, smooth skin which covers his body, it is waterproof. Soap and many other chemicals do not injure it, what's more, it seems to know about certain things. It can tell hot and cold, the skin on your fingertips can tell rough and smooth, these are just a few things that the wonderful skin can do,
The top of the skin is a flaky layer which is always falling away while new cells grow in to rebuild it. Some of the hopelessly dirty flakes come off when you scrub, under this top layer is a fleshy layer of skin with nerves and blood vessels. If you stick a pin down to this layer, you feel pain and you bleed, there are also tiny glands and hair roots in this deeper skin.
The roots grow hairs almost too fine and pale for you to notice, these hairs grow over most of your body, even on your hands and face the tiny glands in the fleshy underskin make sweat which pours up and runs over the skin on a hot day, as the sweat evaporates, it helps to keep the skin cool,
The fleshy underskin is full of delicate muscles. On a cold day, they shiver and shake, and this exercise helps to make your body warmer, these muscles sometimes bunch up around the invisible hairs that cover your body, they form a little white goose pimple where each hair grows out of the skin, there are good reasons for sweat, which makes us cooler, and for shivering, which makes us warmer, but there seems no sensible reason why goose pimples pop up when the weather is cold or when we get scared in, say, a spooky cave.
Some experts think that there was a time in the remote past when goose pimples were useful, our distant ancestors, the cavemen, might have had thick fur all over their bodies, in cold weather, goose pimples would fluff up the fur and make it warmer, when a frightening enemy appeared, the goose pimples would stand the hairs on end and make the caveman look bigger and more dangerous,