The Secret Family follows a family of five - father, mother, daughter, son, infant - through twenty-four hours, and uncovers the extraordinary goings-on in an ordinary day. The book opens with the family awakening and eating breakfast. Breakfast - in fact, any meal - will never be quite the same again. You will be amazed to learn what is in your morning orange juice. You will find confirmation of your belief that men and women navigate differently through a refrigerator. You may be appalled to discover which invisible creatures awake alongside you every morning. In addition to illuminating these mysteries, David Bodanis describes the myriad undetected activities of our own bodies: how people have a tendency to synchronize their blinking (which is faster when we are agitated, slower when we are happy); how our endorphin levels rise quickly in the presence of ultraviolet energy, making sunlight a pleasure; and the patterns underlying our everyday behavior - how in choosing our mates we often gravitate toward those similar to us in looks, opinions, and even number of siblings; or how teenagers have baffled their elders back to the time of Aristotle, who wrote of young Athenians that they "think they know everything and are always quite sure about it."