Quotes from Mary Roach

An anatomy lab is as choosy as a pedigreed woman seeking love: You can't be too fat or too tall or have any communicable diseases.

Frequent bowel movements were associated with an increased risk of rectal cancer in men, and constipation was associated with a decreased risk." Mike Jones wasn't surprised. The medical community was never completely on board Burkitt's fiber train.

I am of the opinion that the vulva of Your Most Sacred Majesty should be titillated for some length of time before intercourse.

If you lower your head to within a foot or two of an infested corpse - and this I truly don't recommend - you can hear them feeding. Arpad pinpoints the sound. Rice Krispies. Ron frowns. Ron used to like Rice Krispies.

What she perhaps didn't realize is that the embalming fluid pumped into the veins expands the body's erectile tissues, with the result that male anatomy lab cadavers may be markedly better endowed in death than they were in life.)

If you're dying of thirst in the desert, drinking your urine won't help you. The proteins and salts are by that point so concentrated that the body needs to pull fluid from the tissues to dilute them, which puts you back where you began, only worse, because now you are saddled with the memory of drinking your own murky, stinking pee. Rhabdomyolysis

To be fair, no eyewitness account or papyrus diary entries survive, and one wonders whether professional jealousy played a role. After all, no one was calling Tertullian the Father of Anatomy.

One of the seminar organizers joins me. Is Yvonne giving you a hard time? Yvonne. My nemesis is none other than the cadaver beheader. As if turns out, she's also the lab manager, the person responsible when things go wrong, such as writers fainting and/or getting sick to their stomach and then going home and writing books that refer to anatomy lab managers as beheaders.

Sunlight triggers a cutoff of melatonin, bringing on wakefulness. (Indoor light—particularly the light from tablets and smartphones—can also suppress melatonin, but nowhere near as dramatically as sunlight.) This is why night shift workers who drive home in the morning through sunlight and then struggle to fall asleep may find relief by buying amber-lensed Bono-style glasses that block the sun's blue light wavelengths. NSMRL

Unlike real tissue, human tissue simulant doesn't snap back: The cavity remains, allowing ballistics types to judge, and preserve a record of, a bullet's performance. Plus, you don't need to autopsy a block of human tissue simulant; because it's clear, you just walk up to it after you've shot it and take a look at the damage. Following which, you can take it home, eat it, and enjoy stronger, healthier nails in thirty days.

It began with meetings, five months before the Apollo 11 launch. The newly formed Committee on Symbolic Activities for the First Lunar Landing gathered to debate the appropriateness of planting a flag on the moon.

To gibbet is to dip a corpse in tar and suspend it in a flat iron cage (the gibbet) in plain view of townsfolk while it rots and gets pecked apart by crows. A stroll through the square must have been a whole different plate of tamales back then.

If you don't have a pair of cadaver shoes, you're not doing enough research." In

After six months, you forget how heavy things are. Like, yourself." You also, after months of weightlessness, forget how to use your legs. "Your muscles don't remember what to do." And astronauts have no pit crew to rush

I'd called [Stanley Garn] because he wrote an American Anthropolgist 's paper on the topic of human flesh and its nutritional value. Your cows, he said, are much more efficient. But I am not so much interested in cultures eating the flesh of their captive enemies as I am in cultures eating their own dead, the practical Why not? model of cannibalism, eating the meat of fresh corpses because it's there and it's a nice change from taro root.

One of the things I love about manned space exploration is that it forces people to unlace certain notions of what is and isn't acceptable. And possible. It's amazing what sometimes gets accomplished via an initially jarring but ultimately harmless shift in thinking.

Genetic differences in thermoregulation—efficient/inefficient, left side/right side, you name it—are surprisingly large and well worth paying attention to, given our seemingly permanent posture of fighting extremism in the Middle East. Dianna

You want a vivid description of what's going through my brain as I'm cutting through a liver and all these larvae are spilling out all over me and juice pops out of the intestines?" I kind of did, but I kept quiet. He went on: "I don't really focus on that. I try to focus on the value of the work. It takes the edge off the grotesqueness.

Whenever Mark takes over the explaining, Brockhoff drops back and takes out her phone. She does not seem rude, just grindingly busy and determined to stay on top of her day. I see her come and go in my peripheral vision, pacing, answering email. She gives the impression of someone for whom idleness is almost physically unbearable. She is gorgeous, articulate, fast-moving, powerful. Lesser humans left blinking in her wake. Brockhoff

In reality, maybe 1 percent of an astronaut's career takes place in space, and 1 percent of that is done in a pressure suit.

One woman confessed that her group had passed comment on the "extremely large genitalia" of their cadaver. (What she perhaps didn't realize is that the embalming fluid pumped into the veins expands the body's erectile tissues, with the result that male anatomy lab cadavers may be markedly better endowed in death than they were in life.)

Californians are like, 'Lions are everywhere now!' What's on the rise are home security cameras. Doorbell cameras are the mammograms of wildlife biology.

Edison believed that living beings were animated and controlled by "life units," smaller-than-microscopic entities that inhabited each and every cell and, upon death, evacuated the premises, floated around awhile, and eventually reassembled to animate a new personality—possibly another man, possibly an ocelot or a sea cucumber.

One French clergyman recommended thrusting a red-hot poker up what Bondeson genteelly refers to as "the rear passage." A French physician invented a set of nipple pincers specifically for the purpose of reanimation. Another invented a bagpipelike contraption for administering tobacco enemas, which he demonstrated enthusiastically on cadavers in the morgues of Paris.