Quotes from Mary Roach

how to get a cat to finish its vegetables. Pyrophosphates have been described to me as "cat crack." Coat some kibble with it, and you, the pet-food manufacturer, can make up for a whole host of gustatory shortcomings.

I ask Dennis how, knowing what he knows and seeing what he sees, he ever manages to board a plane. He points out that most crashing airplanes don't hit the ground from thirty thousand feet. The vast majority crash on takeoff or landing, either on or near the ground. Shanahan says 80 to 85 percent of plane crashes are potentially survivable.

Who's going to open the gates of heaven to some slob with his entrails all hanging out and dripping on the carpeting? From the sixteenth century up until the passage of the Anatomy Act, in 1836, the only cadavers legally available for dissection in Britain were those of executed murderers. For this reason, anatomists came to occupy the same terrain, in the public's mind, as executioners. Worse, even, for dissection was thought of, literally, as a punishment worse than death.

You do not dress to please yourself; you dress to please others.

She looks at once like someone who could have worked as a runway model and someone who would be mildly put off to hear that.

I am not, by trade or character, a spotlight operator. I'm the goober with a flashlight, stumbling into corners and crannies, not looking for anything specific but knowing when I've found it. Courage

I remember watching Morin walk away from me, the endearing gait and the butt that got lubed for science, and thinking, "Oh my god, they're just people." NASA

The body's response to this wild, Valsalvic seesawing of the vital signs can throw off the electrical rhythm of the heart. The resulting arrhythmia can be fatal. This is especially likely to happen in someone, like Elvis, with a compromised heart. Fatal arrhythmia is the cause of death listed on Presley's autopsy report.

Double sentencing wasn't a new idea, but rather the latest variation on the theme. Before that, a murderer might be hanged and then drawn and quartered, wherein horses were tied to his limbs and spurred off in four directions, the resultant "quarters" being impaled on spikes and publicly displayed, as a colorful reminder to the citizenry of the ill-advisedness of crime.

Making matters riskier: bed pans! "The notorious frequency of sudden and unexpected deaths of patients while using bed pans in hospitals has been commented upon for many years," wrote the Cincinnati doctors. Notorious enough for a term to be coined: "bed pan death." Lying flat is as counterproductive a posture as squatting is productive. Squatting passively increases the pressure on the rectum. It does the pushing for you. It

Gibbeting—though it hits the ear like a word for happy playground chatter or perhaps, at worst, the cleaning of small game birds—is in fact a ghastly verb. 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.

The other mode of defecation-associated sudden death is pulmonary embolism. The surge of blood when the person relaxes can dislodge a clot in a large blood vessel

It is assumed that a man will fit one of the three sizes available in the condom-style urine collection device hose attachment inside the EVA suit. To avoid mishaps caused by embarrassed astronauts opting for L when they are really S, there is no S. "There is L, XL, and XXL

Sometimes courage is nothing more than a willingness to think differently than those around you.

Because it's hard for people to gauge quality by flavor, they tend to gauge it by price. That's a mistake. Langstaff

Heroism doesn't always happen in a burst of glory. Sometimes small triumphs and large hearts change the course of history. Sometimes a chicken can save a man's life. ___________

Seventeenth-century surgeon-anatomist William Harvey, famous for discovering the human circulatory system, also deserves fame for being one of few medical men in history so dedicated to his calling that he could dissect his own father and sister.

A four-person crew will, over the course of three years, generate somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand pounds of feces. In the ominous words of sixties space nutritionist Emil Mrak, "The possibility of reuse must be considered." Sometime

The Johnson Space Center "potty cam," as it is more casually known, is an astronaut training aid. It provides a vivid, arresting perspective on something you've had intimate contact with all your life but never really seen. Perhaps not unlike viewing one's home planet from space for the first time. Positioning is critical because the opening to a Space Shuttle toilet is 4 inches across, as opposed to the 18-inch maw we are accustomed to on Earth.

I tell Mark I'm glad to see some cup holders were left in place. I recognize the brief, polite silence that follows. It's Mark Roman rendered mute by the fullness of my ignorance. They're rifle holders.

Space agencies keep a firm grip on their public image, and it's less troublesome for employees and contractors to say no to someone like me than to take their chances and see what I write. Happily there are people involved in the human side of space exploration who see value in unconventional coverage(or are just plain too nice to say no). For their candor and wit - and the generosity with which they shared their time and know-how - super-galactic thanks.

I think that at the moment of death that little window opens up. I think that maybe we're all connected to something bigger than we are.

My bias is that it does exist. But I would never say that I know that. Until I prove it.

The bacteria species in your colon today are more or less the same ones you had when you were six months old. About 80 percent of a person's gut microflora transmit from his or her mother during birth. "It's a very stable system," says Khoruts. "You can trace a person's family tree by their flora.