Quotes from Mary Roach

This is why you don't just stick bodies in the refrigerator before an open-casket funeral.

Nature will castigate those who don't masticate' may hold some truth," concluded the paper, which appeared in the October 1980 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. On the whole-peanut diet, the subjects excreted 18 percent of the fat they'd consumed. When they switched to peanut butter, only 7 percent escaped in their stool.

The human liver is a boss-looking organ. It's glossy, aerodynamic, Olympian.

as dogs rely more on smell than taste in making choices about what to eat and how vigorously. (Pat Moeller estimates that for dogs, the ratio for how much aroma matters to how much taste matters is 70/30. For cats, the ratio is more like 50/50.) The takeaway lesson is that if the palatant smells appealing, the dog will dive in with instant and obvious zeal, and the owner will assume the food is a hit. In reality it may have only smelled like a hit.

Mortuary embalming is designed to keep a cadaver looking fresh and uncadaverous for the funeral service, but not much longer. (Anatomy departments amp up the process by using greater amounts and higher concentrations of formalin; these corpses may remain intact for years, though they take on a kind of pickled horror-movie appearance.)

No engineer could design something as multifunctional and fine-tuned as an anus. To call someone an asshole is really bragging him up.

The difference between dog and cat is immediately obvious. While a dog almost (and occasionally literally) inhales its food the moment it's set down, cats are more cautious. A cat wants to taste a little first. McCarthy directs my gaze to the kibble that has no palatant coating. "See how they feel it in their mouth and then drop it?

In retrospect, it was silly to think that the experience of traveling in space could be approximated by a repurposed walk-in freezer. To find out what would happen to a man alone in the cosmos, at some point you just had to lob one up there.

You can't specify what you're used for; you go where there's a need. The majority of willed bodies wind up in the anatomy department. Almost none end up in the English department.

She replies that lavender was chosen because it's a soothing color.

Faulks was dismissive not only of extreme chewing, but also of the related fad for blenderizing to increase the accessibility of nutrients.

PARC techs also try to keep a bead on doggy interactions in the yards. "We need to know," says McCarthy. "'Are you down because you don't like the food or because Pipes stole your bone earlier?'" Theresa volunteers that a dog named Rover has lately had a stomach upset, and Porkchop likes to eat the vomit. "So that's cutting into Porkchop's appetite." And probably yours.

ask him about Fletcherizing. "You're going to spend all day just having breakfast. You will lose your job!

He's the winningest guy I know, and I mean that from the bottom of my heart, which is the part that comes before the top.

We had no problems, no conflicts," Mars500 Commander Sergei Ryazansky is saying.

Beef went next. Because I used to write for a health magazine, I had heard about Mad Cow disease back when it was known by its scientific nomenclature, bovine spongebob empopalopathy.

On human decay and what can be done about it

I don't know the ultimate fate of a suppressed fart.

What I am getting at is that there is a point at which efficiency crosses over into lunacy, and the savings in money or resources cease to be worthwhile

Anyone who hunts, the pair told me, eats organs. Though the Inuit (in Canada, the term is preferred over Eskimo) gave up their nomadic existence in the 1950s, most adult men still supplemented the family diet with hunted game, partly to save money. In 1993, when I visited, a small can of Spork, the local Spam, cost $2.69. Produce arrives by plane. A watermelon might set you back $25. Cucumbers were so expensive that the local sex educator did his condom demonstrations on a broomstick. I

Pornography, Lloyd points out, exposes us to idealized, highly selective images, making women needlessly self-conscious (and labia-reduction surgeons rich).

And that if you did tell them the details, they might change their minds and withdraw consent.

His wife Lynne, who has accompanied him on several visits, volunteers that she felt nothing. "Though I do sometimes feel a strange oppressiveness in the Sainsbury's dairy area." I volunteer that, owing to her accent or my fourth-grade maturity level, this came through as: "the Sainsbury's derriere." Lynne's look suggests that the humor isn't registering. It suggests she might think I'm something of a dairy area myself.

The shot is an extreme close-up, making it impossible to tell, without already knowing, what kind of flesh it is. It could be Julia Child skinning poultry before a studio audience. The seminar