Quotes from Mary Roach

Space doesn't just encompass the sublime and the ridiculous. It erases the line between.

A meteoroid is a bit of debris, usually planetary, hurtling through the solar system. If it's bigger than a boulder, than it's an asteroid. If any part of a meteroid makes it to Earth intact rather than burning up as it barrels through Earth's atmosphere, then it's a meteorite. A meteoroid's visible path through the atmosphere is a meteor. An astronaut struck by a meteoroid is a goner. A meteroid the size of a tomato seed can pierce a space suit.

Of all the animals we have ever kept, these Albatross are the ones to which I have become most attached. I really love them and respect their independence and jaunty ways. This marks the end of a period of acquaintance with real aristocrats of life.

It's just that there are other ways to spend your time as a cadaver. Get involved with science. Be an art exhibit. Become part of a tree. Some options for you to think about. Death. It doesn't have to be boring.

If other fallers read this, he will no doubt get grief about his lovely hands, but I believe a man named Dazy will handle it.

I've enjoyed hanging around in rooms doing nothing much, and look, I get to do it after I die.

The Salivette makes an unmistakable point: your parotid glands don't care what you chew. There is nothing remotely foodlike about superabsorbent cotton, yet the parotids gamely set to work. They are your faithful servants. Whatever you decide to eat, boss, I will help you get it down.

The Soviet space agency did not traditionally give cosmonauts steak and eggs before launch; it gave them a one-liter enema.) Fahey

The man had donated his body to science, but, owing to its having been autopsied, science politely declined. 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.

It wasn't until about 1920, he added, that "the average patient with the average illness seeing the average physician came off better for the encounter.

Marcel dropped a white plastic bag onto the table. It bounced slightly on landing. "Muktuk," Nirlungayuk said approvingly. It was a piece of narwhal skin, uncooked.

When I get back to my room to review my notes, I find that I've written nothing of substance. I wasn't so much taking notes as testing my Fisher Space Pen. My notes say: "WOO" and "yippee.")

Zero gravity is part of the reason NASA price tags seem so extravagant. For every new piece of equipment that goes up on a mission—every pump, fan, throttle, widget—a prototype must be flown on the C-9 to be sure it works in weightlessness.

The Spanish for 'vacuum' is aspiradora.

Body snatching and other sordid tales from the dawn of human dissection

Alas, for me, a belief is not something you are born into or that you simply choose to adopt one day. Belief, for me, calls for plausibility. And so I continue my wanderings.

Lou is one of a small group of bachelors whom we sometimes invite over for a meal at the last minute. It is never intimidating to cook for these men, as your culinary talents need only surpass those of Mr. Top and his ramen.

Because people like me want to have their hamburgers. Only once or twice a year, I want to say. But I know that's a lame defense. It's not the quantity that matters, it's the statement you make or don't make. When you tell people you don't eat beef — or would never use a glue trap — you make the alternative a little less comfortable for them. You keep it from being a thing they give no thought to.

safety orange/red hunting jacket makes the hunter stand out to other hunters, to deer it may be more camo than store-bought camo.

While Cutler was tinkering with his castor oil, his roommate began feeling ill. Fearing it might be ricin poisoning, the roommate went to the emergency room. It was just flu, but at the mention of ricin, medical personnel called in a potential terrorist situation and a Phoenix SWAT team descended upon the apartment. Cutler served three years for, essentially, possession of a laxative with criminal intent.

Bad enough that some ham-handed fop in a waistcoat and bowtie was up to his wrists in your urinary tract, but on top of that you had an audience-

Battles in Micronesia were so pitched and bloody that Gilbertese warriors would outfit themselves head to foot with doormat-thick armor fashioned from coconut hulls. On top of the significant humiliation of making one's entrance onto the battlefield looking like an enormous macramé planter was the fact that the armor was so bulky that it required the assistance of several squires to help maneuver you.

As we wait for the bill, I ask Shanahan the question he gets asked at every cocktail party he's been to in the past twenty years: Are your chances of surviving a crash better near the front of the plane or the back? "That depends," he says patiently. "on what kind of crash it's going to be." I rephrase the question. Given his choice of anywhere on the plane, where does he prefer to sit? "First class.

I don't want you to say, 'This is gross.' I want you to say, 'I thought this would be gross, but it's really interesting!' Okay, and maybe a little gross.