Quotes from Mary Roach

Upon the occasion of history's first manned flight - in the 1780's aboard the Montgolfier brothers' hot-air balloons - someone asked Franklin what use he saw in such frivolity. What use, he replied, is a newborn baby?

Masters points out that the heterosexuals were at a disadvantage, as they do not benefit from what he called "gender empathy". Doing unto your partner as you would do unto yourself only works well when you're gay.

In a wartime survey conducted by a team of food-habits researchers, only 14 percent of the students at a women's college said they liked evaporated milk. After serving it to the students sixteen times over the course of a month, the researchers asked again. Now 51 percent liked it. As Kurt Lewin put it, "People like what they eat, rather than eat what they like.

Ability to Function Despite Imminent Catastrophe.

This is what primate sex hormones do: "They make individuals perceive other individuals as more attractive than they'd normally perceive them." Hormones are nature's three bottles of beer.

US government button specifications run to twenty-two pages. This fact on its own yields a sense of what it is like to design garments for the Army.

It would be especially comforting to believe that I have the answer to the question, What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that's that—the million-year nap? Or will some part of my personality, my me-ness, persist? What will that feel like? What will I do all day? Is there a place to plug in my laptop?

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.

Snowplows kill twice as many Canadians as grizzly bears do.

As when astronaut Mike Mulhane was asked by a NASA psychiatrist what epitaph he'd like to have on his gravestone, Mulhane answered, A loving husband and devoted father, though in reality, he jokes in Riding Rockets, I would have sold my wife and children into slavery for a ride into space.

Worry lives a long way from rational thought.---Self

Entomologists have a name for young flies, but it is an ugly name, an insult. Let's not use the word maggot. Let's use a pretty word. Let's use hacienda.

Kinsey wanted Dellenback to film his own staff. There are three ways to read that sentence, all of them true.

Gravity is why there are suns and planets in the first place. It is practically God.

Viagra isn't the only drug being prescribed off-label for women with arousal problems. Los Angeles urologist Jennifer Berman told me some doctors are prescribing low doses of Ritalin. Drugs like Ritalin improve a person's focus, so it stands to reason that it would make it easier to stay attuned to subtle changes taking place in one's body. 'It enables a woman to focus o the task at hand,' said Berman, managing, though surely not intending, to make sex sound like homework.

Breast milk and amniotic fluid carry the flavors of the mother's foods, and studies consistently show that babies grow up to be more accepting of flavors they've sampled while in the womb and while breastfeeding.

For me, hands are hard. She looks up from what she's doing. Because you're holding this disconnected hand, and it's holding you back. Cadavers occasionally effect a sort of accidental humanness that catches the medical professional off guard. I once spoke to an anatomy student who described a moment in the lab when she realized that the cadaver's arm was around her waist. It becomes difficult, under circumstances such as these, to retain one's clinical remove.

This book is a salute to the scientists and the surgeons, running along in the wake of combat, lab coats flapping. Building safer tanks, waging war on filth flies. Understanding turkey vultures. T

The anonymity of body parts facilitates the necessary dissociations of cadaveric research: This is not a person. This is just tissue. It has no feelings, and no one has feelings for it. It's okay to do things to it which, were it a sentient being, would constitute torture.

Aspirin and ibuprofen combat inflammation everywhere but the stomach and bowel; there they create inflammation.

We are irrational in our species-?specific devotions. I know a man who won't eat octopus because of its intelligence. Yet he eats pork and buys glue traps for rats, though rats and pigs are highly intelligent, likely more intelligent—?I'm guessing, for I have not seen the SAT scores—?than octopuses. Why, for that matter, is intelligence the scale by which we decide whom to spare? Or size? Have the simple and the small less right to live?

The early anatomists were dealing with a chronic shortage of bodies for dissection, and consequently were motivated to come up with ways to preserve the ones they managed to obtain. Blanchard's textbook was the first to cover arterial embalming. He describes opening up an artery, flushing the blood out with water, and pumping in alcohol. I've been to frat parties like that.

Gravitation is the lust of the cosmos.

It is difficult to put words to the smell of decomposing human. It is dense and cloying, sweet but not flower-sweet. Halfway between rotting fruit and rotting meat.