Quotes from Mary Roach

Hydromedusa tectifera are, like post-war Nazis, native to Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil.

The black bear is a ridiculously lovable species. There's a reason kids have teddy bears, not teddy goats or teddy eels.

What's different? Sweat, risk, uncertainty, inconvenience. But also, awe. Pride. Something ineffably splendid and stirring.

Brave and anal: the ideal space explorer. Though you don't find "anal" on any of those lists of recommended astronaut attributes. NASA doesn't really use words like anal. Unless they have to.

Under the section heading "Experiments with Human Subjects" – a heading that, were I a doctor previously employed by Nazi Germany, I might have rephrased –

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.

Whereas the larger caliber .45 Colt revolver bullets caused the cattle to drop to the ground after three or four shots, the animals shot with smaller caliber .38 bullets failed even after ten shots to drop to the ground. And ever since the U.S. Army has gone confidently into battle knowing that when cows attack, their men will be ready.

Téléclitoridienne means simply "female of the distant clitoris," but it had a lovely, aristocratic ring to it—calling to mind a career woman in heels and sweater set, cabling reports from her home in Biarritz. At the very least, it had a nicer ring to it than "frigid.

The human digestive tract is like the Amtrak line from Seattle to Los Angeles: transit time is about thirty hours, and the scenery on the last leg is pretty monotonous.

A wedding gown entails multilayering of expensive specialty fabrics for an outfit whose useful lifespan may come and go in a single afternoon. Much like a bomb suit.

It's no coincidence that the man who contributed the most to the study of human anatomy, the Belgian Andreas Vesalius, was an avid proponent of do-it-yourself, get-your-fussy-Renaissance-shirt-dirty anatomical dissection.

The simplest strategy for bouts of noxious flatus is to not care. Or perhaps to take advantage of a gastroenterologist I know: get a dog. (To blame.)

Borman's dumping urine. Urine [in] approximately one minute. Two lines further along, we see Lovell saying, What a sight to behold!

Gravity disappears again, and we rise up off the floor like spooks from a grave. It's like the Rapture in here every thirty seconds.

The staff played hot potato with my call until someone could locate the Person in Charge of Lying to the Press. The PCLP said that the room that houses the base archives is locked. And that only the curator would have a key. And that Holloman currently has no curator. Evidently the new curator's first task would be to find a way to open the archives.

No one goes out to play anymore. Simulation is becoming reality.

Back in the 1980s when everyone looked a bit off, my friend Tim and his brothers had some publicity shots taken of their band. Eventually they sold the rights to a stock photo agency. Years later, one of the images turned up on a greeting card. The inside said, Greetings from the Dork Club.

It takes a certain kind of mind to interpret smidgens of fecal matter found in underwear as an ectoplasmic calling card rather than an ordinary by-product of a minor lapse in hygiene. It takes, I would think, a mildly psychotic kind of mind. Crawford's

Every now and then in life, a compliment is tucked so seamlessly into a insult that it's impossible to know how to react.

Riddle traveled a lot in his twenties and recalls being hit by a realization. So much of people's lives—their opportunities, their health and longevity—comes down to where they were born. "It's so random," he says.

Monkeys offer an unadulterated demonstration of the power of hormones, as the females are not concerned about pregnancy or what their friends will think.

Silletti and I, for instance, chewed out cotton wads for the same amount of time. I produced .78 milliliters of stimulated saliva; she produced 1.4. She tried to reassure me. It doesn't say anything about how good you are or how good I am with saliva. Erika, I'm a dried up husk. Don't say that, Mary.

many space psychology experiments these days focus on ways to detect stress or depression in a person who doesn't intend to tell you about it.

For every twenty-four hours awake, Belenky told me, people lose 25 percent of their capacity for useful mental work.