Quotes from Mary Roach

The researchers concluded that during intercourse in the missionary position, the penis "has the shape of a boomerang.

So she looks in her rearview mirror," one is saying, "and there's a bear in the back seat, eating popcorn." When wildlife officers gather at a conference, the shop talk is outstanding. Last night I stepped onto the elevator as a man was saying, "Ever tase an elk?

Ka was the essence of teh person: spirit, intelligence, feelings and passions, humor, grudges, annoying television theme songs, all the things that make a person a person and not a nematode.

I find the dead easier to be around than the dying. They are not in pain, not afraid of death. There are no awkward silences and conversations that dance around the obvious. They aren't scary...Cadavers, once you get used to them--and you do that quite fast--are surprisingly easy to be around.

We abide the surgeon's scalpel to save our own lives, our loved ones' lives, but not to save a stranger's life. H has no heart, but heartless is the last thing you'd call her.

They have this idea that they can send astronauts up and the bone loss will level off in a few months, but the evidence that has come back doesn't support that view. If you look at a two-year mission to Mars, it's kind of a scary prospect.

heterosexuals failed to grasp that if you lost yourself in the tease—in the pleasure and power of turning someone on—that that could be as arousing as being teased and turned on oneself.

As on Earth, weight-bearing exercise is the best way to hang on to your bone. In zero gravity, of course, you have to create your weight.

Stanford University suggests that a two-year mission to Mars would have about the same effect on one's skeleton. Would an astronaut returning from Mars run the risk of stepping out of the capsule into Earth gravity and snapping a bone?

To understand the cautious respect for the dead that pervades the modern anatomy lab, it helps to understand the extreme lack of it that pervades the field's history. Few sciences are as rooted in shame, infamy, and bad PR as human anatomy.

He describes opening up an artery, flushing the blood out with water, and pumping in alcohol. I've been to frat parties like that.

We are all nature, all made of the same basic materials, with the same basic needs. We are no different, on a very basic level, from the ducks and the mussels and last week's coleslaw. Thus we should respect Nature, and when we die, we should give ourselves back to the earth.

He simply believed that lame sex destroyed more marriages than did anything else, and that "considering the inveterate marriage habit of the race," something ought to be done.

He'll always make time to talk to you if you call, but it becomes quickly clear in the course of the conversation that spare time is something Zugibe has very little of. He'll be halfway through an explanation of the formula used to determine the pull of the body on each of Christ's hands when his voice will wander away from the telephone for a minute and then he'll come back and say, Excuse me. A nine year old body. Father beat her to death. Where were we?

Moeller, who has tasted a naked Cheeto, likens it to a piece of unsweetened puffed corn cereal

It's this mood, these sentiments - the excitement of exploration and the surprises and delights of travel to foreign locales - that I hope to inspire with this book.

He told me that a German doctor named Wolff figured it out in the 1800s by studying X-rays of infants' hips as they transitioned from crawling to walking. "A whole new evolution of bone structure takes place to support the mechanical loads associated with walking," said Lang. "Wolff had the great insight that form follows function." Alas, Wolff did not have the great insight that cancer follows gratuitous X-raying with primitive nineteenth-century X-ray machines.

Few sciences are as rooted in shame, infamy, and bad PR as human anatomy. The troubles began in Alexandrian Egypt, circa 300 B.C. King Ptolemy I was the first leader to deem it a-okay for medical types to cut open the dead for the purpose of figuring out how bodies work.

Pearsall is not a doctor, or not, at least, one of the medical variety. He is a doctor of the variety that gets a Ph.D. and attaches it to his name on self-help book covers.

Constipation ran Presley's life. Even his famous motto TCB— 'Taking Care of Business'— sounds like a reference to bathroom matters.

When you get right down to it, there is no dignified way to go, be it decomposition, incineration, dissection, tissue digestion, or composting. They're all, bottom line, a little disagreeable. It takes the careful application of a well-considered euphemism—burial, cremation, anatomical gift-giving, water reduction, ecological funeral—to bring it to the point of acceptance.

Urine is a salty substance (though less so than the NASA Ames chili), and if you were to drink it in an effort to rehydrate yourself, it would have the opposite effect.

The other way to train medics is to have them practice a skill so many times that it becomes automatic. So when the prefrontal cortex goes AWOL, when reasoning drops away, muscle memory, one hopes, will persist.

The pay worked out to about $1,000 a year—some five to ten times the earnings of the average unskilled laborer—with summers off. The job was immoral, and ugly to be sure, but probably less unpleasant than it sounds.