Quotes from Mary Roach

If you found this book in the New Age section of your local bookstore, it was grossly misshelved, and you should put it down at once. If you found it while browsing Gardening, or Boats and Ships, it was also misshelved, but you might enjoy it anyway

If you try this yourself, I recommend doing so when no one is home. Otherwise, you will run the risk of someone walking in on you and having to witness a scene that includes a mirror, the husband's Stanley Powerlock tape measure, and the half-undressed self, squatting.

I guess I believe that not everything we humans encounter in our lives can be neatly and convincingly tucked away inside the orderly cabinetry of science. Certainly most things can--including the vast majority of what people ascribe to fate, ghosts, ESP, Jupiter rising--but not all

This is why you don't just stick bodies in the refrigerator before an open-casket funeral. Mack is telling me about a ninety-seven-year-old woman who looked sixty after her embalming. "We had to paint in wrinkles, or the family wouldn't recognize her.

Not a single one was shipped to the field. Why? Because the National Defense Research Committee had been working on a far more lasting and penetrative weapon for use against the Japanese. Seventeen days before the second and final Final Report on Who, Me? was released, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. O

Penguins can shut down digestion by lowering the temperature inside their stomach to the point where the gastric juices are no longer active. The stomach becomes a kind of cooler to carry home the fish they've caught for their young. Penguins' hunting grounds may be several days' journey from the nest. Without this handy refrigerated mode, the swallowed fish would be completely digested by the time the adults get back—"like

Sex is one of those rare topics wherein the desire for others to keep the nitty-gritty of their experiences private is stronger even than the wish to keep mum on one's own nitty-gritty.

Your genes want you to get pregnant, and hormones are their magic wand.

You don't have to step on a body to carry the smells of death with you on your shoes. For reasons we have just seen, the soil around a corpse is sodden with the liquids of human decay. By analyzing the chemicals in this soil, people like Arpad can tell if a body has been moved from where it decayed. If the unique volatile fatty acids and compounds of human decay aren't there, the body didn't decompose there.

You are perhaps wondering, as I did, why they don't use crash test dummies. This is the other side of the equation. A dummy can tell you how much force a crash is unleashing on various dummy body parts, but without knowing how much of a blow a real body part can take, the information is useless.

They also look like human heads, but my brain has no precedent for human heads on tables or in roasting pans or anywhere other than on top of human bodies, and so I think it has chosen to interpret the sight in a more comforting manner.

Here is the secret to surviving one of these crashes: Be male. In a 1970 Civil Aeromedical Institute study of three crashes involving emergency evacuations, the most prominent factor influencing survival was gender (followed closely by proximity to exit). Adult males were by far the most likely to get out alive. Why? Presumably because they pushed everyone else out of the way.

So powerful are race- and status-based disgusts that explorers have starved to death rather than eat like the locals. British polar exploration suffered heavily for its mealtime snobbery.

And ever since, the U.S. Army has gone confidently into battle, knowing that when cows attack, their men will be ready.

The organism is driven toward nature's singular goal—conception, the passing on of one's genes—and anything that stands in the way is pushed into the background.

watch Marilena gingerly probing the woman's exposed tissue. What she is doing, basically, is getting her bearings: learning—in a detailed, hands-on manner—what's what and what's where in the complicated layering of skin, fat, muscle, and fascia that makes up the human cheek.

It's one thing to get enough evidence to convince yourself, but it's a whole other matter to produce a demonstration that would be acceptable to a community of scientists

At an Italian deli counter, a whiff of butyric acid reads as parmesan cheese; elsewhere, vomit.

Animals' taste systems are specialized for the niche they occupy in the environment. "That's driven their sensory systems down a certain path," Rawson says. This includes the animal known as us.

To quantify the "benefit" side of the equation, a dollar amount is assigned to each saved human life. As calculated by the Urban Institute in 1991, you are worth $2.7 million.

You don't need proof. You just need an inclination

Natick Labs and precursor the Quartermaster Subsistence Research Laboratory have extended shelf lives to near immortality. They currently make a sandwich that keeps for three years.

Weightlessness is like heroin, or how I imagine heroin must be. You try it once, and when it's over, all you can think about is how much you want to do it again. But apparently the thrill wears off.

If you don't have a pair of cadaver shoes, you're not doing enough research.