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19d1265
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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.
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funny
science
humor
mary-roach
space
sci-fi
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Mary Roach |
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f48c0e1
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The Spanish for 'vacuum' is aspiradora.
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Mary Roach |
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034965f
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The mortician cleared his throat and looked toward the coffin. I suppose we should have recognized it, as we'd picked it out and paid for it the day before, but we didn't. Finally the man walked over and gestured at it, bowing slightly, in the manner of a maitre d' showing diners to their table. There, just beyond his open palm, was our mother's face. I wasn't expecting it. We hadn't requested a viewing, and the memorial service was closed-..
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Mary Roach |
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b0fedfe
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remember one of my teammates was just hacking him apart, digging something out," one girl told me, "and I realized I was patting his arm, going, 'It's okay, it's okay.'" I asked a student named Matthew whether he would miss his cadaver when the course ended, and he replied that it was actually sad when "just part of him left." (Halfway through the course, the legs are removed and incinerated to reduce the students' exposure to the chemical ..
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Mary Roach |
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825e1d3
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Though I found this information surprising, this being the Father of Medicine we are talking about, I did not question it. You do not question an author who appears on the title page as "T.V.N. Persaud, M.D., Ph.D., D.Sc., F.R.C. Path. (Lond.), F.F. Path. (R.C.P.I.), F.A.C.O.G." Who knows, perhaps history erred in bestowing upon Hippocrates the title Father of Medicine."
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Mary Roach |
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76f5164
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Pharmaceutical companies make money by treating diseases, not by curing them.
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Mary Roach |
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2f12316
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YOU NEVER THINK about the weight of your organs inside you. Your heart is a half-pound clapper hanging off the end of your aorta. Your arms burden your shoulders like buckets on a yoke. The colon uses the uterus as a beanbag chair. Even the weight of your hair imparts a sensation on your scalp. In weightlessness, all this disappears. You organs float inside your torso.* The result is a subtle physical euphoria, an indescribable sense of bei..
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Mary Roach |
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86eaa86
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By the end of the conference, there was a sense that removing the junk is actually possible. "I've gone from being totally skeptical to thinking maybe something will work," Kessler says. "We can bring things down; it's just going to cost a lot."
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Mary Roach |
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bef55fd
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Space exploration is in some ways an exploration of what it means to be human. How much normalcy can people forgo? For how long, and what does it do to them?
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Mary Roach |
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65c3d5a
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You may be wondering: Could Ella Fitzgerald explode your liver? She could not.
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Mary Roach |
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66ebab6
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Albert King calculated that vehicle safety improvements that have come about as a result of cadaver research have saved an estimated 8,500 lives each year since 1987. For every cadaver that rode the crash sleds to test three-point seat belts, 61 lives per year have been saved. For every cadaver that took an air bag in the face, 147 people per year survive otherwise fatal head-ons. For every corpse whose head has hammered a windshield, 68 li..
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Mary Roach |
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cd882a4
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In attempting to cope with the shortage of cadavers legally available for dissection, instructors at British and early American anatomy schools backed themselves into some unsavory corners.
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Mary Roach |
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31f5740
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A four-person crew will, over the course of three years, generate somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand pounds of feces. In the ominous words of sixties space nutritionist Emil Mrak, "The possibility of reuse must be considered." Sometime"
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Mary Roach |
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d4d60eb
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In retrospect, it was silly to think that the experience of traveling in space could be approximated by a repurposed walk-in freezer. To find out what would happen to a man alone in the cosmos, at some point you just had to lob one up there.
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the-final-frontier
space-travel
space
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Mary Roach |
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3031b03
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Beef went next. Because I used to write for a health magazine, I had heard about Mad Cow disease back when it was known by its scientific nomenclature, bovine spongebob empopalopathy.
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Mary Roach |
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b5494a5
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An entirely truthful rendering of the events would employ words such as "wheedle," "plead," and "attempted bribe." "Does publications know you're here? If you're not cleared through the publications office, you'll have to leave." She strides into her office and dials the phone, staring at me while she talks, like security guards in bad action movies just before Steven Seagal clubs them on the head from behind. One of the seminar organizers ..
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Mary Roach |
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d81d7f4
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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-
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Mary Roach |
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65f7698
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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 macrame planter was the fact that the armor was so bulky that it required the assistance of several squires to help maneuver you.
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Mary Roach |
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01c252e
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Taste - as in personal preference, discernment - is subjective. It's emphemeral, shaped by trends and fads. It's one part mouth and nose, two parts ego.
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taste
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Mary Roach |
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47eae72
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A Dr. Courtney W. Shropshire, writing in 1912, was impressed to note that by means of "a special prostatic applicator, well lubricated, attached to the vibrator, introduced to the rectum" he was "able to empty the seminal vesicles of their secretions." Indeedy."
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Mary Roach |
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be17cc7
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But gross anatomy lab is not just about learning anatomy. It is about confronting death.
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Mary Roach |