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f80084c
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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."
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Mary Roach |
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cbb379d
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No one is excluded from the astronaut corps based on penis size.
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Mary Roach |
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0f8e7a4
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How about suicide rate. And what a shame to lose them after they've made it back. We keep them alive, but we don't teach them how to live.
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Mary Roach |
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ab92bf9
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Religion says that your soul goes to heaven or possibly to a seven-tiered garden, or that your soul is reincarnated into a new body, or that you lie around in your coffin clothes until the Second Coming. And, of course, only one of these can be true. Which means that for millions of people, religion will turn out to have been a bum steer as regards the hereafter. (13)
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Mary Roach |
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23a5d2d
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Khoruts gave me a memorable example of how behavior can be covertly manipulated by microorganisms. The parasite Toxoplasma infects rats but needs to make its way into a cat's gut to reproduce. The parasite's strategy for achieving this goal is to alter the rat brain such that the rodent is now attracted to cat urine. Rat walks right up to cat, gets killed, eaten. If you saw the events unfold, Khoruts continued, you'd scratch your head and g..
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Mary Roach |
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87f8653
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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?
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death
humor
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Mary Roach |
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38cce08
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I agree with Dr. Makris. Does that mean I would let someone blow up my dead foot to help save the feet of NATO land mine clearers? It does. And would I let someone shoot my dead face with a nonlethal projectile to help prevent accidental fatalities? I suppose I would. What wouldn't I let someone do to my remains? I can think of only one experiment I know of that, were I a cadaver, I wouldn't want anything to do with. This particular experim..
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scientific-research
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Mary Roach |
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41fa362
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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."
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sex
heterosexual
homosexual
sexuality
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Mary Roach |
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d5cd509
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It's possible that the reason I've never experienced a ghostly presence is that my temporal lobes aren't wired for it. It could well be that the main difference between skeptics (Susan Blackmore notwithstanding) and believers is the neural structure they were born with. But the question still remains: Are these people whose EMF-influenced brains alert them to "presences" picking up something real that the rest of us can't pick up, or are th..
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science
hallucinations
ghosts
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Mary Roach |
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335b23d
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It tastes like water spiked with strange.
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taste
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Mary Roach |
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ab710c1
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Kinsey wanted Dellenback to film his own staff. There are three ways to read that sentence, all of them true.
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Mary Roach |
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bc2c05e
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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,..
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sex
sexuality
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Mary Roach |
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ccc5f53
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I will tell you sincerely and without exaggeration that the best part of lunch today at the NASA Ames cafeteria is the urine. It is clear and sweet, though not in the way mountain streams are said to be clear and sweet. More in the way of Karo syrup. The urine has been desalinated by osmotic pressure. Basically it swapped molecules with a concentrated sugar solution. Urine is a salty substance (though less so than the NASA Ames chili), and ..
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urine
nasa
space-travel
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Mary Roach |
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76f7db1
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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.
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humour
science
mary-roach
military
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Mary Roach |
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50ef344
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The human head is of the same approximate size and weight as a roaster chicken.
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Mary Roach |
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55fc476
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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."
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Mary Roach |
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23548fb
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What's different? Sweat, risk, uncertainty, inconvenience. But also, awe. Pride. Something ineffably splendid and stirring.
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Mary Roach |
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1b881d1
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Please beware," came his reply, "There are a lot of people who believe that just because we don't have an explanation for something, it's quantum mechanics."
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quantum-physics
believe
belief
paranormal
physics
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Mary Roach |
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dd71f04
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Not that there's anything wrong with just lying around on your back. In it's way, rotting is interesting too, as we will see. It's just that there are other ways to spend your time as a cadaver.
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science
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Mary Roach |
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3b523c1
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Ability to Function Despite Imminent Catastrophe.
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Mary Roach |
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dff1f3b
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Sometimes courage is nothing more than a willingness to think differently than those around you. In a culture of conformity, that's braver than it sounds.
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Mary Roach |
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ef89c4d
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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."
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Mary Roach |
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4814bbc
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According to more than one astronaut memoir, one of the most beautiful sights in space is that of a sun-illumined flurry of flash-frozen waste-water droplets. Space doesn't just encompass the sublime and the ridiculous. It erases the line between.
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Mary Roach |
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287906e
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My interpreter Sayuri is folding a piece of notebook paper. She is at step 21, where the crane's body is inflated. The directions show a tiny puff besides an arrow pointing at the bird. It makes sense if you already know what to do. Otherwise, it's wonderfully surreal:
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Mary Roach |
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5cc755d
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Cheese crumbs spread in front of a copulating pair of rats may distract the female, but not the male.
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Mary Roach |
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334fa3a
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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."
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Mary Roach |
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7425fb2
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Gravitation is the lust of the cosmos.
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Mary Roach |
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4b23011
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The M16 has a scope with a small red arrow in the center of the sight. You align the arrow with what or (jeez) whom you wish to shoot and squeeze the trigger. Both "squeeze" and "pull" are exaggerations of the motion applied to this trigger. It's a trivial, tiny movement, the twitch of a dreaming child. So quick and so effortless is it that it's hard for me to associate it with any but the most inconsequential of acts. Flipping a page. Typi..
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Mary Roach |
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9427f84
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So animated are these freestanding hearts that surgeons have been known to drop them. "We wash them off and they do just fine," replied New York heart transplant surgeon Mehmet Oz when I asked him about it. I imagined the heart slipping across the linoleum, the looks exchanged, the rush to retrieve it and clean it off, like a bratwurst that's rolled off the plate in a restaurant kitchen."
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Mary Roach |
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260fbf8
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All good research--whether for science or for a book--is a form of obsession.
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Mary Roach |
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6d622f5
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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.
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Mary Roach |
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2d130fe
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With the rise of classical Greece, the soul debate evolved into the more familiar heart-versus-brain, the liver having been demoted to an accessory role. We are fortunate that this is so, for we would otherwise have been faced with Celine Dion singing "My Liver Belongs to You" and movie houses playing The Liver Is a Lonely Hunter. Every Spanish love song that contains the word corazon, which is all of them, would contain the somewhat less l..
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science
humor
liver
soul
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Mary Roach |
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0788ddf
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I guess I feel the same way about being a corpse. Why lie around on your back when you can do something interesting and new, something useful?
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Mary Roach |
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f2edfc4
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I like the term "decedent." It's as though the man weren't dead, but merely involved in some sort of protracted legal dispute. For evident reasons, mortuary science is awash with euphemisms. "Don't say stiff, corpse, cadaver," scolds The Principles and Practice of Embalming. "Say decedent, remains or Mr. Blank. Don't say 'keep.' Say 'maintain preservation.'..."Wrinkles are "acquired facial markings." Decomposed brain that filters down throu..
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Mary Roach |
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057162f
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Kissing is a less aggressive form of bacterial transplant. Studies of three different gingivitis-causing bacteria have documented migration from spouse to spouse. Periodontically speaking, an affair might be viewed as a form of bacteriotherapy.
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Mary Roach |
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6f15feb
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NASA might do well to adopt the Red Bull approach to branding and astronautics. Suddenly the man in the spacesuit is not an underpaid civil servant; he's the ultimate extreme athlete. Red Bull knows how to make space hip.
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Mary Roach |
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664598a
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he was doing a breath hydrogen test. If you know the amount of hydrogen someone is exhaling orally, it's a simple matter to extrapolate the amount they're exhaling rectally. This is because a fixed percentage of hydrogen produced in the colon is absorbed into the blood and, and when it reaches the lungs, exhaled. The breath hydrogen test has given flatus researchers a simple, consistent measure of gas production that does not require the su..
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colon
extrapolate
gulp
hydrogen
mary-roach
flatulence
gas
blood
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Mary Roach |
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4b8ea5c
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How is it that we find Christina Aguilera more interesting than the inside of our own bodies?
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Mary Roach |
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c64f496
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Gravity is why there are suns and planets in the first place. It is practically God.
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space-travel
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Mary Roach |
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2cbb0dd
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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.
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Mary Roach |
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1866517
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Science has the answer to every question that can be asked. However, science reserves the right to change that answer should additional data become available.
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Mary Roach |
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38330ec
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Under the section heading "Experiments with Human Subjects" - a heading that, were I a doctor previously employed by Nazi Germany, I might have rephrased -"
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Mary Roach |
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bf99f6c
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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.
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Mary Roach |
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82dd3e6
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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.)
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science
humor
flatulence
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Mary Roach |