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9985ac0
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Borman's dumping urine. Urine [in] approximately one minute." Two lines further along, we see Lovell saying, "What a sight to behold!"
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Mary Roach |
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2d7a684
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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." --
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Mary Roach |
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9ba2994
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As brain cells die from oxygen starvation, euphoria sets in, and one last, grand erection.)
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Mary Roach |
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904e3d0
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Hydromedusa tectifera are, like post-war Nazis, native to Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil.
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Mary Roach |
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3e3ffad
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A patient on the way to surgery travels at twice the speed of a patient on the way to the morgue. Gurneys that ferry the living through hospital corridors move forward in an aura of purpose and push, flanked by caregivers with long strides and set faces, steadying IVs, pumping ambu bags, barreling into double doors. A gurney with a cadaver commands no urgency. It is wheeled by a single person, calmly and with little notice, like a shopping ..
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Mary Roach |
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3ebf489
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I am not, by trade or character, a spotlight operator. I'm the goober with a flashlight, stumbling into corners and crannies, not looking for anything specific but knowing when I've found it.
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Mary Roach |
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d8858ce
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During World War II, when combat rations were tinned, meat hashes were a common entree because they worked well with the filling machines. "But the men wanted something they could chew, something into which they could 'sink their teeth,'" wrote food scientist Samuel Lepkovsky in a 1964 paper making the case against a liquid diet for the Gemini astronauts. He summed up the soldiers' take on potted meat: "We could undoubtedly survive on these..
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science
humor
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Mary Roach |
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7866010
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For me, hands are hard." She looks up from what she's doing. "Because you're holding this disconnected hand, and it's holding you back." Cadavers occasionally effect a sort of accidental humanness that catches the medical professional off guard. I once spoke to an anatomy student who described a moment in the lab when she realized that the cadaver's arm was around her waist. It becomes difficult, under circumstances such as these, to retain..
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Mary Roach |
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9f32a3a
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This book is a salute to the scientists and the surgeons, running along in the wake of combat, lab coats flapping. Building safer tanks, waging war on filth flies. Understanding turkey vultures. T
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Mary Roach |
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76fb1cc
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There is her heart. I've never seen one beating.I had no idea they moved so much. You put your hand on your heart and you picture something pulsing slightly but basically still, like a hand on a desktop tapping Morse code. This things is going wild in there. It's a mixing-machine part, a stoat squirming in its burrow, an alien life form that's just won a Pontiac on The Price Is Right. If you were looking for the home of the human body's ani..
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humanity
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Mary Roach |
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bb7dd87
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Navy personnel began clamoring for it. To the embarrassment of many, the current Navy working uniform is a blue camouflage print. Unsure whether perhaps I was missing the point, I asked a Navy commander about the rationale. He looked down at his trousers and sighed. "That's so no one can see you if you fall overboard." No"
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Mary Roach |
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05fab55
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It's amazing what sometimes gets accomplished via an initially jarring but ultimately harmless shift in thinking. Is cutting the organs out of a dead man and stitching them into someone else barbaric and disrespectful, or is it a straightforward operation to save multiple lives? Does crapping into a Baggie while sitting 6 inches away from your crewmate represent a collapse of human dignity or a unique and comic form of intimacy?
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Mary Roach |
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5bf86f5
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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.
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Mary Roach |
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ff38102
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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."
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Mary Roach |
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5a5bdd0
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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.
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science
humor
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Mary Roach |
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93e1912
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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.
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Mary Roach |
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0e45811
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It is difficult to put words to the smell of decomposing human. It is dense and cloying, sweet but not flower-sweet. Halfway between rotting fruit and rotting meat.
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dead-body
dead-people
dead
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Mary Roach |
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eb501b6
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Any discussion of the sexuality of the digestive tract must inevitably touch on the anus. Anal tissue is among the most densely innervated on the human body. It has to be. It requires a lot of information to do its job. The anus has to be able to tell what's knocking at its door: Is it solid, liquid, or gas? And then selectively release either all of it or one part of it. The consequences of a misread are dire. As Mike Jones put it, "You do..
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Mary Roach |
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6820061
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there is a photograph of zugibe and one of his volunteers in the aforementioned sindon article. zugibe is dressed in a knee-length white lab coat and is shown adjusting one of the vital sign leads affixed to the man's chest. the cross reaches almost to the ceiling, towering over zugibe and his bank of medical monitors. the volunteer is naked except for a pair of gym shorts and a hearty mustache. he wears the unconcerned, mildly zoned-out ex..
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Mary Roach |
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4218ab1
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You may be thinking, Wow, that Mary Roach has her head up her ass. To which I say: Only briefly, and with the utmost respect.
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Mary Roach |
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c8cf854
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You don't need proof. You just need an inclination
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Mary Roach |
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e495986
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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.
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Mary Roach |
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8990c63
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Aspirin and ibuprofen combat inflammation everywhere but the stomach and bowel; there they create inflammation.
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Mary Roach |
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6dc0f29
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Caffeine is safe and effective but not without a downside. Depending on one's sensitivity, it has a half-life of six to eight hours. Even if you have no trouble falling asleep after drinking coffee late in the day, you may wake more easily during the night because your nervous system is still aroused, your brain attuned to sounds and other stimuli that would otherwise go unheeded. The more poorly you sleep, the more caffeine you tend to con..
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Mary Roach |
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7f5ef19
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There is a famous study from the 1930s involving a group of orphanage babies who, at mealtimes, were presented with a smorgasbord of thirty-four whole, healthy foods. Nothing was processed or prepared beyond mincing or mashing. Among the more standard offerings--fresh fruits and vegetables, eggs, milk, chicken, beef--the researcher, Clara Davis, included liver, kidney, brains, sweetbreads, and bone marrow. The babies shunned liver and kidne..
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Mary Roach |
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3dc92a5
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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.
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Mary Roach |
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d5f1e47
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No one goes out to play anymore. Simulation is becoming reality.
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space
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Mary Roach |
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e1abc02
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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."
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Mary Roach |
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0ca9aff
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Women who routinely have orgasm in intercourse without explicit clitoral stimulation all say that it makes little difference what the guy does, as long as he doesn't come too soon,
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Mary Roach |
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3544438
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to test. Would weightlessness put them off their game? It did. The turtles moved "slowly and insecurely" and did not attack a piece of bait placed directly in front of them. Then again, the water in which they swam was repeatedly floating up out of the jar and forming an "ovoid cupola." Who could eat? Von Beckh quickly moved on from turtles to Argentinean pilots. Under the section heading "Experiments with Human Subjects"--a heading that, w..
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Mary Roach |
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a46bd2e
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The researchers concluded that during intercourse in the missionary position, the penis "has the shape of a boomerang."
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Mary Roach |
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2cfe30f
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Of all the so-called variety meats, none presents a steeper challenge to the food persuader than the reproductive organs. Good luck to Deanna Pucciarelli, the woman who seeks to introduce mainstream America to the culinary joys of pig balls. "I am indeed working on a project on pork testicles," said Pucciarelli, director of the Hospitality and Food Management Program at--fill my heart with joy!--Ball State University."
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Mary Roach |
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ec2ca71
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Here's the other thing I think about. It makes little sense to try to control what happens to your remains when you are no longer around to reap the joys or benefits of that control. People who make elaborate requests concerning disposition of their bodies are probably people who have trouble with the concept of not existing. Leaving a note requesting that your family and friends travel to the Ganges or ship your body to a plastination lab ..
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Mary Roach |
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0cab3b2
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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."
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Mary Roach |
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208eacb
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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.
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Mary Roach |
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ae0f90f
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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.
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Mary Roach |
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bb8b2af
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Medical journals from 1905 to 1915 are rife with articles on "vibratory massage" and the many things it cures. Weakened hearts and floating kidneys. Hysterical cramp of the esophagus and catarrh of the inner ear. Deafness, cancer, bad eyesight. And lots and lots of prostate problems. 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 vibrato..
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Mary Roach |
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f798c76
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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-..
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Mary Roach |
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d7a76ca
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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.
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Mary Roach |
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e16f853
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Given the complexity of the chore, "escapees," as free-floating fecal material is known in astronautical circles, plagued the crews. Below is an excerpt from the Apollo 10 mission transcript, starring Mission Commander Thomas Stafford, Lunar Module Pilot Gene Cernan, and Command Module Pilot John Young, orbiting the moon 200,000-plus miles from the nearest bathroom. CERNAN:...You know once you get out of lunar orbit, you can do a lot of thi..
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Mary Roach |
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1ff8788
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Every now and then in life, a compliment is tucked so seamlessly into a insult that it's impossible to know how to react.
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Mary Roach |
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20da8ee
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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.
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Mary Roach |
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aa43c82
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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.
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Mary Roach |
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e5e7f9b
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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.
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Mary Roach |