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d903938
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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.
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Mary Roach |
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08581d9
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Brave and anal: the ideal space explorer. Though you don't find "anal" on any of those lists of recommended astronaut attributes. NASA doesn't really use words like anal. Unless they have to."
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Mary Roach |
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29c2396
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He will be lowered into a vat of liquid nitrogen and frozen. From here he will progress to the second chamber, where either ultrasound waves or mechanical vibration will be used to break his easily shattered self* into small pieces, more or less the size of ground chuck. The pieces, still frozen, will then be freeze-dried and used as compost for a memorial tree or shrub, either in a churchyard memorial park or in the family's yard.
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Mary Roach |
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2d89ab8
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You mean like a small silicone breast implant?" I wasn't actually thinking that, but sure."
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Mary Roach |
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10cfd01
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didn't bother them that the corpses would arrive at their doors, to quote Ruth Richardson, "compressed into boxes, packed in sawdust,...trussed up in sacks, roped up like hams..." So similar in their treatment were the dead to ordinary items of commerce that every now and then boxes would be mixed up in transit. James Moores Ball, author of The Sack-'Em-Up Men, tells the tale of the flummoxed anatomist who opened a crate delivered to his la..
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Mary Roach |
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dba4f9a
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Anne Marie's beauty and style belie a down-and-dirty education in the particulars of practical AI (artificial insemination). She has miked a boar of his prodigious ejaculate--over two hundred milliliters (a cup), as compared to a man's three milliliters--and she has done it with her hand. For, unlike stallions and bulls, boars don't cotton to artificial vaginas. (in part, because their penis, like their tail, is corkscrewed.) AI techs must ..
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Mary Roach |
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7b7f195
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If you're dying of thirst in the desert, drinking your urine won't help you. The proteins and salts are by that point so concentrated that the body needs to pull fluid from the tissues to dilute them, which puts you back where you began, only worse, because now you are saddled with the memory of drinking your own murky, stinking pee. Rhabdomyolysis
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Mary Roach |
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a37f4a3
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Wallen, like Masters and Johnson, thinks it's possible that a majority of the so-called vaginal orgasms being had during intercourse are in reality clitoral orgasms. But unlike Masters and Johnson, he doesn't suggest that most women are having them easily. He believes, like Bonaparte, that the women having them--the paraclitoridiennes of the world--are an anatomically distinct group whose sexual response is different from that of the majori..
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Mary Roach |
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58cbf31
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A few words in defense of military scientists. I agree that squad leaders are in the best position to know what and how much their men and women need to bring on a given mission. But you want those squad leaders to be armed with knowledge, and not all knowledge comes from experience. Sometimes it comes from a pogue at USUHS who's been investigating the specific and potentially deadly consequences of a bodybuilding supplement. Or an army phy..
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science
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Mary Roach |
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66df7c2
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Unlike real tissue, human tissue simulant doesn't snap back: The cavity remains, allowing ballistics types to judge, and preserve a record of, a bullet's performance. Plus, you don't need to autopsy a block of human tissue simulant; because it's clear, you just walk up to it after you've shot it and take a look at the damage. Following which, you can take it home, eat it, and enjoy stronger, healthier nails in thirty days.
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Mary Roach |
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a580318
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Human remains dogs are distinct from the dogs that search for escaped felons and the dogs that search for whole cadavers. They are trained to alert their owners when they detect the specific scents of decomposed human tissue. They can pinpoint the location of a corpse at the bottom of a lake by sniffing the water's surface for the gases and fats that float up from the rotting remains. They can detect the lingering scent molecules of a decom..
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Mary Roach |
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af4cece
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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.
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Mary Roach |
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03d2d70
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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.
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Mary Roach |
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d3738ad
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On top of its other charms, the maggot breathes through its ass. It
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Mary Roach |
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6befe50
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Humanitarian Benefits of Cadaver Research on Injury Prevention," 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-..
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Mary Roach |
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2e512a1
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If you don't have a pair of cadaver shoes, you're not doing enough research.
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Mary Roach |
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5a40a84
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In a 1995 Journal of Trauma article entitled "Humanitarian Benefits of Cadaver Research on Injury Prevention," 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..
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Mary Roach |
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0724b74
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The driving aesthetic of military style is uniformity. Whence the word uniform. From first inspection to Arlington National Cemetery, soldiers look like those around them: same hat, same boots, identical white grave marker. They are discouraged from looking unique, because that would encourage them to feel unique, to feel like an individual. The problem with individuals is that they think for themselves and of themselves, rather than for an..
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Mary Roach |
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218b583
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Constipation ran Presley's life. Even his famous motto TCB-- 'Taking Care of Business'-- sounds like a reference to bathroom matters.
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science
song
humor
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Mary Roach |
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0880073
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If you don't have a pair of cadaver shoes, you're not doing enough research." In"
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Mary Roach |
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428ff6a
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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
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Mary Roach |
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8de533a
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Not all that surprisingly, Holmes began to go insane, spending his final years in and out of institutions. At seventy, he was placing ads in mortuary trade journals for a rubber-coated canvas body removal bag that could, he suggested, double as a sleeping bag. Shortly before he died, Holmes is said to have requested that he not be embalmed, though whether this was a function of sanity or insanity was never made clear.
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Mary Roach |
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920ec8f
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For every twenty-four hours awake, Belenky told me, people lose 25 percent of their capacity for useful mental work.
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Mary Roach |
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6657845
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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.
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Mary Roach |
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cdeac7c
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At an Italian deli counter, a whiff of butyric acid reads as parmesan cheese; elsewhere, vomit.
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Mary Roach |
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46ee1e2
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While he attends to his rats, Persinger gives me the lowdown on the haunt theory. Why would a certain type of electromagnetic field make one hear things or sense a presence? What's the mechanism? The answer hinges on the fact that exposure to electromagnetic fields lowers melatonin levels. Melatonin, he explains, is an anti-convulsive; if you have less of it in your system, your brain --in particular, your right temporal lobe-- will be more..
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science
hallucinations
paranormal
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Mary Roach |
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6e9366c
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Capacity to Tolerate Boredom and Low Levels of Stimulation" is one of the recommended attributes on a Space Shuttle-era document drafted by the NASA In-House Working Group on Psychiatric and Psychological Selection of Astronauts."
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Mary Roach |
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90208a7
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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"
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Mary Roach |
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9b74f88
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Silletti and I, for instance, chewed out cotton wads for the same amount of time. I produced .78 milliliters of stimulated saliva; she produced 1.4. She tried to reassure me. "It doesn't say anything about how good you are or how good I am with saliva." "Erika, I'm a dried up husk." "Don't say that, Mary."
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erika-silletti
saliva
popular-science
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Mary Roach |
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4c8a242
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many space psychology experiments these days focus on ways to detect stress or depression in a person who doesn't intend to tell you about it.
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Mary Roach |
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9ac2557
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Dr. Grime carries a Tide stain pen. He does not use his own spit. Art conservators do. "We make cotton swabs on bamboo sticks and moisten the swab in our mouths," says Andrea Chevalier, senior paintings conservator with the Intermuseum Conservation Association."
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Mary Roach |
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0c0aaf6
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Teleclitoridienne means simply "female of the distant clitoris," but it had a lovely, aristocratic ring to it--calling to mind a career woman in heels and sweater set, cabling reports from her home in Biarritz. At the very least, it had a nicer ring to it than "frigid."
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Mary Roach |
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8a50194
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Moeller, who has tasted a naked Cheeto, likens it to a piece of unsweetened puffed corn cereal
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humor
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Mary Roach |
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86aef0c
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The human liver is a boss-looking organ.
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Mary Roach |
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8d7003d
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Frequent bowel movements were associated with an increased risk of rectal cancer in men, and constipation was associated with a decreased risk." Mike Jones wasn't surprised. The medical community was never completely on board Burkitt's fiber train."
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Mary Roach |
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83204d4
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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.
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Mary Roach |
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d72fa60
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For the more you know about how dead bodies decay--the biological and chemical phases they go through, how long each phase lasts, how the environment affects these phases--the better equipped you are to figure out when any given body died: in other words, the day and even the approximate time of day it was murdered. The police are pretty good at pinpointing approximate time of death in recently dispatched bodies. The potassium level of the ..
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Mary Roach |
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11f20e8
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The Babylonians were the original liver guys, believing the organ to be the source of human emotion and spirit. The Mesopotamians played both sides of the argument, assigning emotion to the liver and intellect to the heart. These guys clearly marched to the beat of a freethinking drummer, for they assigned a further portion of the soul (cunning) to the stomach. Similar freethinkers throughout history have included Descartes, who wrote that ..
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Mary Roach |
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8e71ed9
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by letter in Morse code. Kittinger says it was a joke, but Simons didn't take it that way. (Morse code has always been a tough medium for humor.) In his memoir Man High, Simons recalls thinking that "the weird and little understood breakaway phenomenon could be taking hold of Kittinger's mind,...that he...was gripped in this strange reverie and was hellbent on flying on and on without regard for the consequences." Simons compared the breaka..
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Mary Roach |
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ca1480d
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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.
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Mary Roach |
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751b59c
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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.
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Mary Roach |
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fe39d70
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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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13beec9
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FROM TIME TO TIME, there was talk among the astronauts that it might be nice to have a drink with dinner. Beer is a no-fly, because without gravity, carbonation bubbles don't rise to the surface. "You just get a foamy froth," says Bourland. He says Coke spent $450,000 developing a zero-gravity dispenser, only to be undone by biology. Since bubbles also don't rise to the top of a stomach, the astronauts had trouble burping. "Often a burp is ..
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Mary Roach |
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1f8b5c9
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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.
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Mary Roach |