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1f79074
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As on Earth, weight-bearing exercise is the best way to hang on to your bone. In zero gravity, of course, you have to create your weight.
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Mary Roach |
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dccac45
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Stanford University suggests that a two-year mission to Mars would have about the same effect on one's skeleton. Would an astronaut returning from Mars run the risk of stepping out of the capsule into Earth gravity and snapping a bone?
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Mary Roach |
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de26e7b
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As brain cells die from oxygen starvation, euphoria sets in, and one last, grand erection.) Space
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Mary Roach |
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bc54f45
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Pretty much any amino acid arrangement can be hydrolyzed, including those of the recyclable that dares not speak its name. 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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f811ab6
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Monkeys offer an unadulterated demonstration of the power of hormones, as the females are not concerned about pregnancy or what their friends will think.
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Mary Roach |
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53bb813
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it is indeed possible for humans to copulate in weightlessness. However, they have trouble staying together. The covert researchers discovered that it helped to have a third person to push at the right time in the right place. The anonymous researchers...discovered that this is the way dolphins do it. A third dolphin is always present during the mating process. This led to the creation of the space-going equivalent of aviation's Mile High C..
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Mary Roach |
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06d6324
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It began with meetings, five months before the Apollo 11 launch. The newly formed Committee on Symbolic Activities for the First Lunar Landing gathered to debate the appropriateness of planting a flag on the moon.
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Mary Roach |
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02a3809
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Urine is a salty substance (though less so than the NASA Ames chili), and if you were to drink it in an effort to rehydrate yourself, it would have the opposite effect.
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Mary Roach |
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a60caed
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One of the things I love about manned space exploration is that it forces people to unlace certain notions of what is and isn't acceptable. And possible. It's amazing what sometimes gets accomplished via an initially jarring but ultimately harmless shift in thinking.
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Mary Roach |
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2c21c60
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NASA didn't invent Tang, but their Gemini and Apollo astronauts made it famous. (Kraft Foods invented it, in 1957.) NASA still uses Tang, despite periodic bouts of bad publicity. In 2006, terrorists mixed Tang into a homemade liquid explosive intended for use on a transatlantic flight. In the 1970's, Tang was mixed with methadone to discourage rehabbing heroin addicts from injecting it to get high. They did anyway. Consumed intravenously, T..
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Mary Roach |
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e2a9d30
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Dissection and surgical instruction, like meat-eating, require a carefully maintained set of illusions and denial.
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Mary Roach |
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5944b0e
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The public filed past Elmer in his casket, looking every bit the soldier and nothing at all the decomposing body. Embalming received another boost four years later, when Abe Lincoln's embalmed body traveled from Washington to his hometown in Illinois. The train ride amounted to a promotional tour for funerary embalming, for wherever the train stopped, people came to view him, and more than a few must have noted that he looked a whole lot be..
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Mary Roach |
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621eb1c
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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.
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Mary Roach |
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bcbd531
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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.
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Mary Roach |
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eb4d6ba
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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.
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Mary Roach |
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8fede45
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There is a passage in the Buddhist Sutra on Mindfulness called the Nine Cemetery Contemplations. Apprentice monks are instructed to meditate on a series of decomposing bodies in the charnel ground, starting with a body "swollen and blue and festering," progressing to one "being eaten by...different kinds of worms," and moving on to a skeleton, "without flesh and blood, held together by the tendons." The monks were told to keep meditating un..
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Mary Roach |
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a831d80
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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."
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Mary Roach |
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1ae0aa0
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If you insist on driving around in vintage cars with no seat belt on, try to time your crashes for the systole--blood-squeezed-out--portion of your heartbeat.
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Mary Roach |
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b948c73
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The traditional gross anatomy lab represented a sort of sink-or-swim mentality about dealing with death. To cope with what was being asked of them, medical students had to find ways to desensitize themselves. They quickly learned to objectify cadavers, to think of the dead as structures and tissues, and not a former human being. Humor--at the cadaver's expense--was tolerated, condoned even.
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Mary Roach |
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6d74e57
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One's own dead are more than cadavers, they are place holders for the living. They are a focus, a receptacle, for emotions that no longer have one.
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Mary Roach |
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b021485
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Dissection and surgical instruction, like meat-eating, require a carefully maintained set of illusions and denial. Physicians and anatomy students must learn to think of cadavers as wholly unrelated to the people they once were.
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Mary Roach |
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729fcce
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If there were ever a cadaver eligible for sainthood, it would not be our Spalding Gray upon the cross, it would be these guys: the brain-dead, beating-heart organ donors that come and go in our hospitals every day.
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Mary Roach |
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e7c9aaf
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To understand the cautious respect for the dead that pervades the modern anatomy lab, it helps to understand the extreme lack of it that pervades the field's history. Few sciences are as rooted in shame, infamy, and bad PR as human anatomy.
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Mary Roach |
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e19429a
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Another group tried putting a new type of protective boot onto the hind leg of a mule deer for testing. Given that deer lack toes and heels and people lack hooves, and that no country I know of employs mule deer in land mine clearance, it is hard--though mildly entertaining--to try to imagine what the value of such a study could have been.
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Mary Roach |
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6ab7add
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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. Though human dissection was an accepted practice in the Renaissance-era anatomy class, most professors shied away from personally undertaking it, preferring to deliver their lectures while seated in raised chairs a safe an..
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Mary Roach |
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44e9ab9
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We are all nature, all made of the same basic materials, with the same basic needs. We are no different, on a very basic level, from the ducks and the mussels and last week's coleslaw. Thus we should respect Nature, and when we die, we should give ourselves back to the earth.
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Mary Roach |
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498afda
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He'll always make time to talk to you if you call, but it becomes quickly clear in the course of the conversation that spare time is something Zugibe has very little of. He'll be halfway through an explanation of the formula used to determine the pull of the body on each of Christ's hands when his voice will wander away from the telephone for a minute and then he'll come back and say, "Excuse me. A nine year old body. Father beat her to dea..
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Mary Roach |
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ae08fba
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Lacking any scientific means of pinning down the soul, the first anatomists settled on generative primacy. What shows up first in the embryo must be most important and therefore most likely to hold the soul. The trouble with this particular avenue of learning, known as , was that early first trimester human embryos were difficult to come by. Classical scholars of ensoulment, Aristotle among them, attempted to get around the problem by exam..
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Mary Roach |
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69cbd88
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An anatomy lab is as choosy as a pedigreed woman seeking love: You can't be too fat or too tall or have any communicable diseases.
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Mary Roach |
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62c4610
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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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98a83ff
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What she perhaps didn't realize is that the embalming fluid pumped into the veins expands the body's erectile tissues, with the result that male anatomy lab cadavers may be markedly better endowed in death than they were in life.)
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Mary Roach |
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66d1868
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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.
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Mary Roach |
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774ccf2
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Last year, I was conversing by e-mail with an acquaintance who was investigating the black market in cadaver parts. She came into possession of a sales list for a company that provides organs and tissues for research. On the list was "vagina with clitoris." She did not believe that there could be a legitimate research purpose for cadaver genitalia. She assumed the researcher had procured the part to have sex with it. I replied that physiolo..
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Mary Roach |
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f713bd6
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Sipski defines orgasm as a reflex of the autonomic nervous system that can be either facilitated or inhibited by cerebral input (thoughts and feelings).
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Mary Roach |
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dd41bf8
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He describes opening up an artery, flushing the blood out with water, and pumping in alcohol. I've been to frat parties like that.
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Mary Roach |
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2df8574
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Sudden loud noise triggers a cluster of split-second protective reflexes known as the startle pattern. You blink to protect your eyes, while your upper body swivels toward the sound to assess the threat. The arms bend and retract to the chest, the shoulders hunch, and the knees bend, all of which combine to make you a smaller, less noticeable target. Snapping the limbs in tight to the torso may also serve to protect your vital innards.++ Yo..
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Mary Roach |
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01537f0
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Loden loves guns, loves to talk about them. Right now he's trying to talk about them with me, a distinctly trying experience for I keep shepherding the conversation back to dead bodies which Loden clearly doesn't enjoy very much. You would think that a man who felt comfortable extolling the virtues of hollow point bullets ("Expands to twice its size and just thumps that person.") would be okay talking about dead bodies, but apparently not. ..
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Mary Roach |
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25a8d88
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Kinsey's studies included] stutterers, amputees, paraplegics, even those with cerebral palsy were observed. Kinsey wanted to document the full spectrum of human sexuality, but it was more than that. He believed these people might have things to teach us about the physiology of sex. And he was right. These groups alerted Kinsey--and the scientific community as a whole--to the complicated and crucial role of the central nervous system in sex ..
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disabilities-and-sex
kinsey
kinsey-report
sex-studies
sexual-health
sexuality-and-disabilities
disability
sexuality
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Mary Roach |
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c5f1bb7
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The question then becomes, was it necessary, once the likes of Vesalius had pretty much figured out the basics, for every student of anatomy to get right in there and figure them out all over again? Why couldn't models and preserved prosections be used to teach anatomy? Do gross anatomy labs reinvent the wheel? The questions were especially relevant in Knox's day, given the way in which bodies were procured, but they are still relevant toda..
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Mary Roach |
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e546921
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One of the seminar organizers joins me. "Is Yvonne giving you a hard time?" My nemesis is none other than the cadaver beheader. As if turns out, she's also the lab manager, the person responsible when things go wrong, such as writers fainting and/or getting sick to their stomach and then going home and writing books that refer to anatomy lab managers as beheaders."
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Mary Roach |
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c8cf03b
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Nineteenth-century operating "theaters" had more to do with medical instruction than with saving patients' lives. If you could, you stayed out of them at all cost. For one thing, you were being operated on without anesthesia. (The first operations under ether didn't take place until 1846.) Surgical patients in the late 1700s and early 1800s could feel every cut, stitch, and probing finger. They were often blindfolded--this may have been opt..
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Mary Roach |
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53af603
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When you get right down to it, there is no dignified way to go, be it decomposition, incineration, dissection, tissue digestion, or composting. They're all, bottom line, a little disagreeable. It takes the careful application of a well-considered euphemism--burial, cremation, anatomical gift-giving, water reduction, ecological funeral--to bring it to the point of acceptance.
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Mary Roach |
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7d0597c
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To gibbet is to dip a corpse in tar and suspend it in a flat iron cage (the gibbet) in plain view of townsfolk while it rots and gets pecked apart by crows. A stroll through the square must have been a whole different plate of tamales back then.
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Mary Roach |
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6b815dd
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I'd called [Stanley Garn] because he wrote an 's paper on the topic of human flesh and its nutritional value. "Your cows," he said, "are much more efficient." But I am not so much interested in cultures eating the flesh of their captive enemies as I am in cultures eating their own dead, the practical "Why not?" model of cannibalism, eating the meat of fresh corpses because it's there and it's a nice change from taro root."
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Mary Roach |