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644a389
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I'd called Stanley Garn because I was looking for anthropologists who had done a nutritional analysis of human flesh and/or organ meats. Just, you know, curious. Garn hadn't exactly done this but he had worked out the lean/fat percentage of human flesh. He estimates that humans have more or less the same body composition as veal. To arrive at the figure, Garn extrapolated from average human body fat percentages. "There's information of that..
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Mary Roach |
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d62789c
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You want a vivid description of what's going through my brain as I'm cutting through a liver and all these larvae are spilling out all over me and juice pops out of the intestines?" I kind of did, but I kept quiet. He went on: "I don't really focus on that. I try to focus on the value of the work. It takes the edge off the grotesqueness."
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Mary Roach |
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29df20d
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You could tell Glover was a nice guy because a To Do list on a whiteboard on his office wall said,
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Mary Roach |
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79e857f
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The British investigators know what butchers have long known: If you want people to feel comfortable about dead bodies, cut them into pieces. A cow carcass is upsetting; a brisket is dinner. A human leg has no face, no eyes, no hands that once held babies or stroked a lover's cheek. It's difficult to associate it with the living person from which it came. The anonymity of body parts facilitates the necessary dissociations of cadaveric resea..
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Mary Roach |
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198e47f
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Edison believed that living beings were animated and controlled by "life units," smaller-than-microscopic entities that inhabited each and every cell and, upon death, evacuated the premises, floated around awhile, and eventually reassembled to animate a new personality--possibly another man, possibly an ocelot or a sea cucumber."
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Mary Roach |
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58e86d0
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One French clergyman recommended thrusting a red-hot poker up what Bondeson genteelly refers to as "the rear passage." A French physician invented a set of nipple pincers specifically for the purpose of reanimation. Another invented a bagpipelike contraption for administering tobacco enemas, which he demonstrated enthusiastically on cadavers in the morgues of Paris."
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Mary Roach |
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5aa6bcc
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The staff played hot potato with my call until someone could locate the Person in Charge of Lying to the Press. The PCLP said that the room that houses the base archives is locked. And that only the curator would have a key. And that Holloman currently has no curator. Evidently the new curator's first task would be to find a way to open the archives.
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Mary Roach |
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d0cd3f8
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That was the mindset that propelled one of the AMRL's least popular liquid diets into a long and lucrative career as Carnation Instant Breakfast.
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Mary Roach |
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4148a99
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Not a single one was shipped to the field. Why? Because the National Defense Research Committee had been working on a far more lasting and penetrative weapon for use against the Japanese. Seventeen days before the second and final Final Report on Who, Me? was released, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. O
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Mary Roach |
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10d0536
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It takes a certain kind of mind to interpret smidgens of fecal matter found in underwear as an ectoplasmic calling card rather than an ordinary by-product of a minor lapse in hygiene. It takes, I would think, a mildly psychotic kind of mind. Crawford's
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Mary Roach |
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267461e
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Your genes want you to get pregnant, and hormones are their magic wand.
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Mary Roach |
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46fe5b8
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The torpedo launch console has big square plastic buttons--Flood Tube, Open Shuttle, Ready to Fire--that flash red or green, like something Q would have built into James Bond's Aston Martin. The missile compartment has similarly retro-looking panels of buttons. They provided the setup for one of the more quotable things Murray said to me--a line that, were fewer precautions in place, could have joined "Houston, we've had a problem" or "Watc..
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Mary Roach |
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b470cfc
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What does this tell us about sharks? Should women be worried? Hard to say. How crazy are sharks for seal meat? Do dead groupers smell like used tampons? Unknown. I'd stay in my deck chair, if I were menstruating you.
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Mary Roach |
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0822029
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What sort of person experimentally infests a child with maggots? A confident sort, certainly. A maverick. Someone comfortable with the unpretty facts of biology. Someone who is perhaps himself an unpretty fact of biology.
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science
mary-roach
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Mary Roach |
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7225990
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Anything perceived as a threat trips the amygdala--the brain's hand-wringing sentry--to set in motion the biochemical cascade known as the fight-or-flight response. Bruce Siddle, who consults in this area and sits on the board of Strategic Operations, prefers the term "survival stress response." Whatever you wish to call it, here is a nice, concise summary, courtesy of Siddle: "You become fast, strong, and dumb." Our hardwired survival stra..
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Mary Roach |
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e962404
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Sunlight triggers a cutoff of melatonin, bringing on wakefulness. (Indoor light--particularly the light from tablets and smartphones--can also suppress melatonin, but nowhere near as dramatically as sunlight.) This is why night shift workers who drive home in the morning through sunlight and then struggle to fall asleep may find relief by buying amber-lensed Bono-style glasses that block the sun's blue light wavelengths. NSMRL
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Mary Roach |
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053779d
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Genetic differences in thermoregulation--efficient/inefficient, left side/right side, you name it--are surprisingly large and well worth paying attention to, given our seemingly permanent posture of fighting extremism in the Middle East. Dianna
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Mary Roach |
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8b7ba2b
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Whenever Mark takes over the explaining, Brockhoff drops back and takes out her phone. She does not seem rude, just grindingly busy and determined to stay on top of her day. I see her come and go in my peripheral vision, pacing, answering email. She gives the impression of someone for whom idleness is almost physically unbearable. She is gorgeous, articulate, fast-moving, powerful. Lesser humans left blinking in her wake. Brockhoff
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Mary Roach |
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ee2e6df
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The other way to train medics is to have them practice a skill so many times that it becomes automatic. So when the prefrontal cortex goes AWOL, when reasoning drops away, muscle memory, one hopes, will persist.
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Mary Roach |
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d27595a
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The technical term for fuckin' tunnel vision is attentional narrowing. It's another prehistorically helpful but now potentially disastrous feature of the survival stress response. One focuses on the threat to the exclusion of almost everything else. Bruce Siddle tells a story about a doctor who had some fun with an anxious intern. He sent him across the emergency room to sew up a car crash victim's lacerations. The intern was so intent on h..
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Mary Roach |
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1c52060
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We gave Mrs. Peterson some shit for her quinsy and now she's doing fine!
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Mary Roach |
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42308db
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I applied to be a subject in a simulated Mars mission. I made it past the first round of cuts and was told that someone from the European Space Agency would call me for a phone interview later in the month. The call came at 4:30 A.M., and I did not take care to hide my irritation. I realized later that it had probably been a test, and I had failed it.
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Mary Roach |
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01efea0
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A study in the journal Obesity Surgery reported no significant differences in the size of the stomachs of morbidly obese people as compared with non-obese control subjects. It is hormones and metabolism, calories consumed and calories burned, that determine one's weight, not holding capacity.
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Mary Roach |
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169809f
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During World War II, the U.S. military was shipping so much meat overseas to feed troops and allies that a domestic shortage loomed. According to a 1943 Breeder's Gazette article, the American soldier consumed close to a pound of meat a day. Beginning that year, meat on the homefront was rationed--but only the mainstream cuts. You could have all the organ meats you wanted. The army didn't use them because they spoiled more quickly and becau..
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Mary Roach |
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506d75f
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By the time children are ten years old, generally speaking, they've learned to eat like the people around them. Once food prejudices are set, it is no simple task to dissolve them. In a separate study, Rozin presented sixty-eight American college students with a grasshopper snack, this time a commercially prepared honey-covered variety sold in Japan. Only 12 percent were willing to try one. So
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Mary Roach |
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f85971e
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The other problem with classroom-based efforts to change eating habits was that children don't decide what's for dinner. Mead and her team soon realized they had to get to the person they called the "gatekeeper"--Mom."
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Mary Roach |
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c55e6ac
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To open people's minds to a new food, you sometimes just have to get them to open their mouths. Research has shown that if people try something enough times, they'll probably grow to like it.
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Mary Roach |
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09aed86
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SHOULD CIRCUMSTANCE PREVENT a man from carrying his cigarettes and cell phone in his pants pocket, the rectum provides a workable alternative. So workable that well over a thousand pounds of tobacco and hundreds of cell phones are rectally smuggled into California state prisons each year. The contraband allows incarcerated gang members and narcotics dealers to make business calls from behind bars (and to enjoy a smoke while doing so).
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Mary Roach |
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22a5d4c
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On the way here, I stopped in the office of a block captain who wanted to tell me about an inmate who was caught with two boxes of staples, a pencil sharpener, sharpener blades, and three jumbo binder rings in his rectum. He became known as "OD," for Office Depot. They never found out what he intended to do with the stuff."
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Mary Roach |
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012ff78
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Mir astronaut Jerry Linenger writes in his memoir that he was surprised to find a bottle of cognac in one arm of his spacesuit and a bottle of whiskey in the other. (Linenger was the Frank Burns of space exploration:
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Mary Roach |
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6011bbc
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He recovers and seems to possess all his earlier faculties, with one exception: the formerly mild-mannered Gage is now something of a hellion, an impulsive shit-starter.
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Mary Roach |
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c158430
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You do not dress to please yourself; you dress to please others.
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Mary Roach |
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a7d3da7
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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. Courage
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Mary Roach |
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513d465
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It is assumed that a man will fit one of the three sizes available in the condom-style urine collection device hose attachment inside the EVA suit. To avoid mishaps caused by embarrassed astronauts opting for L when they are really S, there is no S. "There is L, XL, and XXL,"
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Mary Roach |
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5fa74dc
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Sometimes courage is nothing more than a willingness to think differently than those around you.
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Mary Roach |
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eab08ab
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Heroism doesn't always happen in a burst of glory. Sometimes small triumphs and large hearts change the course of history. Sometimes a chicken can save a man's life. ___________
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Mary Roach |
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b4e9396
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I think that at the moment of death that little window opens up. I think that maybe we're all connected to something bigger than we are.
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Mary Roach |
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f196c21
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Twenty-five percent of the nurses in one study, writes Larson, had dry, damaged skin. Ironically, the nurses may be exacerbating the very thing that hand-washing seeks to prevent: the spread of infectious bacteria. Larson says healthy skin sheds 10 million particles a day, and 10 percent of those harbor bacteria. Dry, damaged skin flakes off more readily than healthy, lubricated skin and thus disperses more bacteria. Damaged skin also harbo..
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Mary Roach |
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d636c13
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It's hard to say where is the bigger hubris, in their convictions or in the arrogance of carrying them to a third decimal point
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Mary Roach |
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f3417e7
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the National Research Council (NRC) hired a team of anthropologists, led by the venerable Margaret Mead, to study American food habits. How do people decide what's good to eat, and how do you go about changing their minds? Studies were undertaken, recommendations drafted, reports published--including Mead's 1943 opus "The Problem of Changing Food Habits: Report of the Committee on Food Habits," and if ever a case were to be made for word-ra..
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Mary Roach |
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c32eff6
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So powerful are race- and status-based disgusts that explorers have starved to death rather than eat like the locals. British polar exploration suffered heavily for its mealtime snobbery.
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Mary Roach |
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0019f9f
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Nancy Rawson, seated across from me, is AFB's director of basic research and an expert in animal taste and smell. She volunteers that cats are more or less "monoguesic," meaning they stick to one food. Outdoor cats tend to be either mousers or birders, not both. But don't worry, as most of the difference between Tuna Treat and Poultry Platter is in the name and the picture on the label. "They may have more fish meal in one and more poultry ..
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Mary Roach |
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d675951
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Taste, like smell, is a doorman for the digestive tract, a chemical scan for possibly dangerous (bitter, sour) elements and desirable (salty, sweet) nutrients.
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Mary Roach |
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b8f03cf
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That's what killed Elvis," said Adrianne Noe. Noe is the director of the National Museum of Health and Medicine, which has its own megacolon, from an unknown party. As we were about to get off the phone, Elvis Presley dropped into the conversation. Noe related that she'd been standing by the megacolon exhibit one day and a visitor told her that Elvis had had one too. The man added that Presley had struggled with constipation his whole life ..
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Mary Roach |