1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
4954
4955
4956
4957
4958
5443
5619
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| e63aeea | AFB makes flavor coatings for dry pet foods. To test the coatings, they first need to make small batches of plain kibble and add the coatings. The flavored kibbles are then presented to consumer panels for feedback. The panelists--Spanky, Thomas, Skipper, Porkchop, Rover, Elvis, Sandi, Bela, Yankee, Fergie, Murphy, Limburger, and some three hundred other dogs and cats--reside at AFB's Palatability Assessment Resource Center (PARC), about an.. | Mary Roach | ||
| 6e040e5 | AFB Vice President Pat Moeller, myself, and a few other staff members are seated around an oval conference table. Moeller is middle-aged, likable, and plain-spoken. He has a small mouth with naturally deep red lips and a pronounced Cupid's bow, but it would be inaccurate to say he has a feminine appearance. Moeller once consulted for NASA, and he has that look. The fundamental challenge of the pet-food professional, Moeller is saying, is to.. | Mary Roach | ||
| b87b6b4 | This is especially doable with dog food, as dogs rely more on smell than taste in making choices about what to eat and how vigorously. (Pat Moeller estimates that for dogs, the ratio for how much aroma matters to how much taste matters is 70/30. For cats, the ratio is more like 50/50.) The takeaway lesson is that if the palatant smells appealing, the dog will dive in with instant and obvious zeal, and the owner will assume the food is a hit.. | Mary Roach | ||
| c7ad626 | The flesh gives no resistance and yields no blood. | Mary Roach | ||
| 2c50ef4 | Medicare reimbursement code for maggots: CPT 99070. | Mary Roach | ||
| a035f44 | With charm comes charm's sidekick, dilapidation. | Mary Roach | ||
| 22793a9 | frustration metastasizes to anger. Anger wants an outlet and a victim. | Mary Roach | ||
| 8d96317 | if you slip a rat's face and hide, Hannibal Lecter-style, over the snout of a non-favored prey item, a python will try to swallow it. (University of Alabama snake digestion expert Stephen Secor did this some years back to reenact a scene for National Geographic television. "Worked like a charm," he told me. "I can get a python to eat a beer bottle if I put a rat head on it.") For" | Mary Roach | ||
| d3ab908 | Funny thing happened on the way to the moon: not much," wrote Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan. "Should have brought some crossword puzzles." | Mary Roach | ||
| b2b1903 | What sets a professional nose apart from an everyday nose is not so much its sensitivity to the many aromas in a food or drink, but the ability to tease them apart and identify them. | Mary Roach | ||
| 3e20880 | It's one thing to get enough evidence to convince yourself, but it's a whole other matter to produce a demonstration that would be acceptable to a community of scientists, | Mary Roach | ||
| 7b7a772 | Animals have evolved to survive," Rawson says. They like what's best for them. People blanch to see "fish meal" or "meat meal" on a pet-food ingredient panel, but meal--which variously includes organs, heads, skin, and bones--most closely resembles the diet of dogs and cats in the wild." | Mary Roach | ||
| dbbee6c | Animals' taste systems are specialized for the niche they occupy in the environment. "That's driven their sensory systems down a certain path," Rawson says. This includes the animal known as us." | Mary Roach | ||
| ea2904b | Here is what William Beaumont had to say about saliva: "Its legitimate and only use, in my opinion, is to lubricate the food to facilitate the passage of the bolus through the [esophagus]." Beaumont was right about some things, but he was dead wrong about spit." | Mary Roach | ||
| 12c8af7 | Rawson has an idea of what it is like to eat without perceiving tastes, because she has talked to cancer patients whose taste receptors have been destroyed by radiation treatments. The situation is well beyond unpleasant. "Your body is saying, 'It's not food, it's cardboard,' and it won't let you swallow. No matter how much you tell your brain that you need to eat to survive, you'll gag. These people can actually die of starvation." | Mary Roach | ||
| 1f2ae5f | As hunters and foragers of the dry savannah, our earliest forebears evolved a taste for important but scarce nutrients: salt and high-energy fats and sugars. | Mary Roach | ||
| fee48cd | This is a book about notable achievements made while dead. | Mary Roach | ||
| 08675f2 | technologists sometimes exploit the synergy between the two. By adding strawberry or vanilla--aromas we associate with sweetness--it's possible to fool people into thinking a food is sweeter than it really is. Though sneaky, this is not necessarily bad, because it means the product can contain less added sugar. Which | Mary Roach | ||
| eb73bcc | What can be done for these men? A lot. The art of phalloplasty--crafting a working penis from other parts of a patient's body--has come a long way (thanks in no small part to the transgender community). | Mary Roach | ||
| f135257 | Forget about love. You will receive that many times, but none of it is lasting. | Amy Tan | ||
| a3a4d2a | dogs rely more on smell than taste in making choices about what to eat and how vigorously. (Pat Moeller estimates that for dogs, the ratio for how much aroma matters to how much taste matters is 70/30. For cats, the ratio is more like 50/50.) | Mary Roach | ||
| 3ea0557 | Could those sound waves shake apart your organs? NASA did testing on this back in the sixties, to be sure, as one infrasound expert told me, "that they didn't deliver jam to the moon." | Mary Roach | ||
| f3a238c | They think of it as lubricating, and that's it!" She went back to her hotel room and called her boyfriend in tears." | Mary Roach | ||
| 4f4ea14 | As a feature of the common man's funeral, the open casket is a relatively recent development: around 150 years. According to Mack, it serves several purposes, aside from providing what undertakers call "the memory picture." It reassures the family that, one, their loved one is unequivocally dead and not about to be buried alive, and, two, that the body in the casket is indeed their loved one, and not the stiff from the container beside his... | Mary Roach | ||
| f395be6 | Analogies drawn from the inspection of hen's eggs foundered on the objection that man was not a chicken. | Mary Roach | ||
| d9e3891 | The only conclusion I feel sure of at this point," he mused, "is that women are too complicated." | Mary Roach | ||
| e9205cc | According to the Kind & Knox Web site, other products made with cow-bone-and-pigskin-based gelatin include marshmallows, nougat-type candy bar fillings, liquorice, Gummi Bears, caramels, sports drinks, butter, ice cream, vitamin gel caps, suppositories, and that distasteful whitish peel on the outside of salamis. | Mary Roach | ||
| 3cd464c | I came across a NATO symposium on Human Performance Optimization that included a roundup of medical technologies that might be repurposed to optimize warfighters. In among the prosthetic limbs "to provide superhuman strength" and the infrared and ultraviolet vision-bestowing eye implants was this: corpus callosotomy to "allow unihemispheric sleep and continuous alertness." | Mary Roach | ||
| 6d69d8d | Borman much later admitted that he was, as Cernan wrote in his memoir, "sick as a dog* all the way to the moon." | Mary Roach | ||
| 7e60fcf | The question "Which beer do you want, Mary?" went down at the end. When she puts her nose to a glass, though, something switches on. She sits straighter and her words come out faster, lit by interest and focus. "It smells like a campfire to me also. Smokey, like wood, charred wood. Like a cedar chest, like a cigar, tobacco, dark things, smoking jackets." She sips from the glass. "Now I'm getting the chocolate in the mouth. Caramel, cocoa ni.. | Mary Roach | ||
| 53307f2 | Anyone who hunts, the pair told me, eats organs. Though the Inuit (in Canada, the term is preferred over Eskimo) gave up their nomadic existence in the 1950s, most adult men still supplemented the family diet with hunted game, partly to save money. In 1993, when I visited, a small can of Spork, the local Spam, cost $2.69. Produce arrives by plane. A watermelon might set you back $25. Cucumbers were so expensive that the local sex educator d.. | Mary Roach | ||
| 406a6b9 | And decay is highly dependent on environmental and situational factors. What's the weather been like? Was the body buried? In what? Seeking better understanding of the effects of these factors, the University of Tennessee (UT) Anthropological Research Facility, as it is blandly and vaguely called, has buried bodies in shallow graves, encased them in concrete, left them in car trunks and manmade ponds, and wrapped them in plastic bags. Prett.. | Mary Roach | ||
| ccb350e | eye cap is a simple ten-cent piece of plastic. It is slightly larger than a contact lens, less flexible, and considerably less comfortable. The plastic is repeatedly lanced through, so that small, sharp spurs stick up from its surface. The spurs work on the same principle as those steel spikes that threaten Severe Tire Damage on behalf of rental car companies: The eyelid will come down over an eye cap, but, once closed, will not easily open.. | Mary Roach | ||
| 5514ca1 | I'm short, I'm thin, I'm not rich. I would say my career choice is in fourth place in limiting my effectiveness as a single adult." (It's possible that it helped. Within a year, he would be married.)" | Mary Roach | ||
| 5af6e8d | Gravity is why there are suns and planets in the first place. It is practically God. In the beginning, the cosmos was nothing but empty space and vast clouds of gases. Eventually the gases cooled to the point where tiny grains coalesced. These grains would have spent eternity moving through space, ignoring each other, had gravitational attraction not brought them together. Gravitation is the lust of the cosmos. | Mary Roach | ||
| d0f2fcf | I am of the opinion that the vulva of Your Most Sacred Majesty should be titillated for some length of time before intercourse. | Mary Roach | ||
| 2436978 | Who's going to open the gates of heaven to some slob with his entrails all hanging out and dripping on the carpeting? From the sixteenth century up until the passage of the Anatomy Act, in 1836, the only cadavers legally available for dissection in Britain were those of executed murderers. For this reason, anatomists came to occupy the same terrain, in the public's mind, as executioners. Worse, even, for dissection was thought of, literally.. | Mary Roach | ||
| 8b6a036 | Double sentencing wasn't a new idea, but rather the latest variation on the theme. Before that, a murderer might be hanged and then drawn and quartered, wherein horses were tied to his limbs and spurred off in four directions, the resultant "quarters" being impaled on spikes and publicly displayed, as a colorful reminder to the citizenry of the ill-advisedness of crime." | Mary Roach | ||
| d2f70ba | Gibbeting--though it hits the ear like a word for happy playground chatter or perhaps, at worst, the cleaning of small game birds--is in fact a ghastly verb. 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. | Mary Roach | ||
| 321ad61 | Seventeenth-century surgeon-anatomist William Harvey, famous for discovering the human circulatory system, also deserves fame for being one of few medical men in history so dedicated to his calling that he could dissect his own father and sister. | Mary Roach | ||
| 6de70e6 | The Johnson Space Center "potty cam," as it is more casually known, is an astronaut training aid. It provides a vivid, arresting perspective on something you've had intimate contact with all your life but never really seen. Perhaps not unlike viewing one's home planet from space for the first time. Positioning is critical because the opening to a Space Shuttle toilet is 4 inches across, as opposed to the 18-inch maw we are accustomed to on .. | Mary Roach | ||
| c427ba0 | Depending on who's living in your gut, you may or may not benefit from what you eat. Or be harmed. Charred red meat has long been called a carcinogen, but in fact it is only the raw material for making carcinogens. Without the gut bacteria that break it down, the raw goods are harmless. (This applies to drugs too; depending on the makeup of your gut flora, the efficacy of a drug may vary.) The science is new and extremely complex, but the b.. | Mary Roach | ||
| 9af37ec | They live like rice, too, pressed together: a moist, solid entity. 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." -- | Mary Roach | ||
| 17ad6bd | It is astounding to me, and achingly sad, that with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more than half of the people in the position H's family was in will say no, will choose to burn those organs or let them rot. 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, bu.. | Mary Roach |