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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| cda5a4f | Our final challenge is a ranking test: five olive oils of differing degrees of bitterness. This proves a challenge for me, as I would not have described any of them as bitter. All around me, people make sounds like ill-mannered soup-eaters, aerating the oils to free the aromatic gases. I'm doing a mnyeh-mnyeh-mnyeh Bugs Bunny thing with my tongue, but it's not helping. Well before the test period ends, I stop. I do something I've never done.. | Mary Roach | ||
| 2f07327 | Taste is a sort of chemical touch. Taste cells are specialized skin cells. If you have hands for picking up foods and putting them into your mouth, it makes sense for taste cells to be on your tongue. But if, like flies, you don't, it may be more expedient to have them on your feet. "They land on something and go, 'Oooo, sugar!''' Rawson does her best impersonation of a housefly. "And the proboscis automatically comes out to suck the fluids.. | Mary Roach | ||
| fb43fb8 | Rawson has a colleague who studies crayfish and lobsters, which taste with their antennae. "I was always jealous of people who study lobsters. They examine the antennae, and then they have a lobster dinner." | Mary Roach | ||
| fbecf9b | The study animal of choice for taste researchers is the catfish,* simply because it has so many receptors. They are all over its skin. "Catfish are basically swimming tongues," says Rawson. It is a useful adaptation for a limbless creature that locates food by brushing up against it; many catfish species feed by scavenging debris on the bottom of rivers." | Mary Roach | ||
| 1189754 | Meaning "by way of the anus." "Per annum," with two n's, means "yearly." The correct answer to the question, "What is the birth rate per anum?" is zero (one hopes). The Internet provides many fine examples of the perils of confusing the two. The investment firm that offers "10% interest per anum" is likely to have about as many takers as the Nigerian screenwriter who describes himself as "capable of writing 6 movies per anum" or the Sri Lan.. | Mary Roach | ||
| 6d1ed14 | No engineer could design something as multifunctional and fine-tuned as an anus. To call someone an asshole is really bragging him up. | Mary Roach | ||
| f143430 | On human decay and what can be done about it | Mary Roach | ||
| d543fa9 | What I am getting at is that there is a point at which efficiency crosses over into lunacy, and the savings in money or resources cease to be worthwhile | Mary Roach | ||
| 449be60 | The Soviet space agency did not traditionally give cosmonauts steak and eggs before launch; it gave them a one-liter enema.) Fahey, | Mary Roach | ||
| a09d0ba | But what if the soul -the residual energy/information that doesn't register on our electromagnetic energy detectors- doesn't go somewhere else, but just, you know, snuffs out? Ceases to exist? That has always been my own depressing, humdrum assumption regarding death. No can be, says Nahum. Standing in the way is the First Law of Thermodynamics: Energy is neither created nor destroyed. It has to go somewhere..."The question then becomes, Wh.. | soul | Mary Roach | |
| d7eb16f | Marcel dropped a white plastic bag onto the table. It bounced slightly on landing. "Muktuk," Nirlungayuk said approvingly. It was a piece of narwhal skin, uncooked." | Mary Roach | ||
| c7d74ee | I pulled the rubbery chunk from Nirlungayuk's knife. It was cold from the air outside and disconcertingly narwhal-colored. The taste of muktuk is hard to pin down. Mushrooms? Walnut? There was plenty of time to think about it, as it takes approximately as long to chew narwhal as it does to hunt them. I know you won't believe me, because I didn't believe Nartok, but muktuk is exquisite (and, again, healthy: as much vitamin A as in a carrot, .. | Mary Roach | ||
| 841c2a2 | For a cookbook, Apicius has a markedly gladiatorial style. "Remove the entrails by the throat before the carcass hardens immediately after killing," begins one recipe." | Mary Roach | ||
| 39b65e0 | Sleeter Bull,* the author of the 1951 book Meat for the Table, claims the ancient Greeks had a taste for udders. Very specifically, "the udders of a sow just after she had farrowed but before she had suckled her pigs." That is either the cruelest culinary practice in history or so much Sleeter bull." | Mary Roach | ||
| 1d02533 | As an example, Blake mentions a Sudanese condiment made from fermented cow urine and used as a flavor enhancer "very much in the way soy sauce is used in other parts of the world." | Mary Roach | ||
| 258bc7f | As one former anatomy instructor said to me, "No one's taking heads home in buckets anymore." | Mary Roach | ||
| 39f891d | Our hair is as much as 14 percent L-cysteine, an amino acid commonly used to make meat flavorings and to elasticize dough in commercial baking. How commonly? Enough to merit debate among scholars of Jewish dietary law, or kashrut. "Human hair, while not particularly appetizing, is Kosher," states Rabbi Zushe Blech, the author of Kosher Food Production, on Kashrut.com "There is no 'guck' factor," Blech maintained, in an e-mail. Dissolving ha.. | Mary Roach | ||
| 85831cd | During weightlessness, many of the letters strayed from the boxes, indicating that pilots might experience difficulties maneuvering their planes and doing crossword puzzles during air battles. The following | Mary Roach | ||
| 8c2d88f | But students weren't going to pay tuition to learn arm and leg anatomy; | Mary Roach | ||
| 992bfff | All are wines Wagner himself enjoys. At least one is under $10 and two are over $50. "Over the past eighteen years, every time," he told me, "the least expensive wine averages the highest ranking, and the most expensive two finish at the bottom." In 2011, a Gallo cabernet scored the highest average rating, and a Chateau Gruaud Larose (which retails from between $60 and $70) took the bottom" | Mary Roach | ||
| 6764de7 | 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. | Mary Roach | ||
| 3b13ab6 | Mortuary embalming is designed to keep a cadaver looking fresh and uncadaverous for the funeral service, but not much longer. (Anatomy departments amp up the process by using greater amounts and higher concentrations of formalin; these corpses may remain intact for years, though they take on a kind of pickled horror-movie appearance.) | Mary Roach | ||
| f161c14 | I don't know the ultimate fate of a suppressed fart. | farting flatulence gas poot | Mary Roach | |
| a4a636e | And that if you did tell them the details, they might change their minds and withdraw consent. | Mary Roach | ||
| 66b38cb | The shot is an extreme close-up, making it impossible to tell, without already knowing, what kind of flesh it is. It could be Julia Child skinning poultry before a studio audience. The seminar | Mary Roach | ||
| 5001948 | A meteoroid is a bit of debris, usually planetary, hurtling through the solar system. If it's bigger than a boulder, than it's an asteroid. If any part of a meteroid makes it to Earth intact rather than burning up as it barrels through Earth's atmosphere, then it's a meteorite. A meteoroid's visible path through the atmosphere is a meteor. An astronaut struck by a meteoroid is a goner. A meteroid the size of a tomato seed can pierce a space.. | Mary Roach | ||
| 19d1265 | Weightlessness is like heroin, or how I imagine heroin must be. You try it once, and when it's over, all you can think about is how much you want to do it again. But apparently the thrill wears off. | funny humor mary-roach sci-fi science space | Mary Roach | |
| f48c0e1 | The Spanish for 'vacuum' is aspiradora. | Mary Roach | ||
| 034965f | The mortician cleared his throat and looked toward the coffin. I suppose we should have recognized it, as we'd picked it out and paid for it the day before, but we didn't. Finally the man walked over and gestured at it, bowing slightly, in the manner of a maitre d' showing diners to their table. There, just beyond his open palm, was our mother's face. I wasn't expecting it. We hadn't requested a viewing, and the memorial service was closed-.. | Mary Roach | ||
| b0fedfe | remember one of my teammates was just hacking him apart, digging something out," one girl told me, "and I realized I was patting his arm, going, 'It's okay, it's okay.'" I asked a student named Matthew whether he would miss his cadaver when the course ended, and he replied that it was actually sad when "just part of him left." (Halfway through the course, the legs are removed and incinerated to reduce the students' exposure to the chemical .. | Mary Roach | ||
| 825e1d3 | Though I found this information surprising, this being the Father of Medicine we are talking about, I did not question it. You do not question an author who appears on the title page as "T.V.N. Persaud, M.D., Ph.D., D.Sc., F.R.C. Path. (Lond.), F.F. Path. (R.C.P.I.), F.A.C.O.G." Who knows, perhaps history erred in bestowing upon Hippocrates the title Father of Medicine." | Mary Roach | ||
| 76f5164 | Pharmaceutical companies make money by treating diseases, not by curing them. | Mary Roach | ||
| 2f12316 | YOU NEVER THINK about the weight of your organs inside you. Your heart is a half-pound clapper hanging off the end of your aorta. Your arms burden your shoulders like buckets on a yoke. The colon uses the uterus as a beanbag chair. Even the weight of your hair imparts a sensation on your scalp. In weightlessness, all this disappears. You organs float inside your torso.* The result is a subtle physical euphoria, an indescribable sense of bei.. | Mary Roach | ||
| 86eaa86 | By the end of the conference, there was a sense that removing the junk is actually possible. "I've gone from being totally skeptical to thinking maybe something will work," Kessler says. "We can bring things down; it's just going to cost a lot." | Mary Roach | ||
| bef55fd | Space exploration is in some ways an exploration of what it means to be human. How much normalcy can people forgo? For how long, and what does it do to them? | Mary Roach | ||
| 65c3d5a | You may be wondering: Could Ella Fitzgerald explode your liver? She could not. | Mary Roach | ||
| 66ebab6 | 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-ons. For every corpse whose head has hammered a windshield, 68 li.. | Mary Roach | ||
| cd882a4 | In attempting to cope with the shortage of cadavers legally available for dissection, instructors at British and early American anatomy schools backed themselves into some unsavory corners. | Mary Roach | ||
| 31f5740 | 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" | Mary Roach | ||
| d4d60eb | In retrospect, it was silly to think that the experience of traveling in space could be approximated by a repurposed walk-in freezer. To find out what would happen to a man alone in the cosmos, at some point you just had to lob one up there. | space space-travel the-final-frontier | Mary Roach | |
| 3031b03 | Beef went next. Because I used to write for a health magazine, I had heard about Mad Cow disease back when it was known by its scientific nomenclature, bovine spongebob empopalopathy. | Mary Roach | ||
| b5494a5 | An entirely truthful rendering of the events would employ words such as "wheedle," "plead," and "attempted bribe." "Does publications know you're here? If you're not cleared through the publications office, you'll have to leave." She strides into her office and dials the phone, staring at me while she talks, like security guards in bad action movies just before Steven Seagal clubs them on the head from behind. One of the seminar organizers .. | Mary Roach | ||
| d81d7f4 | Bad enough that some ham-handed fop in a waistcoat and bowtie was up to his wrists in your urinary tract, but on top of that you had an audience- | Mary Roach | ||
| 65f7698 | Battles in Micronesia were so pitched and bloody that Gilbertese warriors would outfit themselves head to foot with doormat-thick armor fashioned from coconut hulls. On top of the significant humiliation of making one's entrance onto the battlefield looking like an enormous macrame planter was the fact that the armor was so bulky that it required the assistance of several squires to help maneuver you. | Mary Roach |