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 humiliat...
Plays a game with his wine-marketing classes at Napa Valley College. The students, most of whom have several years’ experience in the industry, are asked to rank six wines, their labels hidden by—a ni...
We gave Mrs. Peterson some shit for her quinsy and now she’s doing fine!
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 c...
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 an...
The human digestive tract is like the Amtrak line from Seattle to Los Angeles: transit time is about thirty hours, and the scenery on the last leg is pretty monotonous.
The ducks of Mackinac Island are apparently not easily taken down. Found a portion of the Lungs as large as a turkey’s egg protruding through the external wound, lacerated and burnt, and below this an...
The anonymity of body parts facilitates the necessary dissociations of cadaveric research: This is not a person. This is just tissue. It has no feelings, and no one has feelings for it. It's okay to d...
THE GREAT IRONY is that in the beginning, the gut was all there was. We’re basically a highly evolved earthworm surrounding the intestinal tract, Khoruts commented as we drove away from his clinic the...
Sipski defines orgasm as a reflex of the autonomic nervous system that can be either facilitated or inhibited by cerebral input (thoughts and feelings).
She looks at once like someone who could have worked as a runway model and someone who would be mildly put off to hear that.
Religion says that your soul goes to heaven or possibly to a seven-tiered garden, or that your soul is reincarnated into a new body, or that you lie around in your coffin clothes until the Second Comi...
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 we...
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 di...
One young woman's tribute describes unwrapping her cadaver's hands and being brought up short by the realization that the nails were painted pink. The pictures in the anatomy atlas did not show nail p...
Most of us pass our lives never once laying eyes on our organs, the most precious and amazing things we own. Until something goes wrong, we barely give them thought. This seems strange to me. How is i...
Morning breath is hydrogen sulfide released by bacteria consuming shed tongue cells while you mouth-breathe for eight hours; saliva normally washes the debris away.
Moeller came to AFB from Frito-Lay, where his job was to design, well, powdered flavor coatings for edible extruded shapes. There are, he allows, a lot of parallels. A Cheeto without its powdered coat...
Men and women . . . do not ingest nutrients, they consume food. More than that, they . . . eat meals. Although to the single-minded biochemist or physiologist, this aspect of human behavior may appear...
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,