It would be especially comforting to believe that I have the answer to the question, What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that’s that—the million-year nap? Or will some part of my...
I guess I feel the same way about being a corpse. Why lie around on your back when you can do something interesting and new, something useful?
He describes opening up an artery, flushing the blood out with water, and pumping in alcohol. I’ve been to frat parties like that.
Funny thing happened on the way to the moon: not much, wrote Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan. Should have brought some crossword puzzles.
For every twenty-four hours awake, Belenky told me, people lose 25 percent of their capacity for useful mental work.
Eating organs, in 1943, could degrade one’s social standing. Americans preferred bland preparations of muscle meat partly because for as long as they could recall, that’s what the upper class ate. So...
Borman much later admitted that he was, as Cernan wrote in his memoir, sick as a dog* all the way to the moon.
Aspirin and ibuprofen combat inflammation everywhere but the stomach and bowel; there they create inflammation.
Any discussion of the sexuality of the digestive tract must inevitably touch on the anus. Anal tissue is among the most densely innervated on the human body. It has to be. It requires a lot of informa...
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.
Amniotic fluid contains fetal urine (from swallowed amniotic fluid) and occasionally meconium: baby’s first feces, composed of mucus, bile, epithelial cells, shed fetal hair, and other amniotic detrit...
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 th...
A brain bank spokesman showed me around. Down the hall from the dissection room was the computer room. The spokesman referred to this as the brains of the operation which in any other operation would...
As brain cells die from oxygen starvation, euphoria sets in, and one last, grand erection.)
Most of us pass our lives never once laying eyes on our own organs, the most precious and amazing things we own. Until something goes wrong, we barely give them thought. This seems strange to me. How...
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 th...
Heterosexuals failed to grasp that if you lost yourself in the tease—in the pleasure and power of turning someone on—that that could be as arousing as being teased and turned on oneself.
Even in death, men couldn’t be trusted to comport themselves respectably in the presence of a lady.
You mean like a small silicone breast implant? I wasn’t actually thinking that, but sure.
You do not dress to please yourself; you dress to please others.