Unlike filets and stewing meats, organs look like what they are: body parts. That’s another reason we resist them. Organs, says Rozin, remind us of what we have in common with animals. In the same way...
Téléclitoridienne means simply female of the distant clitoris, but it had a lovely, aristocratic ring to it—calling to mind a career woman in heels and sweater set, cabling reports from her home in Bi...
There is her heart. I've never seen one beating.I had no idea they moved so much. You put your hand on your heart and you picture something pulsing slightly but basically still, like a hand on a deskt...
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 t...
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 feline passion for pyrophosphates might explain the animal’s reputation as a picky eater. We make [pet food] choices based on what we like, says Reed, and then when they don’t like it, we call the...
The M16 has a scope with a small red arrow in the center of the sight. You align the arrow with what or (jeez) whom you wish to shoot and squeeze the trigger. Both squeeze and pull are exaggerations o...
Riddle traveled a lot in his twenties and recalls being hit by a realization. So much of people’s lives—their opportunities, their health and longevity—comes down to where they were born. It’s so rand...
People are messy, unpredictable things.
PARC techs also try to keep a bead on doggy interactions in the yards. We need to know, says McCarthy. ‘Are you down because you don’t like the food or because Pipes stole your bone earlier?’ Theresa...
One of the things I love about manned space exploration is that it forces people to unlace certain notions of what is and isn't acceptable. And possible. It's amazing what sometimes gets accomplished...
Nurses on transplant wards often remarked that male transplant patients show renewed interest in sex. One reported that a patient asked her to wear something other than that shapeless scrub so he coul...
Now we’re going to set the features, says Theo. He lifts one of the man’s eyelids and packs tufts of cotton underneath to fill out the lid the way the man’s eyeballs once did. Oddly, the culture I ass...
Now she’s coming out one of the nostrils, across the septum, and then she’s going to reenter the mouth. There are a variety of ways of closing the mouth, he adds, and then he begins talking about some...
Nonetheless, some prototype chimp suits had been developed, including the SPCA Suit—certified humane by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. To prove that a suit was safe for a man, w...
NASA might do well to adopt the Red Bull approach to branding and astronautics. Suddenly the man in the spacesuit is not an underpaid civil servant; he's the ultimate extreme athlete. Red Bull knows h...
Moeller, who has tasted a naked Cheeto, likens it to a piece of unsweetened puffed corn cereal
It began with meetings, five months before the Apollo 11 launch. The newly formed Committee on Symbolic Activities for the First Lunar Landing gathered to debate the appropriateness of planting a flag...
I didn’t realize Farrah Fawcett had died of anal cancer. There were references to her ailment as cancer below the colon. It was like my mother, when I was a kid, calling the vagina your bottom in fron...
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 fig...