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 possibi...
Yes, the money could be better spent on Earth. But would it? Since when has money saved by government redlining been spent on education and cancer research? It is always squandered. Let's squander som...
Yes, men and women eat meals. But they also ingest nutrients. They grind and sculpt them into a moistened bolus that is delivered, via a stadium wave of sequential contractions, into a self-kneading s...
Unlike real tissue, human tissue simulant doesn’t snap back: The cavity remains, allowing ballistics types to judge, and preserve a record of, a bullet’s performance. Plus, you don’t need to autopsy a...
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...
To quantify the benefit side of the equation, a dollar amount is assigned to each saved human life. As calculated by the Urban Institute in 1991, you are worth $2.7 million.
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...
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...
Sexual desire is a state not unlike hunger.
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...
On human decay and what can be done about it
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...
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’s like a cat trying to imagine the taste of sugar. Cats, unlike dogs and other omnivores, can’t taste sweetness.
It's this mood, these sentiments - the excitement of exploration and the surprises and delights of travel to foreign locales - that I hope to inspire with this book.
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...
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.
If you found this book in the New Age section of your local bookstore, it was grossly misshelved, and you should put it down at once. If you found it while browsing Gardening, or Boats and Ships, it w...