The Johnson Space Center potty cam, as it is more casually known, is an astronaut training aid. It provides a vivid, arresting perspective on something you’ve had intimate contact with all your life b...
The British investigators know what butchers have long known: If you want people to feel comfortable about dead bodies, cut them into pieces. A cow carcass is upsetting; a brisket is dinner. A human l...
Thanks to this unusual data set, we now know that humans prefer cat food with a tuna or herbal flavor over cat food with the flavor descriptors rancid, offaly, cereal, or burnt. But humans, as we are...
Taste, like smell, is a doorman for the digestive tract, a chemical scan for possibly dangerous (bitter, sour) elements and desirable (salty, sweet) nutrients.
THE MOST EFFECTIVE agent of dietary change is the adulated eater—the king who embraces whelks, the revolutionary hero with a passion for skewered hearts. Normally disgusting substances or objects that...
Sunlight triggers a cutoff of melatonin, bringing on wakefulness. (Indoor light—particularly the light from tablets and smartphones—can also suppress melatonin, but nowhere near as dramatically as sun...
Space Shuttle toilets have always been mounted on the floor, but you would not call them normal. The original shuttle toilet bowl featured a set of 1,200 rpm Waring blender blades positioned a brief 6...
So powerful are race- and status-based disgusts that explorers have starved to death rather than eat like the locals. British polar exploration suffered heavily for its mealtime snobbery.
So animated are these freestanding hearts that surgeons have been known to drop them. We wash them off and they do just fine, replied New York heart transplant surgeon Mehmet Oz when I asked him about...
Rodents, on the other hand, are slaves to sweetness. They have been known to die of malnutrition rather than step away from a sugar-water drip. In an obesity study from the 1970s, rats fed an all-you-...
People who saw the Graceland master bathroom would remark on its extravagance—a TV set! Telephones! A cushioned seat!—but the décor was in equal part a reflection of how much time was spent there. He...
People like what they eat, rather than eat what they like. The phenomenon starts early. Breast milk and amniotic fluid carry the flavors of the mother’s foods, and studies consistently show that babie...
On top of its other charms, the maggot breathes through its ass. It
It starts as an appetizer typically. That’s low risk. Then it migrates to an entrée dish. Then it becomes a food that you can buy and take home and fix for your family.
I am not, by trade or character, a spotlight operator. I’m the goober with a flashlight, stumbling into corners and crannies, not looking for anything specific but knowing when I’ve found it.
Cornwell’s painting is set at Fort Crawford, in Michigan Territory, during St. Martin’s second stint in Beaumont’s employ, around 1830. At this stage in his digestive explorations, Beaumont had been t...
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 th...
But peanuts are hardly representative of the average food. Everyone knows—via visual observation of stool samples, to use the New England Journal of Medicine’s way of saying a glance before flushing—t...
Because it’s hard for people to gauge quality by flavor, they tend to gauge it by price. That’s a mistake. Langstaff has evaluated wine professionally for twenty years. In her opinion, the difference...
To test. Would weightlessness put them off their game? It did. The turtles moved slowly and insecurely and did not attack a piece of bait placed directly in front of them. Then again, the water in whi...