They have this idea that they can send astronauts up and the bone loss will level off in a few months, but the evidence that has come back doesn’t support that view. If you look at a two-year mission...
There is a famous study from the 1930s involving a group of orphanage babies who, at mealtimes, were presented with a smorgasbord of thirty-four whole, healthy foods. Nothing was processed or prepared...
The torpedo launch console has big square plastic buttons—Flood Tube, Open Shuttle, Ready to Fire—that flash red or green, like something Q would have built into James Bond’s Aston Martin. The missile...
The terrier mix is named Alabama. His tail thumps a beat on the side of the crate. Alabama is a gobbler real bad, Theresa says. In making their reports, the AFB techs must take into account the animal...
The shot is an extreme close-up, making it impossible to tell, without already knowing, what kind of flesh it is. It could be Julia Child skinning poultry before a studio audience. The seminar
The human brain most resembles that of Jersey cows at about six months.*
The extent to which Americans project their own food qualms and biases onto their pets has lately veered off into the absurd. Some of AFB’s clients have begun marketing 100 percent vegetarian kibble f...
The Salivette makes an unmistakable point: your parotid glands don’t care what you chew. There is nothing remotely foodlike about superabsorbent cotton, yet the parotids gamely set to work. They are y...
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...
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 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...
Presley was given laxatives and enemas on an almost daily basis. I carried around three or four boxes of Fleets, Nichopoulos says, referring to the enema brand and recalling his days on tour with Pres...
Other examples of human-sourced pharmaceuticals surely causing more distress than they relieved include strips of cadaver skin tied around the calves to prevent cramping, old liquified placenta to qui...
One of the seminar organizers joins me. Is Yvonne giving you a hard time? My nemesis is none other than the cadaver beheader. As if turns out, she's also the lab manager, the person responsible when...
Of relevant interest, an 1859 issue of California Farmer and Journal of Useful Sciences offers a recipe* for a nutritional extract made from Peruvian seabird guano.
Not all that surprisingly, Holmes began to go insane, spending his final years in and out of institutions. At seventy, he was placing ads in mortuary trade journals for a rubber-coated canvas body rem...
Navy personnel began clamoring for it. To the embarrassment of many, the current Navy working uniform is a blue camouflage print. Unsure whether perhaps I was missing the point, I asked a Navy command...
Meaning 'by way of the anus'. 'Per Annum', with two n's, means 'yearly'. The correct answer to the question, 'What is the birthrate per anum?' is zero (one hopes).
Lacking any scientific means of pinning down the soul, the first anatomists settled on generative primacy. What shows up first in the embryo must be most important and therefore most likely to hold th...