Watch Marilena gingerly probing the woman’s exposed tissue. What she is doing, basically, is getting her bearings: learning—in a detailed, hands-on manner—what’s what and what’s where in the complicat...
To find. He was trying to requisition some gas-powered leaf blowers to blow the new sand off the old. Nothing was happening
There is a point at which efficiency crosses over into lunacy, and the savings in money or resources cease to be worthwhile in light of the price paid in other ways.
Technologists sometimes exploit the synergy between the two. By adding strawberry or vanilla—aromas we associate with sweetness—it’s possible to fool people into thinking a food is sweeter than it rea...
Phalloplasty—crafting a working penis from other parts of a patient’s body—has
You don't need proof. You just need an inclination
Why don’t suicide bombers smuggle bombs in their rectums?
Who’s going to open the gates of heaven to some slob with his entrails all hanging out and dripping on the carpeting? From the sixteenth century up until the passage of the Anatomy Act, in 1836, the o...
What does this tell us about sharks? Should women be worried? Hard to say. How crazy are sharks for seal meat? Do dead groupers smell like used tampons? Unknown. I’d stay in my deck chair, if I were m...
We are all nature, all made of the same basic materials, with the same basic needs. We are no different, on a very basic level, from the ducks and the mussels and last week’s coleslaw. Thus we should...
Verbal facility with smells and flavors doesn’t come naturally. As babies, we learn to talk by naming what we see. Baby points to a lamp, mother says, ‘Yes, a lamp,’ says Johan Lundström, a biological...
Urine is a salty substance (though less so than the NASA Ames chili), and if you were to drink it in an effort to rehydrate yourself, it would have the opposite effect.
Though I found this information surprising, this being the Father of Medicine we are talking about, I did not question it. You do not question an author who appears on the title page as T.V.N. Persaud...
This is especially doable with dog food, as dogs rely more on smell than taste in making choices about what to eat and how vigorously. (Pat Moeller estimates that for dogs, the ratio for how much arom...
The other way to train medics is to have them practice a skill so many times that it becomes automatic. So when the prefrontal cortex goes AWOL, when reasoning drops away, muscle memory, one hopes, wi...
Stanford University suggests that a two-year mission to Mars would have about the same effect on one’s skeleton. Would an astronaut returning from Mars run the risk of stepping out of the capsule into...
Sleeter Bull,* the author of the 1951 book Meat for the Table, claims the ancient Greeks had a taste for udders. Very specifically, the udders of a sow just after she had farrowed but before she had s...
People can't anticipate how much they'll miss the natural world until they are deprived of it. I have read about submarine crewmen who haunt the sonar room, listening to whale songs and colonies of sn...
Our hair is as much as 14 percent L-cysteine, an amino acid commonly used to make meat flavorings and to elasticize dough in commercial baking. How commonly? Enough to merit debate among scholars of J...
On human decay and what can be done about it