That’s what killed Elvis, said Adrianne Noe. Noe is the director of the National Museum of Health and Medicine, which has its own megacolon, from an unknown party. As we were about to get off the phon...
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 come to me and say, ‘My wine stinks. What happened?’ Langstaff can read the stink. Off-flavors—or defects, in the professional’s parlance—are clues to what went wrong. An olive oil with a flavo...
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...
People blanch to see fish meal or meat meal on a pet-food ingredient panel, but meal--which variously includes organs, heads, skin, and bones--most closely resembles the diet of dogs and cats in the w...
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 long ago, a whale biologist named Phillip Clapham sent me a photograph that illustrates the consequences of life without a doorman. Like most creatures that swallow their food whole, sperm whales...
Nirlungayuk reached a similar conclusion. I tracked him down, seventeen years later, and asked him what the outcome of his country-foods campaign had been. It didn’t really work, he said, from his off...
Mourning and moving on are hard enough. Why add to the burden? If someone wants to arrange a balloon launch of the deceased's ashes into inner space, that's fine. But if it's burdensome or troubling f...
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).
Loden loves guns, loves to talk about them. Right now he's trying to talk about them with me, a distinctly trying experience for I keep shepherding the conversation back to dead bodies which Loden cle...
It pulls a gape: mouth opened wide, tongue stuck out to eject the offending food. (Humans do this too. The scientific term here is the disgust face.)
In a 1995 Journal of Trauma article entitled Humanitarian Benefits of Cadaver Research on Injury Prevention, Albert King calculated that vehicle safety improvements that have come about as a result of...
If you’re dying of thirst in the desert, drinking your urine won’t help you. The proteins and salts are by that point so concentrated that the body needs to pull fluid from the tissues to dilute them,...
I think that at the moment of death that little window opens up. I think that maybe we're all connected to something bigger than we are.
I like the term decedent. It's as though the man weren't dead but merely involved in some sort of protracted legal dispute.
Fully half of all transplant patients, I found out, develop postoperative psychological problems of some sort.
For me, hands are hard. She looks up from what she's doing. Because you're holding this disconnected hand, and it's holding you back. Cadavers occasionally effect a sort of accidental humanness that c...
Entomologists have a name for young flies, but it is an ugly name, an insult. Let's not use the word maggot. Let's use a pretty word. Let's use hacienda.