Short piece headlined Elvis Died of Constipation had run as the site’s lead story (and its middle and last story) under the category Constipation News. Why didn’t the colonic inertia theory come up ea...
Remember one of my teammates was just hacking him apart, digging something out, one girl told me, and I realized I was patting his arm, going, ‘It’s okay, it’s okay.’ I asked a student named Matthew w...
Recruiting sensory panelists to sniff* amniotic fluid (withdrawn during amniocentesis) and breast milk from women who had and those who hadn’t swallowed a garlic oil capsule. Panelists agreed: the gar...
Panel applicants at the initial screening were asked not only to describe the cat foods but also to rate them according to how much they liked them. (The average rating, I am gobsmacked to report, fel...
Mainstream pet-food manufacturers blend animal fats and meals with soy and wheat grains and add vitamins and minerals. This yields a cheap, nutritious pellet that no one wants to eat.
Human fetuses have a vomeronasal organ, though no one knows whether it’s functional. You can no more ask a fetus about these things than a python. Rawson surmises that the organ is a holdover from whe...
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 aroma matters to how much taste matters is 70/30...
Cats are more or less monoguesic, meaning they stick to one food. Outdoor cats tend to be either mousers or birders, not both. But don’t worry, as most of the difference between Tuna Treat and Poultry...
You want a vivid description of what’s going through my brain as I’m cutting through a liver and all these larvae are spilling out all over me and juice pops out of the intestines? I kind of did, but...
You may be wondering: Could Ella Fitzgerald explode your liver? She could not.
You may be thinking, Wow, that Mary Roach has her head up her ass. To which I say: Only briefly, and with the utmost respect.
You are perhaps wondering, as I did, why they don’t use crash test dummies. This is the other side of the equation. A dummy can tell you how much force a crash is unleashing on various dummy body part...
Women who routinely have orgasm in intercourse without explicit clitoral stimulation all say that it makes little difference what the guy does, as long as he doesn’t come too soon,
Which is something to be thankful for, says Danielle Reed, Rawson’s former colleague at Monell. Otherwise you’d be tasting things like bile and pancreatic enzymes. (Intestinal taste receptors are thou...
Whereas the larger caliber .45 Colt revolver bullets caused the cattle to drop to the ground after three or four shots, the animals shot with smaller caliber .38 bullets failed even after ten shots to...
We will be evaluating some nasty oils. You will have to put them in your mouth.* For the good of science. For the good of olive oil. We are here to help the producers, to tell them, What attributes do...
To eat liver, knowing that you, too, have a liver, brushes up against the cannibalism taboo. The closer we are to a species, emotionally or phylogenetically, the more potent our horror at the prospect...
The human head is of the same approximate size and weight as a roaster chicken. I have never before had occasion to make the comparison, for never before today have I seen a head in a roasting pan.
The human brain most resembles that of Jersey cows at about six months.*
The difference between dog and cat is immediately obvious. While a dog almost (and occasionally literally) inhales its food the moment it’s set down, cats are more cautious. A cat wants to taste a lit...