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 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...
The Inuit, at the time I visited Igloolik, had no tradition of keeping animals as companions. A sled dog was more or less a piece of equipment. When I told Makabe Nartok that I had a cat, he asked, Wh...
That was the mindset that propelled one of the AMRL’s least popular liquid diets into a long and lucrative career as Carnation Instant Breakfast.
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...
Mir astronaut Jerry Linenger writes in his memoir that he was surprised to find a bottle of cognac in one arm of his spacesuit and a bottle of whiskey in the other. (Linenger was the Frank Burns of sp...
Medical journals from 1905 to 1915 are rife with articles on vibratory massage and the many things it cures. Weakened hearts and floating kidneys. Hysterical cramp of the esophagus and catarrh of the...
It is assumed that a man will fit one of the three sizes available in the condom-style urine collection device hose attachment inside the EVA suit. To avoid mishaps caused by embarrassed astronauts op...
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,...
If you lower your head to within a foot or two of an infested corpse (and this I truly don’t recommend), you can hear them feeding. Arpad pinpoints the sound: Rice Krispies. Ron frowns. Ron used to li...
Humanitarian Benefits of Cadaver Research on Injury Prevention, Albert King calculated that vehicle safety improvements that have come about as a result of cadaver research have saved an estimated 8,5...
Here is the secret to surviving one of these crashes: Be male. In a 1970 Civil Aeromedical Institute study of three crashes involving emergency evacuations, the most prominent factor influencing survi...
He will be lowered into a vat of liquid nitrogen and frozen. From here he will progress to the second chamber, where either ultrasound waves or mechanical vibration will be used to break his easily sh...
For those who must deal with human corpses regularly, it is easier (and, I suppose, more accurate) to think of them as objects, not people. For most physicians, objectification is mastered their first...
For the more you know about how dead bodies decay—the biological and chemical phases they go through, how long each phase lasts, how the environment affects these phases—the better equipped you are to...
Fletcher was the instigator of a fad for extremely thorough chewing. We are not talking about British Prime Minister William Gladstone’s thirty-two chews per bite. We are talking about this: One-fifth...
Firther evidence of the difficulties of reduced-gravity-sex comes from the sea otter. To help hold the female in place, the male will typically pull the female's head back and grab onto her nose with...
Few sciences are as rooted in shame, infamy, and bad PR as human anatomy. The troubles began in Alexandrian Egypt, circa 300 B.C. King Ptolemy I was the first leader to deem it a-okay for medical type...
FROM TIME TO TIME, there was talk among the astronauts that it might be nice to have a drink with dinner. Beer is a no-fly, because without gravity, carbonation bubbles don’t rise to the surface. You...
Depending on who’s living in your gut, you may or may not benefit from what you eat. Or be harmed. Charred red meat has long been called a carcinogen, but in fact it is only the raw material for makin...