Viagra isn't the only drug being prescribed off-label for women with arousal problems. Los Angeles urologist Jennifer Berman told me some doctors are prescribing low doses of Ritalin. Drugs like Rital...
Homo sapiens is one of the few species on earth that care if they’re seen having sex. The impala is unconcerned. The dingo roundly flaunts it. A masturbating chimpanzee will stare straight at you. To...
You could tell Glover was a nice guy because a To Do list on a whiteboard on his office wall said,
What sort of person experimentally infests a child with maggots? A confident sort, certainly. A maverick. Someone comfortable with the unpretty facts of biology. Someone who is perhaps himself an unpr...
Rawson points out that although snakes can’t taste, they have a primitive sense of smell. They’ll extend their tongue to gather volatile molecules and then pull it back in and plug it into the vomeron...
Making matters riskier: bed pans! The notorious frequency of sudden and unexpected deaths of patients while using bed pans in hospitals has been commented upon for many years, wrote the Cincinnati doc...
I am not, by trade or character, a spotlight operator. I’m the goober with a flashlight, stumbling into corners and crannies, not looking for anything specific but knowing when I’ve found it. Courage
He has a minor in explosives and the slightly bitter, misanthropic personality of someone who shouldn't.
Capacity to Tolerate Boredom and Low Levels of Stimulation is one of the recommended attributes on a Space Shuttle–era document drafted by the NASA In-House Working Group on Psychiatric and Psychologi...
By the time children are ten years old, generally speaking, they’ve learned to eat like the people around them. Once food prejudices are set, it is no simple task to dissolve them. In a separate study...
Anything perceived as a threat trips the amygdala—the brain’s hand-wringing sentry—to set in motion the biochemical cascade known as the fight-or-flight response. Bruce Siddle, who consults in this ar...
I used to do my best thinking while staring out airplane windows. The seat-back video system put a stop to that. Now I sit and watch old' Friends' and 'Everybody Loves Raymond' episodes. Walking is go...
This is a book about notable achievements made while dead.
There is a passage in the Buddhist Sutra on Mindfulness called the Nine Cemetery Contemplations. Apprentice monks are instructed to meditate on a series of decomposing bodies in the charnel ground, st...
The public filed past Elmer in his casket, looking every bit the soldier and nothing at all the decomposing body. Embalming received another boost four years later, when Abe Lincoln’s embalmed body tr...
Of all the so-called variety meats, none presents a steeper challenge to the food persuader than the reproductive organs. Good luck to Deanna Pucciarelli, the woman who seeks to introduce mainstream A...
No engineer could design something as multifunctional and fine-tuned as an anus. To call someone an asshole is really bragging him up.
Khoruts gave me a memorable example of how behavior can be covertly manipulated by microorganisms. The parasite Toxoplasma infects rats but needs to make its way into a cat’s gut to reproduce. The par...
It's the reason we say pork and beef instead of pig and cow. Dissection and surgical instruction, like meat-eating, require a carefully maintained set of illusions and denial.
It's amazing what sometimes gets accomplished via an initially jarring but ultimately harmless shift in thinking. Is cutting the organs out of a dead man and stitching them into someone else barbaric...