Vinegar, cola, citrus juice, wine, all are in the acid range of the pH scale: from around pH 2 to 3. Anything under pH 4 will dissolve calcium phosphate, a key component of tooth enamel. The process i...
Seventeenth-century surgeon-anatomist William Harvey, famous for discovering the human circulatory system, also deserves fame for being one of few medical men in history so dedicated to his calling th...
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...
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...
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.
I walk up and down the rows. The heads look like rubber halloween masks. They also look like human heads, but my brain has no precedent for human heads on tables or in roasting pans or anywhere other...
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
H appears no different from the corpses already here. But H is different. She has made three sick people well. She has brought them extra time on Earth. To be able as a dead person to make a gift of t...
Gravitation is the lust of the cosmos.
Dr. Grime carries a Tide stain pen. He does not use his own spit. Art conservators do. We make cotton swabs on bamboo sticks and moisten the swab in our mouths, says Andrea Chevalier, senior paintings...
Every now and then, someone will tell me that one of my books has made them laugh out loud. I never believe them because: a.) my books don't make me laugh out loud; and b.) sometimes I have said this...
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...
Animals' taste systems are specialized for the niche they occupy in the environment. That includes us. As hunters and foragers of the dry savannah, our earliest forebears evolved a taste for important...
Picking my topics is sort of a process of elimination for me. Most things don't work for me. I like to cover science and unexpected things happening in labs. Also, theoretical research doesn't work fo...
It is indeed possible for humans to copulate in weightlessness. However, they have trouble staying together. The covert researchers discovered that it helped to have a third person to push at the righ...
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...
The Spanish for ‘vacuum’ is aspiradora.
She warns me about equating complexity with quality. All that stuff you read on wine bottles, in wine magazines, where they throw out a dozen descriptors? That’s not sensory evaluation. That’s marketi...
Sexual desire is a state not unlike hunger.