Pharmaceutical companies make money by treating diseases, not by curing them.
Olive trees grow in the same climate and soil conditions as grapes. The olive oil people have been up in Napa Valley all along, going, Hey, how do we get a piece of this action?
Natick Labs and precursor the Quartermaster Subsistence Research Laboratory have extended shelf lives to near immortality. They currently make a sandwich that keeps for three years.
Many people will find this book disrespectful. There is nothing amusing about being dead, they will say. Ah, but there is.
Irritable bowel syndrome is a well-documented, little-publicized aftermath of diarrheal infections—especially severe or repeated bouts. If you talk to people who’ve recently been diagnosed with IBS, a...
In a wartime survey conducted by a team of food-habits researchers, only 14 percent of the students at a women’s college said they liked evaporated milk. After serving it to the students sixteen times...
I applied to be a subject in a simulated Mars mission. I made it past the first round of cuts and was told that someone from the European Space Agency would call me for a phone interview later in the...
Hydromedusa tectifera are, like post-war Nazis, native to Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil.
Hydrogen sulfide is so swiftly lethal that farm- and workplace-safety organizations urge anyone who enters a manure pit or attempts to clear a blocked sewage pipe to wear a self-contained breathing ap...
Gibbeting—though it hits the ear like a word for happy playground chatter or perhaps, at worst, the cleaning of small game birds—is in fact a ghastly verb. To gibbet is to dip a corpse in tar and susp...
For the forces of any given blast, one type may stretch, say, a fifth of its length without tearing, while another may manage just 5 percent. WIAMan will be calibrated to reflect these differences and...
Dissection and surgical instruction, like meat-eating, require a carefully maintained set of illusions and denial. Physicians and anatomy students must learn to think of cadavers as wholly unrelated t...
Crispy foods carry a uniquely powerful appeal. I asked Chen what might lie behind this seemingly universal drive to crunch things in our mouths. I believe human being has a destructive nature in its g...
Borman's dumping urine. Urine [in] approximately one minute. Two lines further along, we see Lovell saying, What a sight to behold!
Battles in Micronesia were so pitched and bloody that Gilbertese warriors would outfit themselves head to foot with doormat-thick armor fashioned from coconut hulls. On top of the significant humiliat...
Back in the 1980s when everyone looked a bit off, my friend Tim and his brothers had some publicity shots taken of their band. Eventually they sold the rights to a stock photo agency. Years later, one...
Analogies drawn from the inspection of hen’s eggs foundered on the objection that man was not a chicken.
Weightlessness was unbelievable. It's physical euphoria: Nothing about you has any weight. You don't realize that you are weighed down all the time by yourself, and your organs, and your head. Your ar...
Whenever Mark takes over the explaining, Brockhoff drops back and takes out her phone. She does not seem rude, just grindingly busy and determined to stay on top of her day. I see her come and go in m...
What’s different? Sweat, risk, uncertainty, inconvenience. But also, awe. Pride. Something ineffably splendid and stirring.