People are messy, unpredictable things.
On human decay and what can be done about it
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.
It’s no coincidence that the man who contributed the most to the study of human anatomy, the Belgian Andreas Vesalius, was an avid proponent of do-it-yourself, get-your-fussy-Renaissance-shirt-dirty a...
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...
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...
Humans have taste receptor cells in the gut, the voice box, the upper esophagus, but only the tongue’s receptors report to the brain.
Here's the other thing I think about. It makes little sense to try to control what happens to your remains when you are no longer around to reap the joys or benefits of that control. People who make e...
Here is what William Beaumont had to say about saliva: Its legitimate and only use, in my opinion, is to lubricate the food to facilitate the passage of the bolus through the [esophagus]. Beaumont was...
Here is the secret to surviving one of these [airplane] crashes: Be male. In a 1970 Civil Aeromedical institute study of three crashes involving emergency evacuations, the most prominent factor influe...
Flavor is a combination of taste (sensory input from the surface of the tongue) and smell, but mostly it’s the latter. Humans perceive five tastes—sweet, bitter, salty, sour, and umami (brothy)—and an...
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.
The Soviet space agency did not traditionally give cosmonauts steak and eggs before launch; it gave them a one-liter enema.) Fahey,
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...
Freshly dead popes are struck thrice on the forehead with a special silver hammer.
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...
To meet pets’ nutrition requirements while also giving humans the cheap, handy, cleanly product they demand, mainstream pet-food manufacturers blend animal fats and meals with soy and wheat grains and...