Mary Roach

Borman's dumping urine. Urine [in] approximately one minute." Two lines further along, we see Lovell saying, "What a sight to behold!

Meaning 'by way of the anus'. 'Per Annum', with two n's, means 'yearly'. The correct answer to the question, 'What is the birthrate per anum?' is zero (one hopes).

Every mode of travel has its signature mental aberration.

You don't need proof. You just need an inclination

Please beware," came his reply, "There are a lot of people who believe that just because we don't have an explanation for something, it's quantum mechanics.

Masters points out that the heterosexuals were at a disadvantage, as they do not benefit from what he called __ender empathy_. Doing unto your partner as you would do unto yourself only works well when you__e gay.

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 Ritalin improve a person's focus, so it stands to reason that it would make it easier to stay attuned to subtle changes taking place in one's body. 'It enables a woman to focus o the task at hand,' said Berman, managing, though surely not intending, to make sex sound like homework.

Homo sapiens is one of the few species on earth that care if they__e seen having sex. The impala is unconcerned. The dingo roundly flaunts it. A masturbating chimpanzee will stare straight at you. To any creature other than you and I and 6 billion other privacy-needing H. sapiens, sex is like peeling a mango or scratching your ear. It__ just something you do sometimes.

Hormones are nature's three bottles of beer.

As when astronaut Mike Mulhane was asked by a NASA psychiatrist what epitaph he'd like to have on his gravestone, Mulhane answered, "A loving husband and devoted father," though in reality, he jokes in "Riding Rockets," "I would have sold my wife and children into slavery for a ride into space.

There is her heart. I've never seen one beating.I had no idea they moved so much. You put your hand on your heart and you picture something pulsing slightly but basically still, like a hand on a desktop tapping Morse code. This things is going wild in there. It's a mixing-machine part, a stoat squirming in its burrow, an alien life form that's just won a Pontiac on The Price Is Right. If you were looking for the home of the human body's animating spirit, I could imagine believing it to be here, for the simple reason that it is the human body's most animated organ.

The human organism is built for tension and relaxation, work and sleep. The principle of life is rhythm.

US government button specifications run to twenty-two pages. This fact on its own yields a sense of what it is like to design garments for the Army.

People are messy, unpredictable things.

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 unpretty fact of biology.

Constipation ran Presley's life. Even his famous motto TCB__'Taking Care of Business'___ounds like a reference to bathroom matters.

It's called the FATLOSE trail. FATLOSE stands for 'Fecal Administration To LOSE weight,' an example of PLEASE___retty Lame Excuse for an Acronym, Scientists and Experimenters.

While he attends to his rats, Persinger gives me the lowdown on the haunt theory. Why would a certain type of electromagnetic field make one hear things or sense a presence? What__ the mechanism? The answer hinges on the fact that exposure to electromagnetic fields lowers melatonin levels. Melatonin, he explains, is an anti-convulsive; if you have less of it in your system, your brain __n particular, your right temporal lobe_ will be more prone to tiny epileptic-esque microseizures and the subtle hallucinations these seizures can cause.