NASA might do well to adopt the Red Bull approach to branding and astronautics. Suddenly the man in the spacesuit is not an underpaid civil servant; he's the ultimate extreme athlete. Red Bull knows how to make space hip.
Mary RoachThere wasn't an anhydrous lacrimal gland in the house, writes the author in all seriousness describing a memorial service for a medical school's cadavers.
Mary Roach…he was doing a breath hydrogen test. If you know the amount of hydrogen someone is exhaling orally, it's a simple matter to extrapolate the amount they're exhaling rectally. This is because a fixed percentage of hydrogen produced in the colon is absorbed into the blood and, and when it reaches the lungs, exhaled. The breath hydrogen test has given flatus researchers a simple, consistent measure of gas production that does not require the subject to fart into a balloon.
Mary RoachTags: blood colon hydrogen gas flatulence mary-roach absorb extrapolate gulp
We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget.
Mary RoachTags: science life biology death mary-roach
To the rocket scientist, you are a problem. You are the most irritating piece of machinery he or she will ever have to deal with. You and your fluctuating metabolism, your puny memory, your frame that comes in a million different configurations. You are unpredictable. You're inconstant. You take weeks to fix. The engineer must worry about the water and oxygen and food you'll need in space, about how much extra fuel it will take to launch your shrimp cocktail and irradiated beef tacos. A solar cell or a thruster nozzle is stable and undemanding. It does not excrete or panic or fall in love with the mission commander. It has no ego. Its structural elements don't start to break down without gravity, and it works just fine without sleep.
To me, you are the best thing to happen to rocket science. The human being is the machine that makes the whole endeavor so endlessly intriguing.
Tags: humans space-travel
I began thinking about my skeleton, this solid, beautiful thing inside me that I would never see.
Mary RoachEntomologists have a name for young flies, but it is an ugly name, an insult. Let's not use the word "maggot." Let's use a pretty word. Let's use "hacienda.
Mary RoachGravitation is the lust of the cosmos.
Mary RoachI challenge you to find a more innocuous sentence containing the words sperm, suction, swallow, and any homophone of seaman. And then call me up on the homophone and read it to me.
Mary RoachMeaning '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).
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