Mary Roach

“The human digestive tract is like the Amtrak line from Seattle to Los Angeles: transit time is about thirty hours, and the scenery on the last leg is pretty monotonous.”

“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’s the mecha...”

“Constipation ran Presley's life. Even his famous motto TCB— 'Taking Care of Business'— sounds like a reference to bathroom matters.”

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

“Weightlessness is like heroin, or how I imagine heroin must be. You try it once, and when it's over, all you can think about is how much you want to do it again. But apparently the thrill we...”

“Most of us pass our lives never once laying eyes on our own organs, the most precious and amazing things we own. Until something goes wrong, we barely give them thought. This seems strange t...”

“Meteorite hunting is not for wimps. The best places to look are also the coldest and windiest. You need very old ice, and you need wind, lots of it, strong and unrelenting. Antarctica fits t...”

“I could have had a session of defecography, which is a diagnostic test in which X-rays are taken to assess anatomical problems occurring during the process of defecation. I gave it the brief...”

“To keep your he-man jaw muscles from smashing your precious teeth, the only set you have, the body evolved an automated braking system faster and more sophisticated than anything on a Lexus....”

“LOL is rarely OL, or even really L. A real out-loud laugh - not the forced social variety, which is closer to barking than laughing - is uncommon among adults.”

“One of the maddening ironies of writing books is that it leaves so little time for reading others'. My bedside is piled with books, but it's duty reading: books for book research, books for...”

“I love words, but I also love finding out that there is a word for something that you've experienced but didn't know there was a word for. Like 'toothpack' - that is a word for when you eat...”

“The Internet is a boon for hypochondriacs like me.”

“I make lists to keep my anxiety level down. If I write down 15 things to be done, I lose that vague, nagging sense that there are an overwhelming number of things to be done, all of which ar...”

“Dead people never seem to address the obvious - the things you'd think they'd be bursting to talk about, and the things all of us not-yet-dead are madly curious about. Such as: 'Hey, where a...”

“Will I switch to E-reading? I won't, mainly because I love the look and feel of books - particularly hardbacks. I love them enough to put up with the minor hassles of lugging them around and...”

“Fletcherizing is gross. I tried it once. I tried to go until it's all liquid, and it just creeps you out to be focusing so much on your chewing.”

“When I was 16, I had a job on the cleaning crew at a local hospital. I wore a pink uniform and cleaned bathrooms and buffed the hallway linoleum. Oddly, I don't recall hating the job. I reca...”

“Saliva has antibacterial properties. It also has things called nerve growth factor, skin growth factor, histatins which help with wound closure. So when you see an animal licking a wound or...”

“Chew on this: Human teeth can detect a grain of sand or grit 10 microns in diameter. A micron is 1/25,000 of an inch. If you shrank a Coke can until it was the diameter of a human hair, the...”