We could undoubtedly survive on these rations a lot longer than we’d care to live.” (NASA went ahead and tested an all-milkshake meal plan on groups of college students living in a simulated space capsule...

compressed into boxes, packed in sawdust,… trussed up in sacks, roped up like hams…

The paper does not provide the exact number of penises eaten by ducks, but the author says there have been enough over the years to prompt the coining of a popular saying: ‘I better get...

We can study it, we can apply principles of peer-reviewed research, we can do it.’ People say, ‘Yes, we can figure it out.

Every mode of travel has its signature mental aberration.

It is astounding to me, and achingly sad, that with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more...

cadavers’ intestines hanging like a parade streamers off the sides of tables, skulls bobbing in boiling pots, organs strewn on the floor being eaten by dogs…..

Footnote: In 1998, a woman in Saline, Michigan received a patent for a Decorative Penile Wrap…The patent included three pages of drawings, including a penis wearing a ghost outfit, another in the robes of the...

Nobody ever sees the inside of their body, … It’s wild … it’s not nearly as orderly as you think it’s going to be.

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 mechanism? The...

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.

It is difficult to put words to the smell of decomposing human. It is dense and cloying, sweet but not flower-sweet. Halfway between rotting fruit and rotting meat.

Homo sapiens is one of the few species on earth that care if they’re seen having sex. The impala is unconcerned. The dingo roundly flaunts it. A masturbating chimpanzee will stare straight at you. To...

I can wear pleated pants now.

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...

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...

presences” picking up something real that the rest of us can’t pick up, or are they hallucinating? Here again, we must end with the Big Shrug, a statue of which is being erected on the...

gender empathy”. Doing unto your partner as you would do unto yourself only works well when you’re gay.

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 influencing survival was gender (followed...

Many people will find this book disrespectful. There is nothing amusing about being dead, they will say. Ah, but there is.

No one goes out to play anymore. Simulation is becoming reality.

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,...

The slang for the rectum is “prison wallet”.

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....

Sigmund Freud.” The resulting image-Sigmund Freud with flowing hair and tigers and too much men’s makeup-haunts me to this day.

People are messy, unpredictable things.

I am very much out of my element here. There are moments, listening to the conversations going on around me, when I feel I am going to lose my mind. Earlier today, I heard someone...

It would be especially comforting to believe that I have the answer to the question, What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that’s that—the million-year nap? Or will some part...

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

With the rise of classical Greece, the soul debate evolved into the more familiar heart-versus-brain, the liver having been demoted to an accessory role. We are fortunate that this is so, for we would otherwise...

All good research-whether for science or for a book-is a form of obsession.

Not that there’s anything wrong with just lying around on your back. In it’s way, rotting is interesting too, as we will see. It’s just that there are other ways to spend your time as...

…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...

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

In my experience, the most staunchly held views are based on ignorance or accepted dogma, not carefully considered accumulations of facts. The more you expose the intricacies and realtities of the situation, the less clear-cut...

Where do you find a stomach on a Thursday afternoon in Reno? “Chinatown?” suggests someone. “Costco?” “Butcher Boys.” Tracy pulls his phone from a pocket. “Hello, I’m from the university” – the catchall preamble for...

Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife

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).

It is the mind that speaks a woman’s heart, not the vaginal walls.

There wasn’t an anhydrous lacrimal gland in the room…

But can you prove that, Dr. Crick?

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

The simplest strategy for bouts of noxious flatus is to not care. Or perhaps to take advantage of a gastroenterologist I know: get a dog. (To blame.)

Hormones are nature’s three bottles of beer.

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...