{"author":"Mary Roach","author_id":"Mary+Roach","total_quotes":61,"quotes":[{"text":"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 a cadaver.","author":"Mary Roach","tags":["death","science"],"id":5227,"author_id":"Mary+Roach"},{"text":"I've always been a bit of a space geek. I wrote an article years ago about the neutral buoyancy tank, which is this biblically sized pool where they train astronauts. And it was just the coolest thing.","author":"Mary Roach","tags":["train","years","where "],"id":12593,"author_id":"Mary+Roach"},{"text":"There wasn't an anhydrous lacrimal gland in the room...","author":"Mary Roach","tags":["cadavers","lacrimal","medical","quotes"],"id":33405,"author_id":"Mary+Roach"},{"text":"…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.","author":"Mary Roach","tags":["absorb","blood","colon","extrapolate","flatulence","gas","gulp","hydrogen","mary-roach"],"id":35023,"author_id":"Mary+Roach"},{"text":"One IGHS member said that, yup, she could hear it, too. Then again, during a dinner conversation earlier in the trip, this same woman heard “Siegfried and Roy” as “Sigmund Freud.” The resulting image-Sigmund Freud with flowing hair and tigers and too much men’s makeup-haunts me to this day.","author":"Mary Roach","tags":["ghosts"],"id":37957,"author_id":"Mary+Roach"},{"text":"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 have been faced with Celine Dion singing 'My Liver Belongs to You' and movie houses playing The Liver Is a Lonely Hunter. Every Spanish love song that contains the word corazon, which is all of them, would contain the somewhat less lilting higado, and bumper stickers would proclaim, 'I [liver symbol] my Pekingese.","author":"Mary Roach","tags":["heart","humor","liver","science","soul"],"id":38023,"author_id":"Mary+Roach"},{"text":"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.","author":"Mary Roach","tags":["grunt","mary-roach","science"],"id":39400,"author_id":"Mary+Roach"},{"text":"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 things become.","author":"Mary Roach","tags":["dogma","facts","science","spook"],"id":43777,"author_id":"Mary+Roach"},{"text":"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 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 —in particular, your right temporal lobe— will be more prone to tiny epileptic-esque microseizures and the subtle hallucinations these seizures can cause.","author":"Mary Roach","tags":["ghosts","hallucinations","paranormal","science"],"id":51199,"author_id":"Mary+Roach"},{"text":"Heroism doesn’t always happen in a burst of glory. Sometimes small triumphs and large hearts change the course of history. Sometimes a chicken can save a man’s life.","author":"Mary Roach","tags":["hero","heroism","military","science"],"id":52131,"author_id":"Mary+Roach"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":61,"pages":7,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}