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

— Mary Roach

Animals' taste systems are specialized for the niche they occupy in the environment. That includes us. As hunters and foragers of the dry Savannah, our earliest forebears evolved a taste for important but scarce nutrients: salt and high-energy fats and sugars. That, in a nutshell, explains the widespread popularity of junk food.

— Mary Roach

As when astronaut Mike Methane was asked by a NASA psychiatrist what epitaph he'd like to have on his gravestone, Methane 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.

— Mary Roach

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

— Mary Roach

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.....

— Mary Roach

Compressed into boxes, packed in sawdust, ... trussed up in sacks, roped up like hams...

— Mary Roach

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

— Mary Roach

During World War II, when combat rations were tinned, meat hashes were a common entrée because they worked well with the filling machines. “But the men wanted something they could chew, something into which they could ‘sink their teeth,’” wrote food scientist Samuel Leprosy in a 1964 paper making the case against a liquid diet for the Gemini astronauts. He summed up the soldiers’ take on potted meat: “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 at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in 1964. A significant portion of it ended up beneath the floorboards.)

— Mary Roach

Every mode of travel has its signature mental aberration.

— Mary Roach

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 Grim Reaper, and one dressed up to look like a snowman.

— Mary Roach