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smell, unlike our other senses, isn’t consciously processed. The input goes straight to the emotion and memory centers.
To experience taste, the molecules of the tastant—the thing one is tasting—need to dissolve in liquid. Liquid flows into the microscopic canyons of the tongue’s papillae, coming into contact with the “buds” of taste receptor cells that cover them. That’s one reason to be grateful for saliva. Additionally, it explains the appeal of dunking one’s doughnuts.
I think it’s fair to say that some degree of obsession is a requisite for good science, and certainly for scientific breakthrough.
As much as saliva is a bacterial cesspool, it is also an antimicrobial miracle—the former necessitating the latter. As a germ killer, saliva puts mouthwash to shame.
Human saliva contains histatins, which speed wound closure independent of their antibacterial action.
The way you chew is as unique and consistent as the way you walk or fold your shirts.
healthy adult has a new stomach lining every three days.
Activated charcoal pills did not “appreciably influence the liberation of fecal gases.” Levitt surmised that the binding sites were saturated by the time the charcoal made it to the rectum.
When I spoke to Lahr by phone he told me Johnny Cash, Kurt Cobain, and Tammy Wynette had also struggled with obstinate constipation, and he was convinced that they too had stretches of paralyzed colon. But these were also people who struggled with obstinate drug addictions. Opiates, whether they’re in the form of heroin or prescription painkillers, drastically slow colon motility (as do, by varying degrees, antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs).
LIKE PEOPLE, BACTERIA are good or bad not so much by nature as by circumstance.
Pharmaceutical companies make money by treating diseases, not by curing them.
