Mary Roach

Our bodies regenerate at a remarkable rate – our skin replaces itself every month, our blood every four. You can remove ninety per cent of a liver and it’ll still grow back to its original size (please do not try this at home). Others – the brain, the heart, the eyes – are more complicated. These stay with us for...

For two thousand years, cadavers – some willingly, some unwittingly – have been involved in science’s boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. They’ve tested France’s first guillotines, ridden the NASA Space Shuttle, been crucified in a Parisian laboratory to test the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, and helped solve the mystery of TWA Flight 800. For every new surgical procedure,...

The body is the most complex machine in the world, and the only one for which you cannot get a replacement part from the manufacturer. For centuries, medicine has reached for what’s available—sculpting noses from brass, borrowing skin from frogs and hearts from pigs, crafting eye parts from jet canopies and breasts from petroleum by-products. Today we’re attempting to grow...

What happens when nature and humanity clash? In past centuries, wild animals who broke the law would be given lawyers and put on trial. But what’s the solution now, as we humans dominate the planet and don’t like it when wildlife gets in the way? In this fresh, funny and thoroughly-researched book, Animal Vegetable Criminal, Mary Roach examines the problems,...

What happens to you when you can’t walk for a year? When you can’t have sex? Or smell flowers? What happens if you vomit in your helmet during a space walk? Is it possible to survive a bailout at 17,000 miles an hour? Packing for Mars by Mary Roach delves into these fascinating and often humorous questions about the peculiarities...

Eating is the most pleasurable, gross, necessary, unspeakable biological process we undertake. But very few of us realise what strange wet miracles of science operate inside us after every meal—let alone have pondered the results of the research. How have physicists made crisps crispier? What do laundry detergent and saliva have in common? Was self-styled 'nutritional economist' Horace Fletcher right...

Grunt n. informal a low-ranking soldier. At a converted movie studio, amputee actors prepare army medics for the shock and gore of combat wounds, while at a base in East Africa, diarrhoea threatens national security. Beyond weapons and strategy, this is about the other side of war – how scientists protect soldiers from panic, exhaustion, heat, and noise. Setting about...

Few things are as fundamental to human happiness as sex, and few writers are as entertaining about the subject as Mary Roach. Can a woman think herself to orgasm? Is your penis three inches longer than you think? Why doesn't Viagra help women - or, for that matter, pandas? Does orgasm boost fertility? Or cure hiccups? The study of sexual...