Packing for Mars

Animal protein and fat have the highest digestibility of any foods on Earth. The better the cut, the more thoroughly the meat is digested and absorbed—to the point where there’s almost nothing to egest (opposite of ingest). “For high-quality beef, pork, chicken, or fish, digestibility is about ninety percent,” says George Fahey, professor of animal and nutritional sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Being a Mercury astronaut must have been like being trapped in the sauces aisle of a very small grocery store.

Contractions play an important role in a newborn’s adjustment to life outside the womb. The compressions of vaginal birth cause a huge release of stress hormones in the fetus; these are the same fight-or-flight hormones that fuel feats of extreme strength in adults. “This hormonal surge appears to be very important for getting physiological systems moving. All of a sudden a newborn has to breathe on its own, it has to figure out how to suckle from a nipple. If there aren’t enough contractions, the hormone release is smaller and the fetus has a harder time.” Studies have shown that infants born via planned C-section, with no contractions—as compared to those delivered vaginally—have a higher risk of respiratory distress and high blood pressure, a harder time expelling lung fluids, and delayed neurodevelopment. In other words, stressing an infant appears to be part of nature’s plan. (For this reason, Ronca is also not an advocate of water births.)

Back in the 1980s, some clandestine experiments were conducted very late at night in the neutral buoyancy weightless simulation tank at NASA’s George C. Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The experimental results showed that yes, it is indeed possible for humans to copulate in weightlessness. However, they have trouble staying together. The covert researchers discovered that it helped to have a third person to push at the right time in the right place. The anonymous researchers…discovered that this is the way dolphins do it. A third dolphin is always present during the mating process. This led to the creation of the space-going equivalent of aviation’s Mile High Club known as the Three Dolphin Club

The body’s foreman on call is a cell called the osteocyte, embedded all through the matrix of the bone. Every time you go for a run or lift a heavy box, you cause minute amounts of damage to your bone. The osteocytes sense this and send in a repair team: osteoclasts to remove the damaged cells, and osteoblasts to patch the holes with fresh ones. The repaving strengthens the bone. This is why bone-jarring exercise like jogging is recommended to beef up the balsa-wood bones of thin, small-boned women of northern European ancestry, whose genetics, postmenopause, will land them on the short list for hip replacement.

Dandruff is caused by an inflammatory skin response to oleic acid, which the scalp fungus Malassezia globosa excretes after dining on your scalp oils. Either you’re sensitive to oleic acid or you’re not. If Borman didn’t have dandruff before he went into space, he didn’t have it afterward, says dermatologist Jim Leyden. Leyden once paid prisoners to not wash their hair for a month, specifically to see if they developed dandruff. They did not. The flakes on Borman’s head and skin were most likely the accumulation of millions of shed skin particles—particles normally washed away in the shower—mixing with sebum and clumping together

There is a condition called hot-tub folliculitis, which often appears on hot tubbers’ buttocks and the backs of their thighs—just where the friction and pressure is. (The water in a hot tub is hot, but not hot enough to kill bacteria. An undertreated hot tub is essentially, quoting University of Arizona microbiologist Chuck Gerba, “E. coli soup.”)

In case you have ever questioned the value of thorough wiping and regular changes of underwear, here’s a reason. In people with poor bathroom habits or 1960s Air Force hygiene restrictions, fecal bacteria migrate. Wright-Patterson researchers sampled thirteen sites on the men’s bodies to check for E. coli. It was a remarkable Diaspora. Fecal bacteria had made its way to the men’s eyes, ears, and, in two cases, toes. Five out of six of the Soviet subjects who sat in armchairs for thirty days developed folliculitis—bacterial infection in the hair follicles on the skin. Three developed boils—especially bad, swollen, painful, infected follicles. (The Soviet paper uses the old-timey term “furuncle.” You almost want one just to be able to go around saying “furuncle.”)

Underarm sweat supplies both food and lodging for bacteria. Eccrine sweat is mostly water; it provides the moisture bacteria need to thrive. Protein-rich apocrine secretions are the twenty-four-hour diner. (Though eccrine sweat does contribute edible elements whose breakdown products are, as Leyden says, “part of the overall bouquet, if you will.” It’s a milder, lockerroomy smell.)

On the other hand, as they say, failing to plan is planning to fail.