Grunt and Gulp Mary Roach Collection 2 Books Bundle - The Curious Science of Humans at War, Travels Around the Gut
About this book
Grunt and Gulp Mary Roach Collection 2 Books Bundle - The Curious Science of Humans at War, Travels Around the Gut. The Curious Science of Humans at War 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 her task with infectious enthusiasm, the incomparable Mary Roach sniffs archival World War II stink bombs, tests earplugs in a simulated war zone with the Marine Corps and burns the midnight oil with the sleep-deprived crew of a nuclear submarine. Speaking to the scientists and the soldiers, she learns about everything from life-changing medical procedures such as testicular transplants to more esoteric innovations like firing dead chickens at fighter jets. Engrossing, insightful and laugh-out-loud funny, Grunt is an irresistible ride to the wilder shores of modern military life. Travels Around the Gut 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 to persuade millions of people that chewing a bite of shallot seven hundred times would yield double the vitamins? In her trademark, laugh-out-loud style, Mary Roach breaks bread with spit connoisseurs, beer and pet-food tasters, stomach slugs, potato crisp engineers, enema exorcists, rectum-examining prison guards, competitive hot dog eaters, Elvis' doctor, and many more as she investigates the beginning, and the end, of our food.