» Bestselling author Sarah Vowell discusses her latest book which offers and examination of New England Puritans.

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That thing is called the uvula. After food is chewed, but before it is swallowed, it passes through the back of your throat, called the pharynx, which is divided into the nose part of the pharynx and the throat part of the pharynx. The dewdrop uvula prevents food from coming back out through the nose by pushing it to the back of the throat and down the esophagus on its way to the stomach. If you are laughing when you drink milk, the uvula cannot do its job properly--and milk will come out of your nose!

Why don't humans have tails?

Human embryos do have tails -up to the eighth week if gestation and then they disappear during further development. You can feel what is left of your tail -which is the tailbone or coccyx-by sitting cross-legged on the floor. In this position, you can feel the pointed, triangle-shaped bone at the bottom of your spine just before the crack in your buttocks.

The coccyx got its name from the Greek word kokkyx, which means "cuckoo bird" because the bone is shaped like the beak of a cuckoo.

No one knows exactly why human being no longer have tails like monkeys do, but one idea is that monkeys need their tails for balance and grasping as they swing from tree to tree. Since humans walk upright on two feet, having a tail behind them would throw them off balance. Thus, humans have no need for tails.

Very rarely, a human baby is born with a small tail. This phenomenon was first described in the late 1800s and there have been fewer than one hundred cases reported in the medical literature since that time.