Word: alertness
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What's going on? Several things at once, I suspect. At a hormonal level, studies have shown that meditation can counteract the fight-or-flight response that floods the body with the stress hormone cortisol and that also shuts down the parasympathetic system, which normally restores order after the alert is over. At a molecular level, meditation slows metabolism in red blood cells and suppresses the production of cytokines--proteins associated with the kind of heightened immune response often seen in stressed-out subjects such as students taking exams...
When the brain detects a threat, a number of structures, including the hypothalamus, amygdala and pituitary gland, go on alert: they exchange information with each other and then send signaling hormones and nerve impulses to the rest of the body to prepare for fight or flight...
Hamdani never claimed his customers were terrorists, and there is no evidence he or they had any connection to al-Qaeda. But his story arrived in Washington as U.S. security officials were going on full holiday alert. Pakistani authorities came up with information about an alien-smuggling scheme that dovetailed with the forger's account. On Dec. 27, Islamabad gave the FBI photos and names or aliases of five men thought to be among the 19 smuggled aliens Hamdani had served. The U.S. quickly put out an unusually prominent all-points bulletin for the five. "We don't have...
...mimic the characteristics of explosives in the EDS machines); putting shoes on top so that they can be removed and searched easily; spreading books out and not stacking them on top of one another (stacked books are too dense for the EDS to "see" through and might trigger an alert); and putting all sharp items in a checked bag, not a carry...
...Andrews University. Terrorists, he notes, are "looking for low-tech ways of making maximum mayhem." Substances like ricin - what Ranstorp calls "weapons of mass disruption" - fit the bill. As with the post-Sept. 11 anthrax attacks in the U.S., a small number of deaths can trigger a huge reaction. "Alert, not alarm," was the police message to the public and the health authorities. Although there is no vaccine or antidote for ricin poisoning, the substance is not suitable for killing on a mass scale. In one of Agatha Christie's earliest detective stories, The House of Lurking Death...