Word: braining
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Bobby's Brain...
...calorimeter, in the basement of Judd Hall, several years before 1911. I know, because I was one of them. At midyear examination time of my junior year (i.e., February 1905), a number of us took our examinations in Bobby's box, with the idea of finding out whether brain work consumed any physical energy. As I recall it, they never proved that it did, or at best reached a Scotch verdict. But it was a man-sized calorimeter with all the fixings, and subjects would sometimes stay in it for a week or two, living on scientifically controlled rations...
Glutamic acid, one of the amino acids that form proteins, is found in wheat, soybeans and (less plentifully) in certain other foods such as milk and meat. Its unusual property: glutamic is the only amino acid that is metabolized (i.e., burned up) by brain tissue, and it seems to have a beneficial effect on nerve activity in the brain. The Columbia researchers first tried feeding concentrated doses of glutamic acid to white rats. The rats' show of intelligence improved noticeably; they solved the standard maze problem in half their former time...
...pecking them out a month in advance on her typewriter. Wherever she goes, her notebook goes with her; sometimes friends find her interrupting a conversation to write down some idea for a verse ("I'd like to sweep my soul in spring, And let the sunshine flood my brain"). Her verses pay her $10,000 a year, are syndicated in 30 U.S., Canadian and British papers, and draw about 100 fan letters a week...
...beens as he went along. He writes of them vividly. He found New York's Governor Dewey "as devoid of charm as a rivet . . . able, dramatic . . . a man who will never try to steal second unless the pitcher breaks his leg." Taft is an amalgam of "brain power . . . sincerity . . . majestic wrongheadedness . . . Brobdingnagian bad judgments." Gunther on Bricker: "Intellectually he is like interstellar space-a vast vacuum occasionally crossed by homeless, wandering clichés." Gunther finds U.S. public life full of "poltroons, chiselers, parvenus . . . politicians bloated with intellectual edema." But after all, he says, the U.S. is the "craziest...