Word: miceli
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...courtesy that apparently stopped at the hospital's front door. According to a series in this week's Washington Post, some wounded soldiers have lived amid mice, mold and mismanagement in outpatient facilities. It was a shocking account to ordinary Americans who know of Walter Reed by its spit-shine, high-tech image, but especially to me. An embedded reporter who lost a hand in a grenade attack, I was treated at Walter Reed as an in-patient from December 16, 2003 to January 8, 2004, when I left for my home in Washington. I returned regularly to the hospital...
British firm PlayEngine is offering a line of flat-screen monitors (from $330), mice ($20) and keyboards ($30) housed in bamboo shells. Unlike plastic, bamboo is an eco-friendly, renewable material. A crop of this fast-growing grass eats up more CO2 than an equivalent field of trees, so farming it can help to reduce greenhouse gases. It also biodegrades easily and doesn't release any evil compounds when it's decomposing. However, that doesn't mean your keyboard will start decaying on your desk. All of the bamboo is dried and treated for bugs and infestations, resulting...
Here's how the experiment works: if you provide mice with an escape route, they typically learn very quickly how to avoid a mild electrical shock that occurs a few seconds after they hear a tone. But if the escape route is blocked whenever the tone is sounded, and new shocks occur, the mice will eventually stop trying to run away. Later, even after the escape route is cleared, the animals simply freeze at the sound of the tone--despite the fact that they once knew how to avoid the associated shock...
Obviously, humans have more intellectual resources at their disposal than mice do, but the underlying principle remains. When too many of the rules change, when what used to work doesn't anymore, your ability to reason takes a hit. Just being aware of your nervous system's built-in bias toward learned helplessness in the face of unrelieved stress can help you identify and develop healthy habits that will buffer at least some of the load...
...learned this week that obesity, in people and mice, might be caused, or anyway encouraged, by a type of bacteria called Firmicutes. What these microbes do, for reasons of their own, is not to make you firmer or cuter, but to increase your absorption of calories, so you get fatter on the same amount of food. They don't care any more about your waistline than mice, or your holiday visitors, care about whose house this is. They just know that in a fatso, they thrive...