Word: nervous
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...commanding officer, Venezuela's Dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, 43. Because the airmen quickly lost heart when other armed forces failed to join them, the revolution failed. But Major General Pérez Jiménez, far from relaxing over an easy win, was left nervous and nettled...
...discomforting mask; her movement is sometimes less successful, although properly awkward. Lucienne Schupf, extremely energetic, skillfully emphasizes the over-theatrical, nearly manic-depressive moods of her pitiful character. She throws sparks into an atmosphere that is designed to baffle and perhaps poison the audience. Katherine Kitch, as Madame, seemed nervous, and acted in a series of poses...
Besides the fascination of these athletic feats, the grasshopper gives the zoologist other good reasons for study. Plagues of locusts (shorthorn grasshoppers) can still endanger the food supply of millions. Knowledge of the nervous system that fires the grasshopper's jumping muscles may lead to an effective insecticide...
Even more astonishing is the grasshopper's nervous system, which can fire his leg muscles at either a stroller's gait or a flat-out leap. Hoyle says the control lies in two simple nerve fibers that attach to the jumping muscles; one is for slow action, one for leaping. The tiny bundles of muscle fibers that are packed like the fibrils of a feather all along the thigh are never fully activated by impulses carried by the slow-action circuit, and so the grasshopper can walk where it pleases...
...when it is hopping mad, the grasshopper sends down a nervous impulse that "inhibits the slow nerve fiber and puts it out of action." All further impulses go on the fast-action fiber. How far the grasshopper leaps depends on the number of impulses it sends its leg muscles: one impulse produces a hop; two a "moderate jump"; three an all-out effort. Somehow the grasshopper gets all this done in one-thirtieth of a second. Marvels Grasshopperman Hoyle: "A superb example of natural economy...