Word: petted
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...even many Socialists concede that Mitterrand's primary motive is political. Wholesale nationalization is a pet project of both his own party's Marxist left wing and of the Communists, who hold four seats in the Cabinet. Mitterrand believes that co-opting their ideas is the best way of weakening these potentially troublesome allies...
...American cat of any age or gender enjoys semisacrosanct status approaching that of the holy cow in India. There are some 25 million pet felines in the U.S.; their care and feeding cost up to $1.8 billion a year, which is more than the defense budget of Brazil. Yet, deep in the American psyche, there is evidently a bristling resentment of Felis domestica. This has erupted in a litter of books that celebrate a new and fast-growing cult of ailurophobia (hatred or fear of cats...
...sudden, should sick cat jokes prove so appealing? For one thing, since the triumph of Poland's Solidarity union movement, Polish jokes are out. For another, many people are being made aware of long-hidden resentment of the pampered pets and their golden-eyed contempt toward the humans privileged to support them. Pop Psychologist Joyce Brothers regards ailurophobia, at least in its literary form, as a harmless put-on. "If you get upset at this," she says, "you have too much emotional involvement in your pet." Harvey Mindess, an authority on the psychology of humor, sniffs: "101 Uses proves...
Preliminary evidence from PET scans suggests that in schizophrenics the frontal part of the brain consumes glucose at a very low rate. In manic-depressives, glucose seems to burn at a very high rate during the manic phase. (No pattern has been found for the depressive phase.) People with senile dementia show decreased glucose metabolism; the more advanced the case, the lower the activity. Researchers also plan to use PET for biochemical brain portraits of patients with multiple sclerosis, Huntington's chorea and possibly alcoholism...
Presently PET scanning requires highly skilled specialists, including chemists, physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists and physicians. The initial costs are also very high. A cyclotron to make radioactive compounds, PET equipment, and a facility to house the operation can run into millions of dollars. Even so, PET scanners are being set up all over the world. Six years ago, there were only four medical centers in the U.S. where teams of scientists were actively engaged in developing PET. Today there are about ten, including Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of California in Los Angeles...