Word: rat
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Everyone can recognize the show-off. He is found in clusters, and his natural habitat is the college campus. He enjoys the raccoon coat, the letter sweater, and the old rat-eaten loafers. A battered hat usually adorns his head, and his tie is better hidden than displayed, as it either depicts lewd scenes, or squirts water at unlucky admirers...
Wherever men go, there go rats. From treetops, from roofs and out of small. dark holes, rats watch most of men's activities. But thus far the private lives of rats have been more or less hidden from most men. Last week the U.S. Public Health Service was preparing to publicize the rat's privacy; almost finished was a series of PHS movies about the rat's domestic life...
After the rats had been trained to ignore light and noise, they were put in pens built to resemble such favorite rat hangouts as kitchens or corncribs. There, in front of the cameras, they performed their normal dramas of robbery, love and cannibalism. Rat mothers suckled their young, and sometimes ate the whole litter. Dainty rats groomed themselves, often dipping their paws in water. Male rats fought over food or mates. Females fought off male advances. (Public Healthman Sidney P. Lanier,* head of the project, says that female rats never yield without a desperate battle against larger or multiple suitors...
...watching and photographing rats, Public Healthmen learned many things which they hope can be used as anti-rat measures. For example, when the food supply decreases, rats devour each other. This fact emphasizes the value of cleaning up tidbits that rats like to eat, says Lanier. Another observation, which may come in handy when PHS shows its movies to audiences: rats appear highly susceptible to emotional upsets. Repeated frights shorten their lives, e.g., insistent, inescapable noises, such as tapping on glass, can drive a rat to death...
...their money. Dr. George L.. Clark, head of the division of analytical chemistry at the University of Illinois, reported that the Magic Spikes he had tested contained no vrilium-whatever it might be-but merely ½,000th of a cent's worth of barium chloride, a cheap rat poison. Dr. Bernard Waldman, head of the nuclear physics laboratory at the University of Notre Dame, aimed a Geiger counter at six "radioactive" Magic Spikes in the courtroom. The judge and jurors heard no telltale rat...