Word: rat
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Nolan has a more subversive agenda. He wants viewers to stick their hands down the rat hole of evil and see if they get bitten. With little humor to break the tension, The Dark Knight is beyond dark. It's as black - and teeming and toxic - as the mind of the Joker. Batman Begins, the 2005 film that launched Nolan's series, was a mere five-finger exercise. This is the full symphony...
When the Civil War broke out, Twain may have briefly entertained pro-Union sentiments but at length decided to serve with a ragtag bunch of Confederate irregulars. After a couple of weeks, "hunted like a rat the whole time," he thought better of that commitment and, as Huck Finn did, lit out for the territory. This territory was Nevada and California, where he prospected for silver without luck and practiced scurrilous journalism and general drunkardry with zest...
There's been a lot of really interesting research that points to a connection between our memory of the past and our ability to imagine the future. In our studies of animal models of memory, where we're able to go in and actually watch the pattern of [a rat's] brain activity, we can see that the brain activity while the animal is in a behavior-based situation, [such as navigating a maze,] directly corresponds to its future behavior: what it can, may and will do in the future. We can see that the animal does in fact...
...accepted as an article of faith in the prevention community that "the teen brain" should not be exposed to any alcohol. But the research on alcohol and the young brain is actually quite murky. It has mainly shown that very high doses of alcohol given to adolescent rats (those roughly 40 days old) affect those animals differently from the way alcohol affects adult rats. In typical studies, the rats are injected with 5 g of alcohol per 1,000 g of their body weight, often after the rodents have been deprived of food for 12 hours. Rats metabolize alcohol about...
What these rat studies tell us is that exposure to very large amounts of alcohol (particularly repeated exposure) probably inhibits normal brain development. And yet there are signs that in certain ways the adolescent brain is better equipped to handle alcohol than the adult brain. Adolescent rats show less vulnerability than adult rats to alcohol's sedating effects (which is one reason kids can party so much longer than adults). Other studies have found that, as White writes, "adolescents may be less sensitive than adults to the effects of alcohol on motor coordination." None of this means you should...