Word: rat
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Looking for a travel bargain this summer? Like the heat? Follow the trail of the Rat Pack to Palm Springs, Calif. Its posh spas, golf courses, restaurants and casinos are much roomier in the off-season. And starting in June, rates at resorts like the plush Miramonte fall from as much as $350 a night in peak season to just $89 a night. There is a catch: average temperatures hover at 105[degrees] and can go as high as 122[degrees] midday. But locals swear the golf courses are still playable in the morning. Families can spend the heat...
Indeed, a lot of what researchers have learned about the biology of anxiety comes from scaring rats and then cutting them open. Just as the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov showed 100 years ago that you could condition a dog to salivate at the sound of a bell, scientists today have taught rats to fear all kinds of things--from buzzers to lights--by giving them electrical shocks when they hear the buzzer or see the light. The animals quickly learn to fear the stimulus even in the absence of a shock. Then researchers destroy small portions of the rats' brains...
...journey begins when a rat (we'll get to humans later) feels the stress, in this case an electric shock. The rat's senses immediately send a message to the central portion of its brain, where the stimulus activates two neural pathways. One of these pathways is a relatively long, circuitous route through the cortex, where the brain does its most elaborate and accurate processing of information. The other route is a kind of emergency shortcut that quickly reaches an almond-shaped cluster of cells called the amygdala...
...also fires up a nearby curved cluster of neurons called the hippocampus. (A 16th century anatomist named it after the Greek word for seahorse.) The job of the hippocampus is to help the brain learn and form new memories. And not just any memories. The hippocampus allows a rat to remember where it was when it got shocked and what was going on around it at the time. Such contextual learning helps the poor rodent avoid dangerous places in the future. It probably also helps it recognize what situations are likely to be relatively safe...
...Mackey, though, is definitely not a cop you've seen on TV before. In the pilot of FX's astonishing The Shield (Tuesdays, 10 p.m.), he brutalized a suspect to find a kidnapped girl, then murdered a fellow Los Angeles cop who was about to rat on him and his antigang Strike Team for corruption. By this week's season finale, he has become the most memorable, divisive and hard-to-pin-down character of the TV season--and his series, a lesson in the difference between network and cable TV making...