Word: rat
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...general, science has a hard time pinning down emotions because they are by nature so slippery and subjective. You can't ask a rat if it's anxious or depressed. Even most people are as clueless about why they have certain feelings as they are about how their lungs work. But fear is the one aspect of anxiety that's easy to recognize. Rats freeze in place. Humans break out in a cold sweat. Heartbeats race, and blood pressure rises. That gives scientists something they can control and measure. "You can bring on a sensory stimulus that makes an animal...
...guards injected Abu Harith's arm with something that hurt; he still has a lump there. He was driven back to Baghdad and dumped near his home. When he fled to the Kurdish-controlled north, his suspicions were confirmed: he had been given thallium, a heavy metal used in rat poison that kills slowly through internal bleeding. Kurdish officials got him to Turkey, where he received medical attention...
What's truly novel about this project is the way the rat controllers issue their instructions. By tapping a keyboard, they send signals via radio waves to electrodes implanted in the animal's brain: a mild jolt to neurons that sense the right whiskers means "turn right"; a zap to the left-whisker neurons means "go left." The surprise was how easy this was to do. Neurophysiologists have long dreamed of building artificial limbs with tactile feedback that would be sufficiently sensitive to tell a user when a hand is grasping a barbell tightly enough to keep it from falling...
...want that red Chevy and a future for your kids, you must be willing to carefully negotiate the rat mazes that lie before you. Zaw Win Htut has played guitar with the son of pro-democracy dissident Aung San Suu Kyi and has performed for the children of former dictator Ne Win, who were arrested in March on charges of plotting a coup against the current leadership. His family background has worked in his favor. His mother was a professional singer of traditional folk music. His grandfather, at the behest of General Aung San, Suu Kyi's father...
...Rat problem? Lord, no! Most of the time the rats get eaten by the snakes within a few days...