Word: react
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...current Scientific American, Dr. Walter describes his new, more sophisticated pets. One type is designed, as before, so that when it sees a light, it scurries toward it in search of electric food. In addition, it can also hear a whistle, but at first it does not react to the sound. The whistle, however, is "remembered" in the form of long-lasting oscillations in the new eight-tube brain. When the creature hears a whistle just before it sees a light, the two stimuli are blended and remembered together. After this has happened enough times, these combined memory oscillations acquire...
...from a harmless whistle, or rushes forward eagerly for food that is not there. And this is not the worst. Dr. Walter has figured out a brain with built-in makings of madness. So fitted, his creatures have two "learning circuits" instead of one; they can be trained to react in two different ways to the same stimulus. A whistle, for instance, can come to mean both food (go forward) and an obstacle (draw back). So, when they hear a whistle, the turtles cower in helpless indecision, like certain human neurotics whose emotional circuits are tangled...
...riposte, Columnist Georges Ravon of the conservative Le Figaro raised his brows and drily observed: "It is very curious . . . that the American warmongers' bombs should be the only ones that react on our umbrellas. The peacemongers of the Little Father of the Peoples can experiment with their atomic weapons without L'Humanité noticing the slightest disturbance...
...relied on U.P.'s service and was therefore a foreign-bossed enterprise. In a recent chat with Reuters' Buenos Aires chief, Perón reportedly accused the U.S. agencies of "spying" and sending out false reports, then added darkly that "the people and the publishers" would react against them...
Dropping the Pilot. When military soothsayers try to look into the future, they confess to considerable bewilderment. None can now predict how the new weapons will react upon one another and upon older weapons. Another unknown quantity is their cost, which is sure to be high. But many advantages are gained by dispensing with the human crewmen, who need space, visibility, heating and cooling, oxygen and pressurizing apparatus. And the crew of the modern bomber is an expensive item itself; it takes money and time to train its members...