Word: reflexive
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...disease that kills at least 25,000 infants every year (among them: Patrick Bouvier Kennedy) and the heart attacks that are fatal to 500,000 adult Americans seem poles apart as subjects for medical research. But doctors half the world away from each other have just implicated the same reflex as a possible cause of both killers: a primitive response apparently built into the human body to protect it against asphyxiation...
...seven physicians (six Americans, one Malaysian) working on hyaline membrane disease at Singapore's Kandang Kerbau Hospital, all found themselves reaching back to studies of ducks and seals-experiments that were in some cases nearly a century old. When those aquatic creatures swim below the surface, a "dive" reflex slows their heartbeats and contracts their peripheral arteries, thus concentrating the available oxygenated blood in the heart and brain. Most of the body's tissues then switch from an oxygen-burning system to one in which nutrients are "burned" without oxygen...
Nothing Sacred. The big boost for big-beat music has come, amazingly enough, from the adult world. Where knock-the-rock was once the conditioned reflex of the older generation ("Would you want your daughter to marry a Rolling Stone?"), a surprisingly large segment of 20-to-40-year-olds are now facing up to the music and, what is more, liking it. Mostly, the appeal is its relentless beat. It is perhaps the most kinetic sound since the tom-tom or the jungle drum. It may seem monotonous to the musicologist, too loud to the sensitive...
Defenders of the Harvard Department point out that, in spite of these results, the Department as a whole was rated first in the country by the same poll. But this is often explained in part by a kneejerk reflex to the word "Harvard"; about 70 per cent of Harvard's departments were top-rated in a more general poll some years ago. Also, since until recently Harvard produced more Ph.D.'s than any other university, many respondents may merely have been supporting their alma mater...
...contributors to this issue--the first Review since last May--attack the problems of "The American City" like so many strangers caught in a revolving door. In their premises, their lines of reasoning, and their conclusions, these experts have little in common except the reflex association of "city" with "problem...