Word: spider
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...highceilinged, untidy laboratory at Yale's Sheffield Scientific School, Petrunkevitch has collected members of every known spider family (there are 63). He has had there at times as many as 180 live tarantulas, whose dark, hairy backs he is fond of stroking (see cut). His 30-odd works on arachnology include a description of the internal anatomy of 92 spider species, reports on spiders' circulatory systems, psychology, sex life...
Corporal J. F. Brennan and Pfc. Stan Sill ran into the spider web. When they got home to the Anzio beachhead, they were still mad enough to write a letter to the editor - in this case, the editor of the Stars and Stripes...
...recite the Constitution--Tom Gaines for marching without the aid of his Seeing Eye dog. Jack Frost says, "Gaines is the only man in the world whose Seeing Eye dog needs a Seeing Eye dog."--Bob "Pancho" Bisbe, for his gallant, well-concealed maneuver in removing one ambidextrous spider from a friend's neck--Vern Nelson for marching all the time without his book...
Eventually Ellis discovered, from the way blood spurted from a tiny puncture, that spiders have high blood pressure. Somehow they seemed to be able to raise or lower the pressure in their legs. When Ellis bled a spider, its leg stretching became much weaker. In a report of his findings in the Biological Bulletin, he noted another curious fact: "Spiders nearly always die with their legs completely and permanently flexed...
With delicate and precise instruments, Biologist C. H. Ellis studied many kinds of spiders, including tarantulas and the poisonous black widow. Microscopic examination of their leg membranes, joints, tissues and nerves got him nowhere. But he noticed that even a dead spider leg would stretch if he squeezed it gently. He then injected liquids into spiders' legs with a superfine hypodermic and got some very satisfactory stretching. When he dehydrated spiders by keeping them for several weeks without water, they lost their stretching ability and walked with bent legs...