Word: tatting
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...tat-tat. rat-a-tat-tat. Rat-a-tat-tat. If scientists could eavesdrop on the brain of a human embryo 10, maybe 12 weeks after conception, they would hear an astonishing racket. Inside the womb, long before light first strikes the retina of the eye or the earliest dreamy images flicker through the cortex, nerve cells in the developing brain crackle with purposeful activity. Like teenagers with telephones, cells in one neighborhood of the brain are calling friends in another, and these cells are calling their friends, and they keep calling one another over and over again, "almost," says...
...system and the brain are called--are not transmitting signals in scattershot fashion. That would produce a featureless static, the sort of noise picked up by a radio tuned between stations. On the contrary, evidence is growing that the staccato bursts of electricity that form those distinctive rat-a-tat-tats arise from coordinated waves of neural activity, and that those pulsing waves, like currents shifting sand on the ocean floor, actually change the shape of the brain, carving mental circuits into patterns that over time will enable the newborn infant to perceive a father's voice, a mother...
...tat-tat. Rat-a-tat-tat. Rat-a-tat-tat. Just last week, in the U.S. alone, some 77,000 newborns began the miraculous process of wiring their brains for a lifetime of learning. If parents and policymakers don't pay attention to the conditions under which this delicate process takes place, we will all suffer the consequences--starting around the year...
...says he thinks that newsgroups are "very impersonal and people tend to be a lot ruder than they'd be in person." He was not involved in most of the flame war, but says he thinks it's pretty funny, calling it "playful tit-for-tat...
...tension, a tangled maze of roadblocks, cement barricades and metal spikes manned by hundreds of Israeli soldiers to keep militant Jews and militant Palestinians apart. Both sides have grown hard as Palestinians stab and stone the settlers and Jews shoot and vandalize their neighbors in regular tit-for-tat violence...