Word: bracken
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Essentially docile, bats play a vital role in maintaining ecological balance. For one thing, they protect crops from marauding insects. The 20 million Mexican free-tailed bats that roost in Bracken Cave near San Antonio, Texas, from spring to fall consume 250 tons of insects every night as they swarm to altitudes of 10,000 ft. Farmers are not the only ones who benefit. A single little brown bat can speedily clear a suburban backyard of pesky mosquitoes, lapping up 600 bugs an hour...
...about the kind of naif Capra adored and Sturges affectionately satirized. His name is Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins) and he's plucked out of the mailroom and made president of Hudsucker Industries when its founder (Charles Durning) commits spectacular suicide. You can imagine either Jimmy Stewart or Eddie Bracken in the part, but Robbins has a tricky modernist charm all his own. And you can just as easily imagine Edward Arnold as the evil genius of the board of directors, Sidney J. Mussburger, although Paul Newman brings a sprightly spite to the role...
...this cascade of events could be interrupted, researchers reasoned, then further paralysis might be prevented. In 1990 Michael Bracken of Yale University and his colleagues showed that large doses of an inexpensive steroid, methylprednisolone, could do the job. Apparently, the drug attaches itself to the oxygen free radicals, preventing them from attacking vulnerable tissue. Bracken's study showed that if administered within eight hours of the accident, methylprednisolone could cut the amount of secondary damage in half, sometimes making the difference between the patient's being able to walk...
...drug, which was quickly administered to Byrd, has become a standard treatment for spinal-cord injuries in the U.S., and health authorities are studying proposals that would allow paramedics to inject the steroid at the scene of an accident. Just as important, says Bracken, methylprednisolone has erased the notion that these injuries are hopeless: "It's opened the door to many other studies that may lead to better recovery." Several groups are testing substances that provide the benefits of methylprednisolone without the side effects, which include depressing the immune system...
...cream shop and a doughnut shop are verydifferent things," Bracken said...