Las Vegas is a good restaurant town. It offers respectable culinary and ethnic diversity, served dependably. Hotel dining in Las Vegas is relatively homogeneous in style and cuisine, while proprietary restaurants try hard to be different. The restaurant business in Las Vegas is as much a psychological as a culinary art. In Las Vegas you can have the same meal in an astounding variety of environments for an unbelievable range of prices. Left to its own devices, Las Vegas would be a meat and potatoes town. Owing to the expectations of its many visitors, however, Las Vegas restaurants make things extra special. There are dozens of designer restaurants, gourmet rooms as they are known locally, where the pampered and the curious can pretend they are dining in an exclusive French or Continental restaurant while enjoying the food they like most: meat and potatoes. There are two kinds of restaurants in Las Vegas: restaurants which are an integral part of a hotel/casino operation, and restaurants which must make it entirely on the merits of their food. Gourmet rooms in the hotels are usually associated with the casinos. Their mission is to pamper customers who are giving the house a lot of gambling action. At any given time, most of the folks in a hotel gourmet room are dining as guests of the casino. If you are paying customers in the same restaurant, the astronomical prices you are charged help subsidize the feeding of all these complimentary guests. Every time you buy a meal in a gourmet room, you are helping to pay the tab of the strangers sitting at the next table. This is not to say the gourmet rooms do not serve excellent food. On the contrary, some of the best chefs in the country cook for hotel/casino gourmet rooms. The bottom line, however, if you are a paying guest, is that you are taking up space intended for high rollers, and the house is going to charge you a lot of rent. Restaurants independent of casinos work at a considerable disadvantage. First, they do not have a captive audience of gamblers. Second, their operation is not subsidized by gaming, and third, they are not located where you will just stumble upon them. Finally, they not only compete with the casino gourmet rooms, but also go head-to-head with the numerous buffets and bulk-loading meal deals which casinos offer as loss-leaders to attract the less affluent gambler.

      A new study finds that the concave-eared torrent frog that uses ultrasonic communication can tune its ears like a radio dial to block out lower pitched background noise. 18 This is contrary to everything that we knew about the frog’s auditory system.

      Earlier this year, the researchers reported that male torrent frogs can localize sound with unusual accuracy to find females during ultrasonic mating duets. 19 This surprised the team, because in all other frogs eardrums always respond the same way to a sound stimulus. 

     Further examination revealed that the frogs were actively opening and closing their eustachian tubes, two narrow channels that connect the mouth cavity to the left and right ear. 20 In practice, shifting to high-frequency hearing could help the frogs pick out mating calls during a storm, when the low-pitched noises of plunking raindrops, booming thunder, and rushing water dominate. 21

   We've all had nights when we lie awake in bed, unable to quiet our racing thoughts. There are plenty of reasons why sleep may be evading you—maybe you had caffeine too late in the afternoon, 21 , or you've been staring at your laptop screen for hours and haven't given yourself time to relax before bed. These are things to keep in mind for improving future nights of sleep. But what if you've done everything "right" leading up to bedtime, and you still find yourself 22 and turning? 

   It's very common for people to report being physically tired, but not being able to shut their mind off, especially if they're very worried about something. Worries keep people awake, and they don't have to be 23 worries. It could also be something positive you're planning, like a trip or a big event with a lot of things you have to remember. Spending time during the day or earlier in the evening to sit and 24 those concerns may help, but if it's too late for that, grab a notebook and try physically writing them down in a list for the next day. A recent study found that writing out a to-do list of future tasks helped people fall asleep nine minutes faster than people who wrote about tasks they'd already 25 that day. Researchers think the act of getting them down on paper helps clear the mind and stop rumination, at least temporarily.