Credit cards as therapy for feeling like a dweeb: Retail therapy is apparently a real thing if you're feeling worthless. But demonstrating that involved a bit of experimental methodology that seems a bit cruel. After being given a test that they were told typically reflects academic achievement, "[p]articipants were randomly assigned performance feedback that was either threatening or nonthreatening to their self-worth." After messing with their heads, the researchers let the participants buy products with different payment options—those with the depressing results picked expensive ones and preferred using a credit card. "Paying with credit allows threatened individuals the compensatory benefits of high-status goods divorced from the immediate psychological cost of payment," conclude the authors.
Having a pulse? It's overrated: There are a lot of cases in which an individual has brief periods of symptoms of death before being revived. But a cardiac arrest patient recently experienced one that was decidedly not brief: 96 minutes without a pulse. During the hour and a half, bystanders and paramedics performed CPR and a dozen shocks with a defibrillator, all without restoring a pulse. But the responders were tracking carbon dioxide output from the lungs, which indicated that something was happening internally, so they kept going. Eventually, a heartbeat returned, and the individual has apparently made a full neurological recovery.
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