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Scientific Method / Science & Exploration

Weird Science endorses retail therapy, but only with credit cards

Don't bother with having a pulse, don't strain yourself while sitting on the …

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.

A starfish without star power gets demoted: The distinguishing feature of starfish, for most people, is the arms that gave them their name and distinguish them from other echinoderms. So when scientists found a disk-shaped echinoderm, Xyloplax, that didn't fit in with any of the others, they tentatively gave it its own class, a pretty high-level phylogenetic designation (for example, all mammals are part of a single class). Now, molecular biology has gone and spoiled all the fun, showing that Xyloplax is a starfish that remains trapped in its adolescence, never to grow arms. This apparently may be an adaptation to the fact that Xyloplax lets its offspring grow up to the juvenile stage internally in specialized chambers. Which also seems a bit weird for a starfish, to be honest.

Giant ants crossed the Arctic: And when we say giant, we mean hummingbird sized. "This is, to our knowledge, the first known formiciine of gigantic size in the Western Hemisphere and the first reported cross-Arctic dispersal by a thermophilic insect group," say the authors. As a resident of the Western Hemisphere, I'm hopeful that it will be the last. Apparently, species like this originated in Europe, but made their way to the other hemisphere through a combination of land bridges that no longer exist and periods of the Eocene called "hyperthermals," which raised temperatures enough to make the Arctic tolerable.

Things not to do if you've got an aneurysm: If you've got an intracranial aneurysm (a bloated bit of blood vessel), the last thing you want to do is see it burst. So, some doctors decided they needed to identify the activities that were pursued by victims shortly before the rupture hit. And man, I want to know how they came up with their survey options, which include things like nose-blowing and straining for defecation. In relative terms, being startled and having sex carried the greatest risk but, on a population level, those apparently aren't common enough to overcome coffee drinking, which had a much lower relative risk but occurred frequently enough that it was the biggest problem.

Autism on the brain: This is a pretty weird result, although I don't entirely trust the interpretation. Males are more commonly afflicted with autism, so a team of researchers decided to test...well, something. But the test involved looking for autistic traits among transgender individuals. They found that female-to-male transexuals tended to have more of them than the male-to-females. Which makes sense from some perspectives, but not really in terms of developmental neurobiology. Meanwhile, a search of California birth records reveals that children born in the winter months are more likely to develop autism. Fortunately, these authors don't seem to go to extremes to try to interpret some odd data.

A little reminder always helps: Lots of politicians manage to evade difficult questions by answering different but closely related ones. And, provided that the questions that do get answered aren't blatantly unrelated, the person dodging the question can usually get away with it. But there was one way to catch this: simply displaying the question on screen doubled the chances that viewers would pick up on the dodge.

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