Weird News You Can Use | The Ever-Valuable Internet

• It turns out that a person having a heart attack is usually safer to be in an ambulance headed to a hospital than to already be a patient in a hospital, according to a study by University of North Carolina researchers. It takes longer, on average, for non-ER hospital staff to comply with hospital protocols in ordering and evaluating tests (nearly three hours, according to the study) than it does for ER (and ambulance) staff, who treat every case of cardiac symptoms as life-threatening. Overall, according to a February Wall Street Journal report, the study found the mortality rate for heart-attack victims treated in emergency rooms is 4 percent, compared to 40 percent for patients already admitted for other reasons and then suffering heart attacks. [Wall Street Journal, 2-3-2015]

• In January, "Captain Mercedes," a registered user of the Reddit.com social media site, announced he had compiled a data file cataloguing every bowel movement he had in 2014 and was offering the file to other users to design hypotheses and visual representations of the data in ways that might improve his relationship with his alimentary canal. According to the data-analysis website FiveThirtyEight.com, the "researcher" used the standard "Bristol stool scale" (seven categories of excreta, by shape and consistency) "and produced interesting hypotheses in the ensuing Reddit conversation." [FiveThirtyEight.com, 1-25-2015] [Reddit.com/user/captainmercedes]

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