Last year, more than 300,000 people went into sudden cardiac arrest, during which their heart stops and doesn’t start again without CPR or medical treatment. That is, they died — if just for a few minutes. The survival rate — or, revival rate — is bleak: According to the American Heart Association, only...
For most of us, the eight hours of the day we spend at the office are not our own. They belong to the entity that pays our rent, provides our health care and gives us a reason to go on vacation. It can get existentially exhausting to...
In 2008, the late multimillionaire and creator of Maxim magazine, Felix Dennis, told a reporter from The Times of London that he had once killed a man by pushing him off a cliff in Connecticut. Committing the murder, “Weren’t ’ard,” the Brit boasted in his West London...
While the first use of “boobs” in reference to female anatomy occurred in 1929, the mass mocking of their male equivalent is a quintessentially 21st-century obsession — one that can be traced back to a particular episode of Seinfeld. In the Season Six classic “The Doorman,” which first aired...
The idea that you need an average of eight hours of sleep each night is for most of us so ingrained that it might as well be embroidered on the insides of our eyelids. But it hasn’t always been this way. Most of our ancestors, in fact,...
Last week a first-time Tinder date postponed me in favor of getting stoned . “Hey my friend has just turned up with some weed, I think therefore it’s unlikely I’m going to make it to the pub later,” she wrote. I’ll be honest: it’s not the most...
When a relationship ends, people tend to do one of two things. The first is to purge — to scorch the ground upon which your roots had grown. This part of your life is now over, and nothing can be gained from looking back on it. The second is...
We live in an age in which people willingly lube up homemade electrodes, strap them to their heads, and then crank up some voltage to zap their brains. It’s called transcranial direct-current stimulation, or tDCS, and it is very much a thing — there’s some slick consumer products you...
Once upon a time, the internet was made up of awkward personal blogs and weird webpages about string theory. Then, for a while, it was mostly made up of cats (plus some quizzes). But in the past year or so, the internet has entered a new phase:...
World-class athletes are known for their willingness to embrace extreme training regimens and unorthodox treatments in their pursuits of physical excellence — treatments that often look a little outlandish to the mere mortals who watch from the stands. During the London Olympics, beach volleyball players and others drew notice...
We live in a post-tryptophan world. The idea that turkey makes you sleepy because it has a special chemical in it has been a standard part of Thanksgiving small talk since time immemorial. Plus, having a scientific term on hand let us pretend there was a pseudo-medical...
Patrick Nerrant has the “virus for tanks.” He means, of course, a “bug” for collecting tanks — his French interpretation of an old American idiom. Luckily for him, Normandy, France, where he lives and works, is a good place for a World War II tanks collector to be. Nerrant’s...
