Tasering methed-up sheep: This seems to have received a fair bit of attention this week, but there's simply no way not to cover it. Since police officers have been required to arrest a growing number of meth heads, TASER sponsored a study to test whether their devices were safe to use. Obviously, that's not the sort of thing where you're going to want to use a human subject, so an animal model was required: sheep. The sheep were anesthetized, given meth, and then subjected to a variety of taserings. Full sized adults were fine, within the limits that they experienced various cardiac problems due to meth, but some smaller animals responded poorly to being tasered. Conclusion: if you need to taser a meth head, weigh them first.

(Hat tip to Reuters Health's Executive Editor Ivan Oransky for finding this one.)

Oxygen is overrated: All sorts of small, unicellular organisms do quite well without oxygen—some of them find it positively toxic. But we've generally assumed that the high metabolic demands experienced by multicellular organisms means that they can only tolerate limited periods of oxygen deprivation. We've assumed wrong. Deep ocean sediments are generally anoxic, but expeditions to the Mediterranean continue to pull up creatures from the phylum Loricifera. Instead of mitochondria, these creatures appear to have a derived form of the organelle called a hydrogenosome, which had previously only been seen in single-celled organisms.

Watch out for owner operators: If the ownership in question involves a surgical clinic, that is. If a doctor has ownership of a surgical center, they're apparently more likely to send patients under the knife there through self-referrals.

Tyrranosaurus leech: Well, technically, Tyrannobdella rex, but a leech nevertheless. This is a story that keeps getting more freakish as you delve in further. For starters, there's the fact that the leech was found in the inner passages of the nose of its victim. Next, "Unlike any other leech previously described, this new taxon has but a single jaw with very large teeth." DNA sequencing from the sample then tells us that there's an entire lineage of leeches that appear to have specialized in latching on to the inner cavities of mammals, and they're not especially picky about what orifice they use to get there. "This unnerving tendency to be invasive has been regarded only as a loathsome oddity and not a unifying character for a group of related organisms," the authors write about our previously innocent perspective on these creatures.

Apparently, people didn't like the Wall Streeters even before the banking crisis: There's a strong tendency to dislike materialists, it seems. The study was set up so that randomized pairs of undergrads were asked to either talk about an item they had recently purchased, or talk about a past experience. Either would seem to give the student a good chance to brag, but those who ended up talking about material items were liked less than their experience-focused peers.

Make sure your midlife-crisis-mobile has four wheels: Based on records of over 60,000 motorcycle accidents, the average age of motorcycle riders is going up. And that's a bad thing, as mortality, length of hospital stays, and severity of injuries go up dramatically as people clear 40 years old.

It's not entirely safe to keep smokers from lighting up in the ICU: This is something I wouldn't have predicted. Anyone who's watched a smoker try to quit knows how agitated they can get. Add in pain and partial consciousness, and what do you get? Apparently, a strong tendency for the smoker to pull out any tubes and catheters. Which, I'd imagine, can have a pretty severe impact on their health if not caught quickly.