Blow to head? Drink up!: You could probably figure out the topic despite the medicalese in the title: "Positive Serum Ethanol Level and Mortality in Moderate to Severe Traumatic Brain Injury." The study is a retrospective one, based on identifying a set of patients in trauma centers who had been diagnosed with severe brain injuries. Not surprisingly, a number of them had been drinking. The surprise was that the folks with alcohol in the bloodstream had a better survival rate than those who hadn't had a drink, even after correcting for some potential confounding factors. As always, further studies are suggested before we start dispensing vodka shots in the ER.

Balancing the checkbook as a diagnostic tool: Here's another potential medical tool, this one diagnostic. Many elderly adults suffer from mild cognitive impairment, but only some of them progress to full-blown dementia. A year-long longitudinal study suggests a potential diagnostic indicator: basic financial competence. Anyone suffering from mild impairment wound up performing below controls in a test called the Financial Capacity Instrument, but those who were diagnosed as suffering from dementia at the end of the year did much worse, and had problems with financial concepts, cash transactions, bank statement management, and bill payment.

The mythos of poor purchase decisions: Apparently, we mythologize the items we buy in order to make ourselves feel better about things that might otherwise seem like character flaws. That's the conclusion of some researchers that checked in with owners of an item that might otherwise be pretty hard to justify: the Hummer H2, which represents conspicuous consumption and environmental rapaciousness at a time where both of those seem badly off-key. The paper's authors even point out there's a website called fuh2.com, dedicated to photos of people giving the vehicle the finger.

So, how do H2 owners live with themselves? Quite easily, it turns out, as they latch onto the American mythology of a rugged frontier, and decide that their Hummer purchase is a defense of that. In fact, they revel in feeling under siege, and view themselves as "moral protagonists," according to the authors, who go on to write, "consumers use this mythic structure to transform their ideological beliefs into dramatic narratives of identity."

Our era just isn't what it used to be: In fact, it's quite a bit bigger, 800,000 years bigger, to be exact. We're living in the Quaternary portion of the Cenezoic, which had been given a start date of 1.8 million years ago. Unfortunately, that didn't seem to line up with any major geological or biological event, leaving it seeming a bit arbitrary and difficult to pin down. Now, the International Union of Geological Sciences has decided to shift it to 2.58 million years ago, to correspond roughly with the emergence of humans on the planet. To an extent, all this really indicates is that the natural world doesn't fit nicely into binary categories, leaving humans struggling to put labels on it (parallels with the status of Pluto should be obvious).

You can forget words, but not the language: Children learn languages much more readily than adults, but if contact with the language is lost, knowledge will completely fade. But it turns out the capacity to recognize it won't. Hindi and Zulu have some basic phonetic components that don't appear in English, making it difficult for English speakers to recognize some words. Researchers tested some people in the UK that had contact with these languages when young, but hadn't seen it in so long, they flunked basic vocabulary tests. It turns out they could still pick up the phonetic differences that their peers would miss.