"Frank" wrote in message
...
Just as I walked into my family room a couple of winters ago, I heard
a snap trap go off in the adjacent utility room.

Getting trap and mouse, I decided to flush him rather than open the
door to the cold.

He splashed into the bowl and revived, desperately trying to escape,
so I flushed him.

He now resides in my septic system with a diet of stink bugs


I wonder how long a mouse can survive? I had one in a trap in a brown
paper bag once in the morning and assumed it was dead, but was running
late for work and so decided to deal with it after work... When I got
home, the trap was empty.

A little off topic, but apropos to the revival of the mouse but
regarding humans:

"What happens when we die - wouldn't we all like to know? We can't bring
people back from the dead to tell us but in some cases, we almost can.
Resuscitation medicine is now sometimes capable of reviving people after
their hearts have stopped beating and their brains have flat lined."

"[Dr. Sam Parnia:] So today when we define someone as being dead, we
look at those three criteria - no heartbeat, no respirations, and we
check the pupils of the eye for a reflex that when it's absent, it tells
us that the brain stem and the brain is no longer functioning. The
person is motionless - and they're dead, and we define them as dead.

However, what we've now discovered - in the past decade or so - is that
actually, it's only after a person dies. So in other words, when someone
has actually reached that point and they've become a corpse, that the
cells inside the body start to undergo their own process of death, and
that the period in which the cells die is variable depending on the
organs, but it certainly goes on to hours of time.

So for instance, brain cells will die at about eight hours; again, there
is some variation, but around eight hours after a person has died. And
therefore, our work in resuscitation science is to try to study the
processes that are going on in a person after they've died, but before
they've reached the point of complete, irreversible and irretrievable
cell damage such that no matter what we do, we can't bring them back.

And if we manage to restore oxygen and nutrients back to those cells
before they've reached that point, we are able to successfully bring
someone back to life. And that's why today, with numerous advances that
have taken place in the field of resuscitation science, we have managed
to push back that boundary to well beyond the 10-, 20-minute time frame
that had been perceived in the past, into many hours of death."

http://www.npr.org/templates/transcr...ryId=172495667


'With today's medicine, we can bring people back to life up to one,
maybe two hours, sometimes even longer, after their heart stopped
beating and they have thus died by circulatory failure. In the future,
we will likely get better at reversing death.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/ar...urs-death.html


"He [Sam Parnia] specializes in people who survive cardiac arrest.
Eighty to 90 percent of these patients do not have stories of bright
lights, tunnels, out-of-body experiences and luminous beings."
http://www.npr.org/2013/02/21/172495...-erasing-death