This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them: Deep Oesophagus — Scientists, as a group, like to think they behave in ways a little distinct from the herd. The herd, as a herd, likes to think so, too. From time to time, Feedback receives furtive […]
At least one co-author of this study stayed awake while the data for the research was being collected. Probably. The study is: “Dreaming During Scientific Papers: Effects of Added Extrinsic Material,” Richard F. Harvey, Melvin B. Schullinger, Alexis Stassinopoulos, and Erica Winkle, British Medical Journal (Clinical Research Edition), vol. 287, no. 6409, 1983, pp. 1916-1919. […]
Yuri Nakahashi, a student at Hosei University, Japan, wrote a thesis about sleeping with a cat night after night in locations chosen by the cat. IT Media News reports that the thesis is called “Creation of new sleep value in search with cats,” and has been or will be published in Information Processing Society of […]
Innovation seldom ceases in the global effort to learn better ways to get flies, and perhaps people, to get to sleep. “Sleep Induction by Mechanosensory Stimulation in Drosophila,” Arzu Ozturk-Colak, Sho Inami, Joseph R. Buchler, Patrick D. McClanahan, Andri Cruz, Christopher Fang-Yen, and Kyunghee Koh, Cell, vol. 33, no. 108462, 2020. The authors, at Thomas […]
A patient who is diagnosed as having terminal insomnia might be disposed to panic at the news. But the condition is not necessarily fatal, as one can learn by carefully reading this study: “Relationship between personality and insomnia in panic disorder patients,” Hae-Ran Na, Eun-Ho Kang, Bum-Hee Yu, Jong-Min Woo, Youl-Ri Kim, Seung-Hwan Lee, Eui-Jung […]
“To smell again, perchance to learn better” would be a poetical way to speak of this study about teaching sleeping children in Germany how to read and write better English: “How Odor Cues Help to Optimize Learning During Sleep in a Real Life-Setting,” Franziska Neumann, Vitus Oberhauser, and Jürgen Kornmeier, Scientific Reports, vol. 10, no. […]
Color Preference in the Insane, Can Consumers Recognize the Taste of their Favorite Beer?, Effect of Audience Boredom on the Power Hungry, You Never Sleep Alone, Improbable Medical Review, Extracting the Wrong Tooth, and Telephones for Animals. In episode #206, Marc Abrahams shows some unfamiliar research studies to Jean Berko Gleason, Chris Cotsapas, Maggie Lettvin, […]
It seems that a lack of sleep may prevent the brain from forgetting unimportant information. A lack of sleep may also prevent the brain from remembering important information. How can scientists make sense of this seemingly-nonsensical seeming-contradiction? Imagine you just met your child’s teacher, who is named Gwen. The name Gwen, however, is firmly associated […]
A baldness/dog/sleep/hair causal chain-of-events is the thrilling backbone to this new medical report. “Successful treatment of refractory alopecia universalis by persuading a patient not to sleep with her dog,” Takahiro Arita, Tomoko Nomiyama, Jun Asai, Norito Katoh, Allergology International, epub 2017. The authors, at Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine, Japan, report: “A 57-year-old woman who […]
Inspired by popular interpretations of a new study (see below), we offer a revision to an old poem: I think that I shall never see A thing as sleepy as a tree. A tree with drooping bits depressed, All snoozy when it’s time to rest… Andy Coglan writes, in New Scientist, about a recently published twig on a branch on the […]