Free Republic

PARIS (AP) - The French already enjoy a 35-hour work week and generous vacation. Now the health minister wants to look into whether workers should be allowed to sleep on the job.

This is a curiosity-based vanity. My impression is that the average FReeper works very hard. Probably the most common reason people deprive themselves of sleep is to get work done. I've heard some amazing stories of how little sleep soldiers have gotten in the midst of combat. What's your story? Incidentally, the longest I've ever gone without sleep was about 85 hours, with the help of a ton of coffee, Diet Coke, and Reeses Peanut Butter Cups.

Video: Senator Byrd Snoozing during Speech of Soldiers Dying in Iraq Clicky for YouTube link.Senator Robert Byrd - DEMOCRAT, WVA...

Applying a gentle electric current to the brain during sleep can significantly boost memory, researchers report. A small new study showed that half an hour of this brain stimulation improved students? performance at a verbal memory task by about 8%. The approach enhances memory by creating a form of electrical current in the brain seen in deep sleep, the researchers suggest. ... The students? various sleep stages were monitored using an electroencephalogram (EEG) machine. When the students entered a period of light sleep, Born?s team started to apply a gentle current in one-second-long pulses, every second, for about 30 minutes....

ATLANTA, GEORGIA--Going a night without sleep may cause your hippocampus to go on strike. A new study has caught this crucial memory-encoding brain region slacking off in college students the day after they've pulled an all-nighter. The study is one of the first to investigate how sleep deprivation interferes with memory mechanisms in the human brain. Neuroscientist Matthew Walker of Harvard University and his colleagues paid 10 undergraduate students to forgo a night's sleep. The next day, the students viewed a series of 30 words, and two days later--after having two nights to catch up on their sleep--the students returned...

From the day they brought her home, the D'Avellas' black-and-white mutt loathed ringing phones. At the first trill, Jay Dee would bolt from the room and howl until someone picked up. But within a few weeks, the D'Avellas began missing calls: When the phone rang, their friends later told them, someone would pick up and then the line would go dead. One evening, Aida D'Avella solved the mystery. Sitting in the family room of her Newark, N.J., home, Ms. D'Avella got up as the phone rang, but the dog beat her to it. Jay Dee ran straight to the ringing...

Flies explain mystery of sleep By Roger Highfield, Science Editor (Filed: 22/09/2006) The more we gossip, socialise and learn, the more we need to nap, scientists report today in a study that sheds new light on the mystery of sleep. Many theories have been put forward over the years to explain why we need so much sleep. Today, scientists put forward new evidence that our bodies require sleep so our brain can process what we have learned during the day. The insight is reported today in the journal Science by Dr Indrani Ganguly-Fitzgerald of the Neurosciences Institute, San Diego, California,...

SNORING is ruining the sex lives of one in four couples, a survey says. Twenty-five per cent sleep separately to avoid the racket, while half admit it affects their relationship. Seven in ten men confess to snoring, according to the Great British Snoring Survey. Four out of ten women admit they have a problem. Relationship expert Denise Knowles, from Relate, said: “People deprived of sleep suffer physically and emotionally. “Sex is the last thing you want when you’re shattered.” Marianne Davey of the British Snoring and Sleep Apnoea Association said: “Snoring can put a big strain on relationships. We get...

LOS ANGELES -- If you know nothing about Metallica, "Enter Sandman" does sound like it could be the title of a lullaby. A company called Baby Rock Records has created lullaby versions of songs by Metallica, Coldplay and Radiohead. Executive producer Valerie Aiello said her company did the lullaby tributes because they love the music of all those artists. She said they tested the CDs on babies they knew and she can vouch that one crying baby fell asleep while listening to the Coldplay disc. The Metallica, Coldplay and Radiohead versions come out Tuesday. Future editions will feature lullaby versions...

Sleep with Neanderthals? Apparently we (homo Sapiens) did By Faye Flam The Philadelphia Inquirer Though it's been 150 years since mysteriously humanlike bones first turned up in Germany's Neander Valley, the find continues to shake our collective sense of human identity. Neanderthals are humanity's closest relatives, with brains at least as big as ours, and yet we don't know whether we should include them as members of our own species. No longer does science consider them our direct ancestors but some suspect Neanderthals and modern homo Sapiens interbred during the 20,000 some-odd years we co-existed in Europe. The archaeological record...

Sharing a bed with someone could temporarily reduce your brain power - at least if you are a man - Austrian scientists suggest. When men spend the night with a bed mate their sleep is disturbed, whether they make love or not, and this impairs their mental ability the next day. The lack of sleep also increases a man's stress hormone levels. According to the New Scientist study, women who share a bed fare better because they sleep more deeply. Sleepless nights Professor Gerhard Kloesch and colleagues at the University of Vienna studied eight unmarried, childless couples in their 20s....

Study reveals that even without sex, male brain is fatigued the next morning LONDON: Men beware — sleeping with your wife can damage your brain! The warning was issued by a team of Austrian scientists whose research suggested that when men spend the night with a partner, their sleep patterns are disturbed. The research, carried out by a team led by Professor Gerhard Kloesch at the University of Vienna and presented to the Forum of European Neurosciences in Vienna, claimed that even women who share a bed had disturbed sleep, but their brain power remained undiminished. Men's mental agility, however,...

Researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School and the University of Pennsylvania found that sleep benefits an individual's ability to recall recently learned declarative memories, even when recall of these memories is challenged hours later by competing information. This finding is particularly important for individuals with mentally demanding lifestyles, such as doctors, medical residents and college students, who often do not get adequate amounts of sleep. The study appears in the July 11, 2006 issue of Current Biology. Declarative memories, or hippocampus-mediated memories, are types of memories about facts and events that can generally be put into words....

Colleges across the country are reporting a drop in SAT scores this year. I've been tutoring students in New York City for the SAT since 1989, and I have watched the numbers rise and fall. This year, though, the scores of my best students dropped about 50 points total in the math and verbal portions of the test (each on a scale of 200 to 800). Colleges and parents are wondering: Is there something wrong with the new test? Or are our children not being taught what they should know? Before 1994, the verbal section of the SAT was about...

The movement to give groggy teens a bit more shut-eye by pushing back the school start time is gaining steam. Fifty mothers gathered at a Central Middle School PTA meeting yesterday to hear how the Wilton League of Women Voters studied adolescent sleep patterns, concluded that the start of high school ought to be pushed back and then worked with the school system to change the start time from 7:15 a.m. to 8:20 a.m. without adding transportation costs to the district budget. "New research is showing that (adolescents') hormones and circadian rhythms don't allow them to go to sleep until...

Sleep at work By ELOISE KING May 16, 2006 EVER felt like sleeping on the job? Rather than crumbling into unsightly heaps on their desks, Sydney workers may soon have access to a comfortable and legitimate place to nap at their offices. Snooze: a worker tries out a pod yesterday MetroNaps Australia is this week launching its sleep pods in the foyer of the ABN AMRO building, on the corner of Phillip and Bent Sts in the city. Busy workers are invited to stop in and put up their feet for 20 minutes to relax and rejuvenate in style. Nappers'...

PAULSBORO, N.J. - It's bedtime and your toddler is having a meltdown, insisting on just one more episode of "Bob the Builder." Well, parents, now TV might help. Melanie the baby sitter, Star the puppet and Hush the goldfish are the stars of a new bedtime show on PBS KIDS Sprout. Since mid-April, the cast of "The Good Night Show" has been taping the second season in a Paulsboro studio, just outside Philadelphia. The show returns in July on KIDS Sprout, a cable and satellite network owned jointly by Comcast Corp., PBS, Sesame Workshop and HIT Entertainment. The network features...

WASHINGTON - Zolpidem tartrate, the sedative-hypnotic better known to wide-awake, stressed-out sheet kickers as Ambien, is an efficacious little helper if you ever thought you might go crazy from not sleeping. It's "Goodnight Moon" for grown-ups. You should take it only with some Charlie Rose. Now it's also become the new explanation for that which goes bump in the night: I took an Ambien, Americans are saying, and then I don't know exactly what happened.

With a tendency to stare zombie-like and run into stationary objects, a new species of impaired motorist is hitting the roads: the Ambien driver. Ambien, the nation's best-selling prescription sleeping pill, is showing up with regularity as a factor in traffic arrests, sometimes involving drivers who later say they were sleep-driving and have no memory of taking the wheel after taking the drug. In some state toxicology laboratories Ambien makes the top 10 list of drugs found in impaired drivers. Wisconsin officials identified Ambien in the bloodstreams of 187 arrested drivers from 1999 to 2004. And as a more people...

I sleep with a remote... Clicky Here To Find Your Sleep Pose