Free Republic

A good night's sleep may help you lose weight, a study has suggested. The study of US nurses found those who slept longest were slimmer than those who managed the least shut-eye. Scientists say lack of sleep affects hormone levels that can trigger hunger and slow down your metabolism. Sleep specialist Dr Arn Eliasson said BMI (body mass index) is linked to length and quality of sleep in a surprisingly consistent fashion. Dr Eliasson, of the Integrative Cardiac Health Project at Walter Reed Army Medical Centre, Washington DC, said: "When we analysed our data by splitting our subjects into 'short...

More than 25 of the CIA's war-on-terror prisoners were subjected to sleep deprivation for as long as 11 days at a time during the administration of former president George Bush. At one stage during the war on terror, the Central Intelligence Agency was allowed to keep prisoners awake for as long as 11 days, citing memoranda made public by the Justice department last month. The limit was later reduced to just over a week, the report stated. Sleep deprivation was one of the most important elements in the CIA's interrogation programme, seen as more effective than more violent techniques used...

As President Obama prepared last month to release secret memos on the CIA's use of severe interrogation methods, the White House fielded a flurry of last-minute appeals. One came from former CIA Director Michael V. Hayden, who expressed disbelief that the administration was prepared to expose methods it might later decide it needed. "Are you telling me that under all conditions of threat, you will never interfere with the sleep cycle of a detainee?" Hayden asked a top White House official, according to sources familiar with the exchange. From the beginning, sleep deprivation had been one of the most important...

Why bother to wake up when there are few jobs and when a wage earner is taxed so heavily to support a welfare state? Look at France, where people with no need to rouse themselves sleep longer than any other group of people in the industrialized world. David Gauthier-Villars reports in the Wall Street Journal: When he won the presidential election two years ago, Nicolas Sarkozy urged the French to get up early and work more to earn more. A study released Monday suggests they missed the wake-up call. France is the industrialized country where people spend the longest periods...

The weekend looms, and that means a morning lie-in for many - though with the clocks going forward there'll be an hour's less shut-eye on Sunday morning. But, says Sean Coughlan, there's much more to getting a really good kip than just shutting your eyes. Britons are the worst sleepers in Europe, claimed a survey last week, depicting a nation starved of sleep and facing a daily battle against red-eyed exhaustion. Notice in boarding house If it's a good sleep you want, there are rules One in five of the population sleeps for fewer than seven hours a night, according...

[video] You’re the press secretary for the most powerful man on the planet. You’re in the middle of the greatest financial crisis in generations. Terrorists threaten the future of the world. Under the circumstances, people hang on your every word. Unless you’re Robert Gibbs, the president’s press secretary. He smirks, he snarls, he smears, but even that isn’t enough to keep reporters from falling into deathlike trances during his daily press briefings. One member of the White House press corps actually fell asleep yesterday. You can see her over the left shoulder of the reporter asking the question in this...

A good night's sleep may be just what your arteries need. So finds a new five-year study in which middle-aged people who had an extra hour of sleep each night were less likely to have artery-stiffening calcium deposits. Lauderdale and her colleagues have been following a group of young adults for years, studying their heart arteries from a number of angles. The latest report linked the sleeping habits of 495 participants, ages 35 to 47, with the incidence of artery calcification, measured by CT scans. Calcium deposits can make the coronary arteries less flexible and ultimately lead to heart disease....

President-elect Barack Obama hasn't named a secretary of state yet and the Obama family hasn't decided which breed of dog will get to romp on the White House lawn. But at the Shifman Mattress Co. in Newark's Ironbound section, there's hope that the new president will follow in the footsteps of his predecessors and choose one of their hand-tufted luxury mattresses to lay his head on. Both the Kennedy and Clinton administrations purchased Shifman mattresses for the White House, so this isn't just wishful thinking, said company president Bill Hammer. The purchases may date back even further, to the Teddy...

During slumber, our brain engages in data analysis, from strengthening memories to solving problems ...Until the mid-1950s, scientists generally assumed that the brain was shut down while we snoozed. Although German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus had evidence in 1885 that sleep protects simple memories from decay, for decades researchers attributed the effect to a passive protection against interference. We forget things, they argued, because all the new information coming in pushes out the existing memories. But because there is nothing coming in while we get shut-eye, we simply do not forget as much. Then, in 1953, the late physiologists Eugene Aserinsky...

A refreshing night's sleep may be the best way to boost memory, a study suggests. Researchers found sleep appears to have a dramatic impact on the way the brain functions the next day. It appears to strengthen connections between nerve cells in the brain - a process key to both learning and memory. The University of Geneva study was presented to a Federation of European Neuroscience Societies conference. The researchers studied a group of volunteers who were taught a new skill or shown images they would later have to remember. The skill tasks included trying to follow a moving dot...

MUMBAI: An Air India Jaipur-Mumbai flight flew well past its destination with both its pilots fatigued and fast asleep in the cockpit. When the pilots were finally woken up by anxious Mumbai air traffic controllers, the plane was about half way to Goa. ( Watch ) This nap in the sky took place about a fortnight ago on the domestic leg of a Dubai-Jaipur-Mumbai flight — IC 612 — which had about 100 passengers on board. "The plane took off from Dubai at 1.35am IST and then from Jaipur at 7am. After operating an overnight flight, fatigue levels peak, and...

This article goes over sleep physiology, stages of sleep and napping. I was unable to copy and paste a section of the article but the link above should help. The article is an excellent, short summary of the issues.

ScienceDaily (Jun. 11, 2008) — A cognitive behavioral intervention for insomnia delivered via the Internet can significantly improve insomnia in adults, according to a research abstract that will be presented on June 11 at SLEEP 2008, the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies (APSS). The study, authored by Lee Ritterband, PhD, of the University of Virginia, focused on 44 participants (mostly female) with an average age of 45 years. The participants were randomly selected to either the cognitive behavioral intervention for insomnia via the Internet or a wait list control. Measures of sleep, mood, cost, and cognitive...

House prices force Americans to sleep in cars By Catherine Elsworth in Los Angeles Last Updated: 12:58AM BST 22/05/2008 Increasing numbers of women and elderly people are taking advantage of a scheme in one of America's wealthiest cities that enables the homeless to sleep safely in their cars at night. Organisers of the programme say they are seeing ever more unlikely people living out of their cars in the exclusive beachfront city of Santa Barbara, where the average house costs more than $1 million(£500,000). Many hold down part-time jobs while bedding down for the night in their vehicles. Barbara Harvey,...

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. -- A 3-year-old Florida boy with a rare condition has not slept in three years. Doctors said Rhett Lamb of St. Petersburg apparently has a condition called chiari malformation that puts pressure on his brain. Click here to find out more! Rhett has never taken a nap or gone to sleep at night, forcing his parents to keep watch day and night. "(My husband) has the day shift and I kind of have the afternoon shift," mother Shannon Lamb said. "We share the night shift because no one can sleep in the house when he is up...

ATLANTA - People who sleep fewer than six hours a night — or more than nine — are more likely to be obese, according to a new government study that is one of the largest to show a link between irregular sleep and big bellies. The study also linked light sleepers to higher smoking rates, less physical activity and more alcohol use. The research adds weight to a stream of studies that have found obesity and other health problems in those who don't get proper shuteye, said Dr. Ron Kramer, a Colorado physician and a spokesman for the American Academy...

Enlarge ImageScience of sleep. The scientists used fluorescent proteins--green and red in these images--to determine whether E. coli bacteria were active.Credit: Gefen et al., PNAS 105 (22 April 2008) Most antibiotics kill only microbes that are growing and multiplying, leaving untouched a select few that are hibernating. A new study suggests that a dose of the right nutrients can awaken these bacteria for just long enough to kill them with antibiotics. If the strategy works in humans, it might provide a more effective way to treat persistent diseases such as tuberculosis and urinary-tract infections. During infections, bacteria may slow...

PARIS (AFP) - An extra hour between the sheets at night might be the key to shedding excess weight and fighting obesity, according to recent research. "More sleep could be the ideal way of stabilising weight or slimming," said neuro-scientist Karine Spiegel, of France's INSERM, a public organisation dedicated to biological, medical and public health research. While poor eating habits and lack of exercise clearly play a role in the global rise of obesity, recent data indicates that lack of sleep may also be a factor, and one that is often under-estimated. Around 30 surveys carried out on wide population...

(CBS) Human beings spend on average one third of their lives asleep. We know we need to sleep but most of us have never really given a whole lot of thought to why. Why do we spend seven or eight hours a night immobile and unconscious? What really happens inside our brains and bodies while we're sleeping? We've known the purpose of our other biological drives for hundreds of years: we eat to give our bodies energy, we drink to keep hydrated, we procreate to perpetuate the species - among other things. But what is the biological purpose of sleep?...

This bunny is called Sweet Dreams and with a soft hymn called, “Pass Me Not, Oh Gentle Savior” and her pancake-nightcap goes to sleep. Revski