Mis-clock-ceptions
clock | November 2, 2008If you live in (most places in) the United States as well as many other countries, you have reset your clocks back by one hour last night (or last week). How will that affect you and other people?
One possibility is that you are less likely to suffer a heart attack tomorrow morning than on any other Monday of the year. Why? Let me try to explain in as simple way as possible (hoping that oversimplification will not lead to intolerable degrees of inaccuracy).
Almost all biochemical, physiological and behavioral parameters in almost all (at least multicellular) organisms display diurnal (daily…
clock | May 3, 2008Believe me, I love the word "circadian". It is a really cool word, invented by Franz Halberg in the late 1950s, out of 'circa' (Latin - "about") and diem ("a day"), to denote daily rhythms in biochemistry, physiology and behavior generated by the internal, endogenous biological clocks within living organisms.
It's been a while since the last time I found someone mistaking the word for 'cicada' which is a really cool insect. 'Circadian' has become quite common term in the media and, these days increasingly, in popular culture. Names of some bands contain the word. A few blogs' names…
clock | August 4, 2007An oldie but goodie (June 12, 2005) debunking one of the rare Creationist claims that encroaches onto my territory.
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I got homework to do. PZ Myers alerted me to an incredible argument that the existence of circadian rhythms denies evolution!
bryanm, the proprietor of the aptly-named The Narrow blog, describes himself as "...nobody who wants to tell everybody that there is somebody who can save anybody." In other words he is a know-nothing who keeps bothering everybody trying to push his idea that there is this non-existent being who…
clock | May 26, 2007Back in the late 1990s, when people first started using various differential screens, etc. looking for elusive "genes for sleep", I wrote in my written prelims (and reprinted it on my blog several years later):
Now the sleep researchers are jumping on the bandwagon of molecular techniques. They are screening for differences in gene expression between sleeping and awake humans (or rats or mice), searching quite openly for the "genes for sleep". Every time they "fish out" a gene, it turns out to be Protein kinase A, a dopamine receptor, or something similar with a general function in the brain…
clock | May 1, 2007How does one fisk a medical quackery when there is no attempt whatsoever to explain what it is all about - not even a string of New-Age mumbo-jumbo, nonsensical, vaguely English-sounding words. All it says is: Buy The Book. Yeah, right...
Related: Circadian Quackery
clock | February 28, 2007This is a story about two mindsets - one scientific, one not - both concerned with the same idea but doing something very different with it. Interestingly, both arrived in my e-mail inbox on the same day, but this post had to wait until I got out of bed and started feeling a little bit better.
First, just a little bit of background:
Circadian oscillations are incredibly robust, i.e., resistant to perturbations and random noise from the environment. Ricardo Azevedo has described one model that accounts for such robustness in his two-part post here and here and others have used other methods…
clock | February 22, 2007OK, it is a premise of a new SF novel. The book description does not look too promising, though I guess I should read it for professional reasons (I put it on my amazon wish-list for now):
Last call from Earth -Stage I, Biological Survival (also available for download on Lulu.com).
This is what Newswire says about it:
Successful Soul Transplant Operation Featured in New Sci-Fi Book 'Last call from Earth'
Soul transplant operation is the last recourse for human survival in new trilogy, Last call from Earth - People affected with CRDS loose their DNA controls and become repugnant: The body…
clock | January 27, 2007Nicole Eugene recently defended her Masters Thesis called Potent Sleep: The Cultural Politics of Sleep (PDF) on a topic that I find fascinating:
Why is sleep, a moment that is physiologically full and mentally boundless, thought to be a moment of absence and powerlessness? Where did this devalued notion of sleep come from and how can we situate sleep studies within a continuation of a historical processes and economic infuences? In other words, how does sleep effect and exist within systems of power? To answer these questions I turn to a range of scholarship and theoretical studies to examine…
clock | December 20, 2006For science bloggers, a study older than a week is often too old to blog about. For scientists, last five years of literature are the most relevant (and many grad students, unfortunately, never read the older stuff). I thought that for journalists, 24-cycle was everything. Apparently not.
Northwest Explorer's 'Senior Life' columnist is having a Senior Moment, I guess. In this article about Seasonal Affective Disorder, he mentions a study that is several years old and, what's worse, has been shown to be wrong. No, the mammalian circadian clock CANNOT be reset by shining a light at the…
clock | December 13, 2006Now behind the Wall, but plenty of excerpts available in this March 26, 2005 post...
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Ha! The New York Times has this neat article, that is almost half as good as my early (and so far most frequently linked) post "Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sleep". Here are some excerpts, go read the rest:
The Crow of the Early Bird
THERE was a time when to project an image of industriousness and responsibility, all a person had to do was wake at the crack of dawn. But in a culture obsessed with status--in which every…
clock | November 22, 2006Well, it's Thanksgiving tomorrow night so it's time to republish this post from last year, just in time for the ageless debate: does eating turkey meat make you sleepy? Some people say Yes, some people say No, and the debate can escalate into a big fight. The truth is - we do not know.
But for this hypothesis to be true, several things need to happen. In this post I look at the evidence for each of the those several things. Unfortunately, nobody has put all the elements together yet, and certainly not in a human. I am wondering...is there a simple easily-controlled experiment that…
clock | November 15, 2006An oldie but goodie (June 12, 2005) debunking one of the rare Creationist claims that encroaches onto my territory.
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I got homework to do. PZ Myers alerted me to an incredible argument that the existence of circadian rhythms denies evolution!
bryanm, the proprietor of the aptly-named The Narrow blog, describes himself as "...nobody who wants to tell everybody that there is somebody who can save anybody." In other words he is a know-nothing who keeps bothering everybody trying to push his idea that there is this non-existent being who…
clock | November 13, 2006
This post is a relatively recent (May 24, 2006) critique of a PLoS paper.
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There is a new study on PLoS - Biology that is getting some traction in the media and which caught my attention because it was supposed to be about circadian rhythms. So, I downloaded the paper and read it through to see what it is really about.
Well, it is a decent study, but, unfortunately, it has nothing to do with circadian rhythms. Many examples of tritrophic relationships involve parasitoids (usually small wasps) being attracted by plant volatiles which are…
clock | October 5, 2006Study says no video games on school nights:
According to Dr. Iman Sharif, the results were clear-cut. "On weekdays, the more they watched, the worse they did," said Dr. Sharif. Weekends were another matter, with gaming and TV watching habits showing little or no effect on academic performance, as long as the kids spent no more than four hours per day in front of the console or TV. "They could watch a lot on weekends, and it didn't seem to correlate with doing worse in school," noted Dr. Sharif.
The study was using self-reporting by kids, which has its problems, but is OK in this case, I…
clock | September 20, 2006Over 1.6 Million Americans Use Alternative Medicine For Insomnia Or Trouble Sleeping:
A recent analysis of national survey data reveals that over 1.6 million American adults use some form of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) to treat insomnia or trouble sleeping according to scientists at the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), part of the National Institutes of Health.
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Those using CAM to treat insomnia or trouble sleeping were more likely to use biologically based therapies (nearly 65 percent), such as herbal…
clock | September 11, 2006The fourth part of a four-part series on the topic, this one from April 02, 2006....
This being the National Sleep Awareness Week and on the heels of the recent study on sleep of adolescents, it is not surprising that this issue is all over the media, including blogs, these days.
I have written about it recently several times. I present some science and some opinion here and add a little more science and much more opinion here.
You can look at media coverage here and listen to an excellent podcast linked here. Some basic underlying science is covered here.
All of this targets highschoolers…
clock | September 11, 2006This is the third part of the series on the topic, from April 01, 2006...
This being the National Sleep Awareness Week and in the heels of the recent study on sleep of adolescents, it is not surprising that this issue is all over the media, including blogs, these days.
I have covered this issue a couple of times last week, e.g., here, here and here. Recently, Lance Mannion wrote an interesting post on the topic, which reminded me also of an older post by Ezra Klein in which the commenters voiced all the usual arguments heard in this debate.
There are a couple of more details that I have not…
clock | September 11, 2006
Here is the second post on the topic, from March 28, 2006. A couple of links are broken due to medieval understanding of permalinks by newspapers, but you will not miss too much, I hope....
Health Journal: Doctors probe why it's hard for many kids to get up (also Night Owls: Disorder may cause teens to sleep less):
"The parents get stigmatized as not having control over their kids when they can't get them to school in time," says James Wyatt, co-director of the sleep-disorders center at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago who is conducting research looking for ways to better diagnose…
clock | September 11, 2006
Earlier this year, during the National Sleep Awareness Week, I wrote a series of posts about the changes in sleep schedules in adolescents. Over the next 3-4 hours, I will repost them all, starting with this one from March 26, 2006. Also check my more recent posts on the subject here and here...
I am glad to see that there is more and more interest in and awareness of sleep research. Just watch Sanjay Gupta on CNN or listen to the recent segment on Weekend America on NPR.
At the same time, I am often alarmed at the levels of ignorance still rampant in the general population, and even more…