SNIPPETS..
Dec 06, 2016,
How good is a bad night’s sleep?
Is a night’s sleep physiologically beneficial even if it includes emotionally disturbing nightmares? Almost certainly yes, said Dr Neomi Shah, a specialist at the Mount Sinai Integrative Sleep Centre in New York, USA. Despite the problems nightmares can cause, sleeping and having them is better than not sleeping, research suggests. Nightmares can make it difficult to sleep and interfere with daytime functioning, but physiological indicators of sleep patterns and quality do not differ in people who have nightmares, Dr Neomi said.
Frequent long, distressing and vivid dreams often wake people and cause problems like insomnia and poor sleep quality, she said. Research has also consistently demonstrated that nightmares can harm general well-being, affect mood and elevate stress. Some studies suggest there are measurable sleep problems for people who have nightmares, while others show no difference.
The studies that show such a link found that people who woke up stayed awake longer and that certain stages of sleep did not last as long. But people in those studies who had nightmares also had longer periods of rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep, when most dreaming occurs.
A weakness of these studies is that they were not conducted in the subjects’ normal sleeping environment. A more recent study in such an environment found no differences in so-called sleep architecture, sleep-cycle and REM durations, or sleep patterns for just the nights with nightmares.
Therefore, Dr Neomi said, despite upsetting nightmares, “sleep architecture appears to be preserved, and subjects with frequent nightmares are likely deriving the physiological benefits of sleep.”
C Claiborne Ray
*********************************************************************
Getting to know you from your phone
Your phone is pretty much a high-tech bucket of germs. Thousands of microscopic bugs crawl around on its surface. Your hands have smeared hundreds of chemicals across its surface. Scientists recently swabbed the hands of 39 people, and their phones, producing hundreds of chemical samples. Based on the compounds on both hands and phones, the researchers were able to make inferences about each person’s lifestyle.
One day, the technique might be used in criminal investigations to narrow down a suspect pool when DNA or fingerprint evidence doesn’t yield a match, according to new research. But critics argue it’s not ready for such tasks and worry that investigators might push courts to admit evidence based on potentially inaccurate inferences. For the moment, your bodily secrets are safe with your phone.
Joanna Klein
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Lower status affects monkey’s immunity
Social class is one of the most powerful predictors of health, more powerful than genes, smoking, alcohol intake or other health risks. But scientists do not know for sure whether lower social status causes people to end up sicker, or whether being less healthy leads to lower social status.
Now, researchers report that for 45 female rhesus monkeys, their position in the dominance hierarchy altered the functioning of their immune systems. The lower a female monkey’s rank, the more inflammation-related genes were turned on.
In humans, chronic inflammation has been associated with chronic stress and is suspected of increasing a person’s risk for illnesses from heart disease to Alzheimer’s. The new findings add support to the idea that the chronic stress that attends lower status may play a role in predisposing people to illness, the researchers said.
Erica Goode
*********************************************************************
Large ice sheet found
An ice sheet holding more water than Lake Superior may slake the thirst of future astronauts living on Mars. Using radar soundings from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft, scientists probed what lies in Utopia Planitia, a 2,000-mile-wide basin within an ancient impact crater.
What they found is an underground ice deposit ranging in thickness from 260 to 560 feet, and covering an area larger than New Mexico, USA. The ice is fairly pure — at least 50% frozen water — with dirt, rocks and porous empty spaces mixed in,
researchers believe.
Kenneth Chang
The New York Times
Is a night’s sleep physiologically beneficial even if it includes emotionally disturbing nightmares? Almost certainly yes, said Dr Neomi Shah, a specialist at the Mount Sinai Integrative Sleep Centre in New York, USA. Despite the problems nightmares can cause, sleeping and having them is better than not sleeping, research suggests. Nightmares can make it difficult to sleep and interfere with daytime functioning, but physiological indicators of sleep patterns and quality do not differ in people who have nightmares, Dr Neomi said.
Frequent long, distressing and vivid dreams often wake people and cause problems like insomnia and poor sleep quality, she said. Research has also consistently demonstrated that nightmares can harm general well-being, affect mood and elevate stress. Some studies suggest there are measurable sleep problems for people who have nightmares, while others show no difference.
The studies that show such a link found that people who woke up stayed awake longer and that certain stages of sleep did not last as long. But people in those studies who had nightmares also had longer periods of rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep, when most dreaming occurs.
A weakness of these studies is that they were not conducted in the subjects’ normal sleeping environment. A more recent study in such an environment found no differences in so-called sleep architecture, sleep-cycle and REM durations, or sleep patterns for just the nights with nightmares.
Therefore, Dr Neomi said, despite upsetting nightmares, “sleep architecture appears to be preserved, and subjects with frequent nightmares are likely deriving the physiological benefits of sleep.”
C Claiborne Ray
*********************************************************************
Getting to know you from your phone
Your phone is pretty much a high-tech bucket of germs. Thousands of microscopic bugs crawl around on its surface. Your hands have smeared hundreds of chemicals across its surface. Scientists recently swabbed the hands of 39 people, and their phones, producing hundreds of chemical samples. Based on the compounds on both hands and phones, the researchers were able to make inferences about each person’s lifestyle.
One day, the technique might be used in criminal investigations to narrow down a suspect pool when DNA or fingerprint evidence doesn’t yield a match, according to new research. But critics argue it’s not ready for such tasks and worry that investigators might push courts to admit evidence based on potentially inaccurate inferences. For the moment, your bodily secrets are safe with your phone.
Joanna Klein
*********************************************************************
Lower status affects monkey’s immunity
Social class is one of the most powerful predictors of health, more powerful than genes, smoking, alcohol intake or other health risks. But scientists do not know for sure whether lower social status causes people to end up sicker, or whether being less healthy leads to lower social status.
Now, researchers report that for 45 female rhesus monkeys, their position in the dominance hierarchy altered the functioning of their immune systems. The lower a female monkey’s rank, the more inflammation-related genes were turned on.
In humans, chronic inflammation has been associated with chronic stress and is suspected of increasing a person’s risk for illnesses from heart disease to Alzheimer’s. The new findings add support to the idea that the chronic stress that attends lower status may play a role in predisposing people to illness, the researchers said.
Erica Goode
*********************************************************************
Large ice sheet found
An ice sheet holding more water than Lake Superior may slake the thirst of future astronauts living on Mars. Using radar soundings from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft, scientists probed what lies in Utopia Planitia, a 2,000-mile-wide basin within an ancient impact crater.
What they found is an underground ice deposit ranging in thickness from 260 to 560 feet, and covering an area larger than New Mexico, USA. The ice is fairly pure — at least 50% frozen water — with dirt, rocks and porous empty spaces mixed in,
researchers believe.
Kenneth Chang
The New York Times
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