Eideard

A team working in South Africa claims to have found the earliest known sleeping mats, made of plant material and dated up to 77,000 years ago — 50,000 years earlier than previous evidence for human bedding. These early mattresses apparently were even specially prepared to be resistant to mosquitoes and other insects.

Early members of our species, Homo sapiens, were nomads who made their living by hunting and gathering. Yet they often created temporary base camps where they cooked food and spent the night. One of the best studied of these camps is Sibudu Cave, a rock shelter in a cliff face above South Africa’s Tongati River, about 40 kilometers north of Durban. Sibudu was first occupied by modern humans at least 77,000 years ago and continued to serve as a favored gathering place over the following 40,000 years. Since 1998, a team led by Lyn Wadley, an archaeologist at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, has been excavating at Sibudu, uncovering evidence for complex behaviors, including the earliest known use of bows and arrows.

Over the past several years, the team has found that many of the archaeological layers featured large, 1-centimeter thick swaths of plant remains, including the remnants of both stems and leaves. Most of them cover at least three square meters. The team suspected that these swaths were the remains of bedding, but the earliest previous evidence for sleeping mats is only between 20,000 and 30,000 years old, at sites in Spain, South Africa, and Israel, where similar but more fragmentary arrangements of plant remains have been found…

The team found that the swaths, which dated from 77,000 to 58,000 years ago, were made from sedges, rushes, and grasses, plants that grow down by the Tongati River but are not found in the dry rock shelter. Thus the people at Sibudu must have gathered them deliberately and brought them to the cave. Under the microscope, blocks of the plant material showed signs of compression and repeated trampling. In the earliest layer, 77,000 years old, the team found the leaves of Cryptocarya woodii, also known as Cape laurel, or the “bastard camphor tree,” an aromatic plant whose leaves are used in traditional medicines even today. The leaves contain several chemical compounds that can kill insects, and the team suggests that early humans chose them to protect against malaria-carrying mosquitoes and other pests…

Among the plant remains, Wadley’s team also found tiny fragments of chipped stone and crushed, burnt bone, which the researchers interpret as evidence that these were not only sleeping mats but also work surfaces where tools were fashioned and food was prepared. Thus while early modern humans were skilled at organizing their living spaces, some parts of the cave served double duty, Wadley says. “There were no rules for separate eating, working, or sleeping places,” she says. “Breakfast in bed may have been an almost daily occurrence.”

AAAS articles are almost always informative, useful, educational. Sometimes the effort to be entertaining can be pretty corny.

Among the various substances and structures they examined at microscopic level I wonder what remains of insects associated with humans may have been found? Like fossilized Cimex lectularius?

Men may think about sex more often than women do, but a new study suggests that men also think about other biological needs, such as eating and sleep, more frequently than women do, as well.

And the research discredits the persistent stereotype that men think about sex every seven seconds, which would amount to more than 8,000 thoughts about sex in 16 waking hours. In the study, the median number of young men’s thought about sex stood at almost 19 times per day. Young women in the study reported a median of nearly 10 thoughts about sex per day.

As a group, the men also thought about food almost 18 times per day and sleep almost 11 times per day, compared to women’s median number of thoughts about eating and sleep, at nearly 15 times and about 8 1/2 times, respectively…

“If you had to know one thing about a person to best predict how often they would be thinking about sex, you’d be better off knowing their emotional orientation toward sexuality, as opposed to knowing whether they were male or female,” said Terri Fisher, professor of psychology at Ohio State University’s Mansfield campus and lead author of the study. “Frequency of thinking about sex is related to variables beyond one’s biological sex…”

Before the thought-tracking began, the participants completed a number of questionnaires. These included a sexual opinion survey to measure a positive or negative emotional orientation toward sexuality (erotophilia vs. erotophobia); a sociosexual orientation inventory measuring attitudes about sex and tracking sexual behavior and levels of desire; a social desirability scale to measure respondents’ tendency to try to appear socially acceptable; and an eating habits questionnaire and sleepiness scale. They also were asked to estimate how many times in an average day that they thought about sleeping, eating and sex…

And when all of those thoughts were taken into account in the statistical analysis, the difference between men and women in their average number of daily thoughts about sex wasn’t considered any larger than the gender differences between thoughts about sleep or thoughts about food.

I joke that I don’t differentiate much between food and sex. Folks always chuckle – for the wrong reason. They think I mean food is as important as sex when what I mean is that sex is as important as food.

Some people sleepwalk; others talk in their sleep. Now a study finds that 1 in 12 patients with sleep disorders reported having had sex while they were asleep.

Researchers reviewed the medical charts of 832 consecutive patients seeking help at a Toronto sleep center and found that 63 patients, or 7.6 percent, reported either having had sex or engaging in other sexual activity, like masturbating, while asleep.

The phenomenon, called sexsomnia, is a form of parasomnia, a disorder in which people who are asleep but in a state of semi-arousal engage in behaviors they are not conscious of. Sexsomnia is defined by the International Classification of Sleep Disorders and may take place during a sleepwalking episode…

The author, Sharon A. Chung, a scientist at the Sleep Research Laboratory at Toronto Western Hospital, says the behavior becomes a problem when it disrupts the normal sleep cycle.

“At night you’re supposed to be sleeping,” she said in an interview. “Anything that stops you from sleeping at night is bad — not because of the behavior, because it stops you from sleeping.”

Looking back on my somewhat checkered past, I can say – with a smile of relief – that all the sex I ever experienced when I was supposed to be sleeping was while I was awake to enjoy it.

Sleep has long been known to improve performance on memory tests. Now, a new study suggests that an afternoon power nap may boost your ability to process and store information tenfold — but only if you dream while you’re asleep.

“When you dream, your brain is trying to look at connections that you might not think of or notice when [you're] awake,” says the lead author of the study, Robert Stickgold, the director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in Boston, Massachusetts. “In the dream…the brain tries to figure out what’s important and what it should keep or dump because it’s of no value…”

“The sleeping brain seems to be processing information on one level, but on a higher level it helps evolve your memory network if the information is relevant or helpful in your life experience,” adds Breus, who is also the author of “Beauty Sleep.”

The study’s findings, which appear in the journal Current Biology, underscore just how important sleep is to our memory and mental function.

RTFA. Methods seem straightforward enough. I look forward to reading the details when available to cheapskate members of the public – like me.

As someone whose sleep apnea is thoroughly moderated by CPAP sleep, I don’t dream except for a few brief moments while rousing in the morning. I hope I’m not screwing up this ancient brain.

Last one out the door at night – turn out the lights!

When a corporation as large as Ford decides to do something as simple as shutting down its computers at night, the savings can be astronomical. In the case of Ford, powering down computers can save the company $1.2 million each year.

The new program called PC Power Management, utilizes energy saving settings provided by Microsoft Windows. The energy settings will be used on company laptops and desktops to reduce energy waste. A managed shutdown will occur each night and during the weekend period. Additionally, computers will be awake to receive updates during pre-selected non-business hours, freeing up time previously used for updates throughout the working day.

According to Ford, an estimated 60 percent of the company’s computers remained on after business hours resulting in wasted energy. The new managed shutdown will eliminate waste to the tune of over a million dollars in savings for the company and reduce its carbon footprint by an estimated 16,000-25,000 metric tons per year.

The folks at autobloggreen have the whole press release at their site.

Rock on, Mulally!

If you look real carefully, you can see the camera.

Fifty house cats were given collar cameras that took a photo every 15 minutes. The results put a digital dent in some human theories about catnapping.

Based on the photos, about 22 percent of the cats’ time was spent looking out of windows, 12 percent was used to interact with other family pets and 8 percent was spent climbing on chairs or kitty condos. Just 6 percent of their hours were spent sleeping.

“What surprised me was how active the cats were. I believed my three cats were sleeping during the day,” said Jill Villarreal, an animal behavior scientist who collected the data for Nestle Purina PetCare’s Friskies brand of cat food.

Scientists believe that a nap can boost creative thought and help problem-solving. So what major breakthroughs in science and the arts have been made during sleep..?

Scientists believe so-called REM sleep allows the brain to form new nerve connections without the interference of other thought pathways that occur when we are awake or in non-dreamy sleep.

Anecdotal evidence from some key figures in the arts and science suggests there could be some truth in this.

Here is one example of major discoveries made in dreams…

“Yesterday” by The Beatles is one of the world’s most well-known songs and according to the Guinness Book of Records, the song with the most cover versions.

Paul McCartney has spoken about how the melody came to him in a dream. He was staying in a small attic room in London in 1965, while the band were filming Help!.

He woke up with a tune in his head, he said, and immediately decided to play it.

“I got out of bed, sat at the piano, found G, found F sharp minor 7th – and that leads you through then to B to E minor, and finally back to E. It all leads forward logically…

He was still unsure whether he had merely repeated someone else’s song so he played it to anyone who would listen, but no-one could identify it. Many fans have tried to do the same.

RTFA. Four more examples of similar experience in science, sport and art.

When I was writing a great deal – and a light sleeper at the time – I used to keep a notebook at my bedside to jot down whatever I recalled from a restless night’s sleep. Some of it was pretty good. Some was trash, of course. Especially, I recall, if I was excited and transcribed my thoughts in BIG PRINT.

There is no cure for the common cold, but in an experiment that deliberately infected volunteers with a virus, researchers have shown that getting less sleep can substantially increase the risk of catching one.

For 14 days, the researchers monitored and recorded the sleep time of 153 healthy men and women ages 21 to 55. They also scored their sleep efficiency, the percentage of time in bed spent asleep. Then they dripped a solution containing a rhinovirus into their noses and monitored their health for five days. Almost all subjects became infected, and more than a third had cold symptoms.

The study, led by Sheldon Cohen of Carnegie Mellon University, was published…in The Archives of Internal Medicine.

Researchers found that those who got less than seven hours of sleep a night were almost three times as likely to have clinical symptoms as those who got eight or more. Those with a sleep efficiency score of 85 percent or less were more than five times as likely to be infected as those with higher efficiency.

Go away! Don’t bother me! I’m getting healthyzzzzz…

E-mailing now comes so naturally to us that we can do it in our sleep — at least in the exceptional case. An article soon appearing in the journal Sleep Medicine, details the experience of a sleepwalker, showing we can send messages even when we seem to be sound asleep.

Such e-mailing interests neurologists who specialize in sleep science. After all, it poses a challenge to the accepted notion that sleepwalking is confined to activities involving gross motor movements, with minimal cognitive activity. Until now, we have been able to take comfort in our understanding of our own sleepwalking as an impersonal phenomenon. Whether it is eating junk food, rearranging furniture or even driving a car, the body carries out the action, seemingly on its own, while the mind slumbers, blissfully unaware.

Legal doctrine is based on this same notion. Sleepwalkers have been acquitted of criminal felony charges by basing their defense on the concept of “noninsane automatism.”

E-mailing while sleeping, however, upturns the previous understanding of the mind as essentially quiescent, absolved of a participating role. The Sleep Medicine article describes one woman’s e-mailing while sleeping as the first reported case of “complex nonviolent cognitive behavior.” It involved not just composing messages, but also navigating past two separate levels of password security to reach the e-mail software.

The patient suffered from severe insomnia and was taking zolpidem, which is marketed under various brand names, the best known of which is Ambien. She decided on her own to increase her daily dose to 15 milligrams, from the 10 milligrams prescribed by her doctor, to counteract what she perceived as diminished efficacy of the drug over time.

Later, she received a call from a friend, asking about a strange e-mail message that the patient had sent the caller the previous night. She had no memory of having done so. When the patient checked the computer and looked at a folder containing her sent messages, she discovered that three that had gone out within eight minutes the previous night while she was asleep, all with unusual capitalization, punctuation and language. “!HELP ME P-LEEEEESE” was the subject of one message, an invitation for “dinner & drinks,” and the message also implored the recipient to “come TOMORROW AND SORT THIS HELL HOLE Out!!!!!!”

Are they certain she wasn’t sleeping in her office. I get emails like that every day.

Research funded by the Wellcome Trust has identified a link between sleeplessness and paranoid thinking, a theme highlighted in Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’. The study – the first to examine insomnia and persecutory thoughts – found that in the general population individuals with insomnia were five times more likely to have high levels of paranoid thinking than people who were sleeping well. In an extension of the research, over half the individuals attending psychiatric services for severe paranoia were found to have clinical insomnia.

Insomnia has long been known to be very common. According to epidemiological surveys, on any given night one in three people will have difficulties getting to or staying asleep. For one in ten people this will occur several nights a week. Lack of sleep can lead to anxiety, sadness and irritability, but this new study highlights another potential consequence: feeling that others are deliberately trying to harm us…

Although the study shows a clear link between the two conditions, it is unclear which causes the other. Clinical experience indicates that there is a vicious cycle: insomnia makes us anxious and fearful, and these feelings make it harder for us to sleep.

Dr Freeman believes that the research points to a potential treatment for helping to reduce the risk of developing persecutory thoughts.

“The good news is that there are several tried-and-tested ways to overcome insomnia,” he says. “In particular, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) has proven benefits. The intriguing implication of the research is that use of the sleep techniques may also make us feel safer and less mistrustful during the day. A good night’s sleep may simply make us view the world in a much more positive light.”

As the MacBeth leaves the chamber of Duncan, having murdered the king, he believes he hears someone cry “Sleep no more: Macbeth doth murder sleep”. Dude needed a CPAP machine for sure.

Thanks, sciencedaily.com