These sleeping positions may be awkward to us, but cats are liquid, so they settle in just fine anywhere. The real reason you should check out this collection of cat pictures is because they are both funny and adorable. Link 

Scientists discovered that people who need only a few hours of sleep each night before waking up refreshed and full of energy (no coffee required!) owe this ability to a single gene:

The Europe-wide study saw 4,000 people from seven EU countries fill out a questionnaire assessing their sleep habits. The researchers then scanned the genomes of the volunteers and looked for variations in their genes that correlated with their answers about their sleep patterns.

They discovered that people who had two copies of one common variant of ABCC9 slept for significantly shorter periods than people with two copies of another version.

The finding, described in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, could explain why light sleepers are able to get by on just a few hours of shut-eye a night, says Toronto-based sleep expert Dr. Colin Shapiro.

"This tells us that we are programmed in some way to need a certain amount of sleep, just as some people are programmed to be taller and others are programmed to be shorter," he told CTV's Canada AM Tuesday morning.

Link - via Booster Shots

Sleep expert Dr. Marcus Schmidt says he’s starting to see more cases of sleep texting.

“Four out of five kids that have cell phones sleep with the cell phone in the bedroom, next to their bed and only one in ten actually turn it off,” Dr. Schmidt said.

He says sleep deprivation can trigger common motor behaviors during sleep, including reaching for the phone when it goes off.

Link -via Dave Barry | Photo: Flickr user proudcanadianeh

While there are countless documented cases of sleep-walking, this is the first known case of sleep-drawing. Hadwin got started at age 4, when he scribbled on walls and furniture. Now some of his pieces fetch six-figure prices. Still, the North Wales native doesn’t want to make art his career. He never studied art, and is lousy at drawing when awake. “Art has never interested me at all,” says Hadwin, as quoted by the BBC. But just in case, he now prepares by leaving a sketchpad, brushes, and other art supplies in his bedroom.

Hadwin says that an evening of drinking can often trigger an episode of sleep-drawing. His condition leaves experts baffled: Doctors at the Edinburgh Sleep Center can’t even determine what stage of sleep Hadwin is in when his creative impulses kick in. Whatever is happening here, says Whitchurch Arts, it’s working. And — who knows — there could be more sleep-drawing prodigies out there. “Perhaps put out a piece of paper and pencil on the bedside table tonight to find out.”

Watch Hadwin in action in this video on The Week. Link

Humans and cats both have certain muscles that are for precision, as well as what are called larger “anti-gravity muscles” like those that lift your legs. Those larger ones are activated by a neurochemical called serotonin. During REM sleep, the brain’s serotonin system is shut off, which means the anti-gravity muscles are shut off. What’s not switched off are these highly-tuned muscles in things like eyes and extremities—what for us would be fingers and toes, but for them it’s paws and whiskers. This kitten is in the state of sleep some people call “the sleep of the body,” because the body is totally relaxed except for these tips of things twitching, while the brain is active and dreaming.

Dr. Dodman has plenty more to tell us about the cat and kitten, at NatGeo Daily News. Link -Thanks, Marilyn!

The median number of thoughts about sex by college-age men was 18 times a day to women’s 10 times a day, the study found. But the men also thought about food and sleep proportionately more.

"In other words, there was nothing special about sexual thoughts," study researcher Terri Fisher, a psychologist at The Ohio State University, Mansfield, told LiveScience. "Males thought more about any of the health-related thoughts compared to females, not just thoughts about sex."

Link

Leo Babauta over at the Zen Habits blog has posted what he calls “The Simplest Cure for Insomnia” – an effective alternative to counting sheep when you’re having a hard time falling asleep. I’ve tried it and it has worked great.

The simplest cure for insomnia: get comfortable and close your eyes, and then replay your day in your head, in every detail possible, from the moment you woke up.

Link (and for those Neatorama readers living is Sweden – as I do – here’s a Swedish translation of that powerful insomnia cure: Den enklaste kuren mot sömnlöshet)

No wonder they can accomplish so much more: they’re awake all the time (and not be cranky about it, either)

Natural "short sleepers," as they’re officially known, are night owls and early birds simultaneously. They typically turn in well after midnight, then get up just a few hours later and barrel through the day without needing to take naps or load up on caffeine.

They are also energetic, outgoing, optimistic and ambitious, according to the few researchers who have studied them. The pattern sometimes starts in childhood and often runs in families.

While it’s unclear if all short sleepers are high achievers, they do have more time in the day to do things, and keep finding more interesting things to do than sleep, often doing several things at once.

Link

Cats along with mice, pigs and cheetahs love to spend a lot of quality time snoozing. They can sleep for around 12 hours per day. Rats, gerbils and lions are a little ahead of them as they can sleep for about 13 hours a day. This means they essentially spend 2/3rd of their entire lives in dreamland.

As you can see, there are way more than seven animals in this article. You probably won’t be surprised to find out which one is the #1 sleepiest! Link

Need to sleep in public but can’t buy the Night Owl Sleeping Mask from the NeatoShop because it’s sadly sold out? Don’t close your eyes … to this amazing new product called the Snazzy Napper. It looks like a cross between a burqa and a snuggie! Link

Here’s a study by Brown University sleep researcher Judith Owens on how starting school just 30 minutes later could lead to huge improvements:

An eye-opening study says delaying high school starting times by just 30 minutes can reap big rewards for tired teens.
A small study at St. George’s School in Middletown, Rhode Island, says students there were more alert in class, expressed better moods, arrived to class on time, and even reported eating a healthier breakfast due to the later start.

"The results were stunning. There’s no other word to use," says Patricia Moss, academic dean at the boarding school where the study was done. Similar results have been found in some public schools that let teens start school late.

Researchers say there’s a reason why even 30 minutes can make a big difference. Teens tend to be in their deepest sleep around dawn – when they typically need to get up for school. Interrupting that sleep can leave them groggy, especially since they also tend to have trouble falling asleep before 11 p.m.

So why do schools start so early in the morning? You can blame the parents and their pesky jobs: Link (Photo: Shutterstock)

Sleeping while at work is generally considered to be unacceptable behavior by most U.S. employers.  With some types of work falling asleep can be dangerous, while with other types such as office work, falling asleep implies one’s failure to be available for productive work during a specified time. There is no tradition in this country of a post-lunch or afternoon Siesta. Yet dozens of studies agree that the U.S. is a sleep-deprived nation. A National Commission on Sleep Disorders, 2003 reported: “Sleep deprivation costs $150 billion each year in higher stress and reduced worker productivity.”

In the early 1980s I tried to imagine desks that would accommodate an employee’s need for a quick nap. While I was working on these designs, the American office itself was changing.  The purpose and design of the desk was being redefined. The Computer Revolution had arrived.

Here, an employee takes a break from working on her Mac Plus. She climbs into her soft, comfortable and soundproofed File Cabinet Sleeping Quarters for a quick nap.

As the computer took over more office functions, the concept of the Work Station emerged. I wondered if it would be possible to acknowledge the way workers were increasingly stuck at their stations by designing the workstation and the office chair together as a unit.  Aside from needing to walk down the hall to take a bathroom break or to eat lunch, one might never have to move from one’s workstation. In this concept the chair flattens out for naps.

And I tried incorporating a snack machine into the design. The employee would rarely have an excuse for leaving his or her station.

By 1990 I had started to worry about what the future held for office workers. Might they become prisoners at their jobs and be required as a condition of employment to never leave the office, day or night?  Would their work stations become their homes? Here I showed how an employee’s life had been reduced to a few functions, accommodated in an enlarged Live-in Work Station. In this concept, I imagined that the office worker needed to ask for permission to have social interactions outside of the office building, knowing that his or her Full-Life Pay would be reduced based on the amount of time spent away from the job.

While some of my designs for Live-in Work Stations lacked bathroom facilities, others included them.

In some of my concepts, tall cubicle walls supported an accordion-style, folding, sound-proofed ceiling allowing one to sleep – or meditate – peacefully inside. A sign saying “Do Not Disturb” could be hung from the doorknob.

One of my concepts that might end up in the Never Going To Happen category is Nappers’ Cubicles for seniors.  As recently as 2005, when this was drawn, trends were forecast that showed incomes remaining fixed during retirement at a time of rising health care costs, forcing many senior citizens to remain at the job past age 65. Giving the trend a positive twist, cheery articles appeared in AARP, The Magazine that showed smiling seniors eagerly making use of job skills late into their 70s! Believing that the forecast was accurate, I reasoned that it would become law for companies to offer napping facilities for senior employees.

Yet the current severe economic downturn has upended that prediction. Even though the number of elderly Americans as a percent of the population continues to rise, the availability of jobs for all citizens has been gutted. Now, most seniors who need extra income find themselves unemployable. Ageism, a term applied to discrimination in the hiring or firing of senior employees, suddenly seems like a meaningless issue. With large numbers of citizens of all ages competing for the same few jobs, almost everyone can feel discriminated against, or as was said about African-Americans, they may become “the last to be hired and the first to be fired.” Nappers’ Cubicles, a cute idea, might need to go in my Clever Ideas Waste Bin.

World Sleep Day is an international annual event, intended to be a celebration of sleep and a call to action on important issues related to sleep, including medicine, education, social aspects and driving. It aims to lessen the burden of sleep problems on society through better prevention and management of sleep disorders. World Sleep Day 2010 is being held on March 19th, under the slogan “Sleep Well, Stay Healthy”.

I would have posted this earlier, but I was asleep. Link -via Simply Left Behind

(image credit: Flickr user fofurasfelinas)

This creatively named disorder occurs during the onset of deep sleep, when the person is suddenly startled awake by a sharp, loud noise. These noises range from cymbals crashing to explosives going off. To the person hearing them, the explosions seem to originate either from right next to the person’s head or inside the skull itself. There’s no pain involved, and no danger, either. Doctors don’t know what causes exploding head syndrome, but they do know that it isn’t associated with any serious illness.

This is only one of the ten disorders listed. Sleep well tonight! Link -via Digg

Riding in school buses in the early morning, then sitting in poorly lighted classrooms are the main reasons students have trouble getting to sleep at night, according to new research.

Teenagers, like everyone else, need bright lights in the morning, particularly in the blue wavelengths, to synchronize their inner, circadian rhythms with nature’s cycles of day and night.

If they are deprived of blue light during the morning, they go to sleep an average of six minutes later each night, until their bodies are completely out of sync with the school day, researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute reported Tuesday in the journal Neuroendocrinology Letters.

The finding was made by fitting a group of students with goggles that blocked blue light and discovering that their circadian rhythms were significantly affected.

Link

Results show that adolescents with parental set bedtimes of midnight or later were 24 percent more likely to suffer from depression (odds ratio = 1.24) and 20 percent more likely to have suicidal ideation (OR=1.20) than adolescents with parental set bedtimes of 10 p.m. or earlier. This association was appreciably attenuated by self-reported sleep duration and the perception of getting enough sleep. Adolescents who reported that they usually sleep for five or fewer hours per night were 71 percent more likely to suffer from depression (OR=1.71) and 48 percent more likely to think about committing suicide (OR=1.48) than those who reported getting eight hours of nightly sleep. Participants who reported that they “usually get enough sleep” were significantly less likely to suffer from depression (OR=0.35) and suicidal ideation (OR=0.71).

The researchers in this study say there are several ways sleep deprivation can lead to depression. Link -via reddit

(image credit: Flickr user Carlos 57)

I hope everyone finds some sweetness like this in their world this weekend.  I, for one, will be giving my daughter a little extra love and attention!

Link

Scientists have found that hearing specific sounds during deep sleep can improve memory and recall. [...]

Scientists asked a group of students to look at 50 objects, including a cat and a kettle, which were all paired to a specific location on a computer screen.

They then asked the volunteers to lie down and as they slept played them a series of sounds related to half of the objects, including a miaow [sic] and a kettle boiling.

Tested later the students were better able to correctly place an object whose sounds that had heard with their locations.

"The research strongly suggests that we don’t shut down our minds during deep sleep," said John Rudoy, from Northwestern University, in Chicago, who led the study. "Rather this is an important time for consolidating memories."

Link

Not getting enough sleep? If you live in West Virginia, there’s a good chance that you’re part of the 20% of the population who suffer from insomnia:

West Virginians’ lack of sleep was about double the national rate, perhaps a side effect of health problems such as obesity, experts said.

Nearly 1 in 5 West Virginians said they did not get a single good night’s sleep in the previous month. The national average was about 1 in 10, according to a federal health survey conducted last year and released Thursday.

Tennessee, Kentucky and Oklahoma also were notably above average in their reported lack of sleep. In contrast, North Dakota had fewer problems sleeping, with only 1 in 13 reporting that degree of sleeplessness.

Health officials do not know the exact reasons for the differences.

Link

“Intimacy is important for emotional health. But good sleep is important for physical, emotional and mental health.”

What do you guys think? Would you sleep away from your love so you can actually improve your sleep?

Link

Frustrated with those around office who brag about how early they got up?  It appears that genetics plays a role in one’s sleep habits … and that the tendency of getting up early is caused by a mutation:

In 2001, geneticist Ying-Hui Fu and colleagues identified a mutation in a gene called Per2 that appeared to cause familial advanced sleep-phase syndrome (FASPS).

In 2005, they uncovered another mutation associated with FASPS. And now they say they have found the first genetic mutation in humans that appears to affect sleep duration rather than sleep timing. The mutation lies in DEC2, a gene that codes for a protein that helps turn off expression of other genes, including some that control circadian rhythm, the internal clock that regulates a person’s sleep-wake cycle.

The findings, says Fu, could lead to better treatments for sleep disorders.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by OddNumber.

What do you think this little guy is dreaming about? Feilds of food and fluffy bedding? Whatever it is, it certainly seems to be delicious and fun.

Link Via Cute Overload

As if you need that many reasons to take a snooze.

Studies show that not only will you feel better almost immediately, says Sara Mednick, PhD, a sleep medicine researcher at the University of California at San Diego and author of Take a Nap! Change Your Life, but a daily nap of between 20 and 90 minutes before 4:00 pm will also increase your mental performance, reduce your chances of gaining weight, and make you feel a whole lot more like having sex after dinner than you probably do now. What’s more, it won’t affect your nighttime sleep.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by smellslikepurple.

Sleep researchers at the University of Toledo, Ohio, reported the first case of someone using the Internet while asleep.  A 44-year-old woman had gone to bed about 10 p.m., then got up a few hours later, logged on to her computer with her username and password, and composed three e-mails to friends inviting them over for drinks. She only found out about it when they called the next day to accept.

Her e-mails contained a mix of upper- and lowercase characters, were badly formatted and contained odd expressions.  One read: "Come tomorrow and sort this hell hole out.  Dinner and drinks, 4 pm.  Bring wine and caviar only."  Another e-mail said only: "What the …"

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Marilyn Terrell.

I can think of a couple of times when I’ve nodded off while driving. This feature would’ve come in handy. Special sensors in the steering wheels of new Mercedes E-Class cars will detect inattentiveness by the driver and sound an alarm.

Link via Geekologie