Scientists delves into why we sleep.

Analysis shows snoozing is a strategy to increase efficiency, minimize risk

Bats, birds, box turtles, humans and many other animals share at least one thing in common: They sleep. Humans, in fact, spend roughly one-third of their lives asleep, but sleep researchers still don’t know why.

According to the journal Science, the function of sleep is one of the 125 greatest unsolved mysteries in science. Theories range from brain “maintenance” — including memory consolidation and pruning — to reversing damage from oxidative stress suffered while awake, to promoting longevity. None of these theories are well established, and many are mutually exclusive.

Now, a new analysis by Jerome Siegel, UCLA professor of psychiatry and director of the Center for Sleep Research at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA and the Sepulveda Veterans Affairs Medical Center, has concluded that sleep’s primary function is to increase animals’ efficiency and minimize their risk by regulating the duration and timing of their behavior.

The research appears in the current online edition of the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

“Sleep has normally been viewed as something negative for survival because sleeping animals may be vulnerable to predation and they can’t perform the behaviors that ensure survival,” Siegel said. These behaviors include eating, procreating, caring for family members, monitoring the environment for danger and scouting for prey.

“So it’s been thought that sleep must serve some as-yet unidentified physiological or neural function that can’t be accomplished when animals are awake,” he said.

Siegel’s lab conducted a new survey of the sleep times of a broad range of animals, examining everything from the platypus and the walrus to the echidna, a small, burrowing, egg-laying mammal covered in spines. The researchers concluded that sleep itself is highly adaptive, much like the inactive states seen in a wide range of species, starting with plants and simple microorganisms; these species have dormant states — as opposed to sleep — even though in many cases they do not have nervous systems. That challenges the idea that sleep is for the brain, said Siegel.

“We see sleep as lying on a continuum that ranges from these dormant states like torpor and hibernation, on to periods of continuous activity without any sleep, such as during migration, where birds can fly for days on end without stopping,” he said.

Hibernation is one example of an activity that regulates behavior for survival. A small animal, Siegel noted, can’t migrate to a warmer climate in winter. So it hibernates, effectively cutting its energy consumption and thus its need for food, remaining secure from predators by burrowing underground.

Sleep duration, then, is determined in each species by the time requirements of eating, the cost-benefit relations between activity and risk, migration needs, care of young, and other factors. However, unlike hibernation and torpor, Siegel said, sleep is rapidly reversible — that is, animals can wake up quickly, a unique mammalian adaptation that allows for a relatively quick response to sensory signals.

Humans fit into this analysis as well. What is most remarkable about sleep, according to Siegel, is not the unresponsiveness or vulnerability it creates but rather that ability to reduce body and brain metabolism while still allowing that high level of responsiveness to the environment.

“The often cited example is that of a parent arousing at a baby’s whimper but sleeping through a thunderstorm,” he said. “That dramatizes the ability of the sleeping human brain to continuously process sensory signals and trigger complete awakening to significant stimuli within a few hundred milliseconds.”

In humans, the brain constitutes, on average, just 2 percent of total body weight but consumes 20 percent of the energy used during quiet waking, so these savings have considerable adaptive significance. Besides conserving energy, sleep invokes survival benefits for humans too — “for example,” said Siegel, “a reduced risk of injury, reduced resource consumption and, from an evolutionary standpoint, reduced risk of detection by predators.”

- uclanews

Police reject candidate for being too intelligent

A US man has been rejected in his bid to become a police officer for scoring too high on an intelligence test.

Robert Jordan, a 49-year-old college graduate, took an exam to join the New London police, in Connecticut, in 1996 and scored 33 points, the equivalent of an IQ of 125.

But New London police interviewed only candidates who scored 20 to 27, on the theory that those who scored too high could get bored with police work and leave soon after undergoing costly training.

Mr Jordan launched a federal lawsuit against the city, but lost.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York upheld a lower court’s decision that the city did not discriminate against Mr Jordan because the same standards were applied to everyone who took the test.

He said: “This kind of puts an official face on discrimination in America against people of a certain class. I maintain you have no more control over your basic intelligence than your eye color or your gender or anything else.”

He said he does not plan to take any further legal action and has worked as a prison guard since he took the test.

The average score nationally for police officers is 21 to 22, the equivalent of an IQ of 104, or just a little above average.

via Ananova – Police reject candidate for being too intelligent.

Quick test for mercury due out about now…

This article was from 2006. I’d say it is ” a few years” later now…

According to chemist Andres Campiglia, mercury attacks the nervous system. Too much mercury in your body can cause injury to your brain, kidneys, heart, lungs and immune system.

For pregnant women like Courtney, too much mercury can be toxic to their unborn babies. That’s why she is having her water tested.

University of Central Florida chemists Eloy Hernández and Campiglia have created a new quick, cheap test to detect mercury by using a very unlikely source — pure gold. Water is mixed with a solution containing gold nanorods, or solid gold bars 2,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. Gold absorbs mercury. Then, scientists use an optical spectrometer to measure the light soaked up by the nanorods and reveal how much mercury is present.

“The more reddish it becomes, the higher the concentration of mercury,” Hernández tells DBIS.

The entire process takes less than 10 minutes. Results read out on a computer.

Courtney and Jordan’s water was safe, so for them it’s another cup of tea — with a little milk — and no mercury.

This mercury test works on not only liquids, but also on gases and solids. Scientists believe it can also be used in a larger capacity to clean up water and power plants. It could be available to the public within a few years.

via Is Your Water Safe? — Physical Chemists Devise Quick Spectrometry-Based Mercury Test.

Here is a mercury test kit for $22 canadian dollars.

5 Species That Seem to be Trying to Take over the Earth

Rich Wallace over at Cracked has an interesting article about some competition we may face for the Earth. I met the ants on my trip to Utah.

… Right now, huge chunks of the Southeastern U.S. pretty much look like the above picture. That stuff that makes it look like God threw a big leafy blanket over everything, is the Kudzu vine.

It dominates the landscape because it is simply the best at what it does, and what it does is grow. Seriously, at a rate of about a foot a day it’s like watching time-lapse in real life. Go on vacation for a week, and when you come back you’ll find this shit has eaten your car.

via 5 Species That Seem to be Trying to Take over the Earth | Cracked.com.

New Zealand man’s love runs deep in search for ring

A New Zealand man has been dubbed the Lord of the Ring after he searched and found his wedding ring more than a year after it slipped off his finger and sank to the sea floor.

The ring was lost for 16 months in the harbor of the country’s capital city, Wellington, before Aleki Taumoepeau found it shining on the sea floor, the DominionPost newspaper reported on Thursday.

“The whole top surface of the ring was glowing,” Taumoepeau, an ecologist, said.

Taumoepeau had been married for just three months when he lost the wedding ring while conducting an environmental sweep of the harbor.

He roughly marked the spot where the ring had flown from his finger, but was unable to find it despite returning to the area many times.

Taumoepeau’s wife offered to buy another ring, but he refused, pledging to find the ring.

But, equipped with new global satellite based coordinates and offering up a quick prayer, he found the ring after an hour’s search.

“I couldn’t believe that I could see the ring so perfectly,” Taumoepeau said.

He said those with him on the boat at the time the ring flew off his finger had likened it to a similar, slow motion shot from The Lord of the Rings, much of which was filmed in Wellington by local director Peter Jackson.

via New Zealand man’s love runs deep in search for ring – Yahoo! News.

Nude public pictures in New York?

A strip club isn’t the only place in town you can see a pole dance — amazed passengers on an L train watched in awe as a naked young woman competed with straphangers for space on a pole.

The performance by actress Jocelyn Saldana, 19, lasted just 30 seconds, and some of the passengers probably thought they were hallucinating or dreaming.

Most were blasé. But one woman started screaming and an elderly man next to her got the shakes.

That free show in mid-June — as well as similar ones from Times Square to Chinatown — were the creation of photographer Zach Hyman, 22, whose portraits are never under-exposed.

The photographer and his volunteer models don’t spend much time on location. The model quickly disrobes and Hyman gives himself only 30 seconds to fire off 10 shots with his Hasselblad 500 film camera.

Alex Reisner, a 20-year-old Columbia student, had a very appreciative audience when she disrobed in Chinatown.

When Hyman snapped her jumping in the air in the middle of the street, the crowd burst into applause.

“There was so much adrenaline,” she said. “I was bouncing around for the rest of the day. I told him I want to pose nude every weekend.”

Hyman noted that “photographing females in public is easier than males.

“People see a naked woman and they smile,” he said. “They see a penis and they freak out.”

Hyman is opening a show tonight at Chair and Maiden Gallery in the West Village featuring 14 of his favorite shots of Nude Yorkers.

His photo shoots involve precautions that not many of his colleagues have to worry about.

Like taking along a lookout to spot cops, keeping bail money on hand, and making sure his lawyer is on speed dial.

“In Times Square, there are cops everywhere,” Hyman said. “It seemed that always right before or after the shoot, a cop car would roll by. Thankfully, we never needed bail money. But I have a clean record, so I’m open to the experience of getting arrested.”

Hyman says his series was inspired by classic nude paintings at the Met. Like those nudes, he insists his images are not pornographic.

“We all have these parts — it’s one of the unifying aspects of being human,” he says.

via STRIPHANGER – New York Post.

… an exhibit of 14 of his images opens Thursday at Chair and Maiden Gallery in Manhattan. – art

Weird. How do you think you would react if you witnessed this? Call the police? Scream? Get the shakes? Smile? Faint? Laugh? Pretend to ignore it?

Mortgage delinquencies still rising

The number of Americans who have fallen at least 30 days behind on their home loan payments jumped 44% in the second quarter from a year ago, according to an industry report.That puts delinquencies at a record 9.24% of mortgages, according to the National Delinquency Report from the Mortgage Bankers Association MBA. That represents more than 4 million of the 45 million borrowers covered by the report.What the rate does not include, however, are loans already in foreclosure. Some 4.3% of all the mortgages are in that stage, up from 3.85% three months earlier and 1.55 percentage points from one year ago.The combined percentage of loans past due and those already in foreclosure hit 13.16% during the quarter, the highest ever recorded by the MBA survey”There was a major drop in foreclosures on subprime ARM loans,” said Jay Brinkmann, chief economist for the MBA, in a prepared statement. “The drop, however, was offset by increases in the foreclosure rates on the other types of loans, with prime fixed-rate loans having the biggest increase.”Indeed, the MBA survey reported that prime, fixed-rate mortgages accounted for nearly one in every three foreclosure starts. That’s way up from a year ago, when only one of every five foreclosure start involved a prime loan.That bodes ill for the future health of the mortgage market. Prime loans make up two-thirds of the mortgage market, and if delinquencies among these mortgages continue to proliferate, the number of foreclosures will soar.

- via CNN

After having an attorney review my loan docs this morning, I’m certain now that the only thing Bank of America can take is my home, even though it is worth $130,000 less than my loan.  My lawyer determined that, as long as I don’t damage the place on the way out, I am not open to a deficiency judgment on either the 1st or 2nd loan because mine was a purchase money obligation for a bona fide residential purchase.  He  saw no point in trying to negotiate to get the bank to report “paid as agreed” to my creditors when the short sale closes, because he says the bank won’t do that. At least he’d never heard of it.  I may get a second opinion on that one.

Short sale vs foreclosure?

See this. Your credit will be in the toilet whether you have a short sale or a foreclosure. There really is no credit benefit to a short sale. A real benefit of a short sale, however, is that you can buy a new home three years sooner. The waiting period before you can buy again with a foreclosure is 5 to 7 years. With a short sale it is only 2 years. If you’ve had no late payments (rare), you can buy another place right away, according to this article. A short sale also benefits your Real Estate agent. Foreclosure benefits include not having to show your home and keep it clean and the possibility of Cash for Keys from the bank at the end of the ordeal.

Free Xeno Song – What Have I Done – Mix #5

Some downloaded mixes 1 through 4. These are gone, they’ve hit the door. Posted 8/21/09 is Mix #5. Minor change: Blended the harmony volume better in this mix.

Download What Have I Done – Mix #5 now if you like. Who can say when it too will vanish forever to be replaced by Mix #6? Who can say? Not even me.

For lyrics and story, see my earlier post.