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Restorative, sedative-free slumber can ward off mental and physical ailments.
http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/04/05/deep-sleep-aging/
As we grow old, our nights are frequently plagued by bouts of wakefulness, bathroom trips and other nuisances as we lose our ability to generate the deep, restorative slumber we enjoyed in youth.
But does that mean older people just need less sleep?
Not according to UC Berkeley researchers, who argue in an article published April 5 in the journal Neuron that the unmet sleep needs of the elderly elevate their risk of memory loss and a wide range of mental and physical disorders.
"Nearly every disease killing us in later life has a causal link to lack of sleep," said the article's senior author, Matthew Walker, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology and neuroscience. "We've done a good job of extending life span, but a poor job of extending our health span. We now see sleep, and improving sleep, as a new pathway for helping remedy that."
-- submitted from IRC
Bryce A. Mander, Joseph R. Winer, Matthew P. Walker. Sleep and Human Aging. Neuron DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2017.02.004
[Ed note. (martyb)] I've certainly noticed that I do not sleep as soundly as I used to — I rarely sleep through an entire night. On the other hand, there is a body of evidence for divided/segmented sleep. How has your sleeping fared as you have gotten older?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday April 11 2017, @02:54PM (1 child)
in python
I've been playing a lot with ESP8266 microcontrollers with the micropython firmware uploaded for fun. nodemcu board $8 delivered by amazon prime.
The phone has motion etc.
And part of my screwing around has involved a magnetometer which as a side effect uses the accelerometer to know where "down" is (long story having nothing to do with sleep research... lack of sleep due to ham radio hobby LOL)
When the N900 gives up the ghost...!
You could probably gin something up with an adafruit feather esp8266 which has built in lithium battery management and can be flashed with (micro)python and can talk I2C to most/some/all accelerometers. So all is not lost.
However achieving hardware feature parity checklist is a long way from the hardware working which is a long way from the software working and "barely works" is a long way from a production system. But with infinite spare time I think you can still be in business in a post-N900 world doing python based sleep research.
I had a N900 until the screen broke and I seem to remember that was like a decade ago, so thats quite an old machine to have kept running. Ran linux IIRC.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Wednesday April 12 2017, @04:10AM
I got a almost-free (v.cheap) one when the other stopped working under warranty.
Got an N8 (abandonware)
Got an N9 (some what abandonware).
A Moto-E2 (abandonware after less than 2 months - F*ck moto - never buying it again until they warranty 5 years of software updates - or full refund. F*ck moto again!).
Now a Nexus 6p - let's see if it lasts until the Google+1.
TL;DR. I keep my old phones as general computers...