Sometimes, I go long periods barely sleeping at all. It makes you feel like you’re in a war.

Still, scientific studies are often retarded.

The Guardian:

Two nights of broken sleep are enough to make people feel years older, according to researchers, who said consistent, restful slumber was a key factor in helping to stave off feeling one’s true age.

Psychologists in Sweden found that, on average, volunteers felt more than four years older when they were restricted to only four hours of sleep for two consecutive nights, with some claiming the sleepiness made them feel decades older.

D E C A D E S

The opposite was seen when people were allowed to stay in bed for nine hours, though the effect was more modest, with participants in the study claiming to feel on average three months younger than their real age after ample rest.

I don’t think saying “I feel three months younger” is very serious at all. This seems to assert that people can feel their bodies dying in real time. Do you remember feeling noticeably younger three months ago? If not, how could these people in the study make such a claim?

“Sleep has a major impact on how old you feel and it’s not only your long-term sleep patterns,” said Dr Leonie Balter, a psychoneuroimmunologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and first author on the study. “Even when you only sleep less for two nights that has a real impact on how you feel.”

Beyond simply feeling more decrepit, the perception of being many years older may affect people’s health, Balter said, by encouraging unhealthy eating, reducing physical exercise, and making people less willing to socialise and engage in new experiences.

Well, that’s very obvious.

If you don’t get a good night’s sleep, you don’t want to go to the gym, and you don’t want to talk to anyone. If you try to do either of those things, you will probably fail.

That is: unless you take pre-workout.

Pre-workout is proven to be a viable substitute for sleep. You can also mix it with vodka for an extra boost.

The researchers ran two studies. In the first, 429 people aged 18 to 70 answered questions about how old they felt and on how many nights, if any, they had slept badly in the past month. Their sleepiness was also rated according to a standard scale used in psychology research.

For each day of poor sleep the volunteers felt on average three months older, the scientists found, while those who reported no bad nights in the preceding month felt on average nearly six years younger than their true age. It was unclear, however, whether bad sleep made people feel older or vice versa.

Seriously, this is retarded. Imagine saying “I feel three months older.”

It means nothing.

I agree that sleep is important, but this is goofy.

In the second study, the researchers quizzed 186 volunteers aged 18 to 46 on how old they felt after two nights of plentiful sleep, in which they stayed in bed for nine hours each night, and two nights when they slept for only four hours a night. After two nights of restricted sleep, the participants felt on average 4.44 years older than when they had ample sleep. Feeling older was linked, unsurprisingly, to feeling sleepier.

“If you want to feel young, the most important thing is to protect your sleep,” Balter said.

That’s pretty obviously true.

The best thing you can do is try to avoid digital screens for at least 4 hours before you plan to sleep.

Good luck with that.

Source

“Age is just a number.”

If you’ve ever wondered why we needed women in science, this is why.

Study Finds:

Finding that first gray hair is a rite of passage for humans. It’s also a sign, of course, that we’re getting older — and more are on the way. For chimpanzees, however, hair color doesn’t follow the same linear path. As scientists from The George Washington University explain, observing gray or silver hair on a chimpanzee doesn’t mean you’re looking at an old timer.

While these findings may sound fairly inconsequential at first, in actuality they challenge the significance of the gray phenotype among non-human beings. Patches and areas of gray hair are very common in chimpanzees. The amount and locations of discoloration, however, varies greatly from chimp to chimp.

Most chimpanzees see portions of their hair gray over time until they reach middle age. After that point the graying process appears to level off.

“With humans, the pattern is pretty linear, and it’s progressive. You gray more as you age. With chimps that’s really not the pattern we found at all,” explains lead study author  Elizabeth Tapanes, a Ph.D. candidate in the GW Department of Anthropology, in a release. “Chimps reach this point where they’re just a little salt and peppery, but they’re never fully gray so you can’t use it as a marker to age them.”

To produce evidence that gray hair is not indicative of old age among chimps, the study’s authors gathered together a series of photographs of two chimpanzee subspecies. Sets of photos for both subspecies included wild and captive chimps.

Researchers closely examined each photo, and took note of the chimps’ gray hair. They then cross examined each chimp’s recorded age with the amount of visible gray hair on their body.

…

The idea behind this research came to lead author Dr. Brenda Bradley, an associate professor of anthropology, as she was observing chimpanzees in Uganda for five years. At the time, she kept assuming the chimps with more gray hair were older. After learning that wasn’t the case, she set out to explore the topic further.

Surprisingly, there hasn’t been much research performed on gray hair development in chimpanzees, or any other wild animal for that matter, before this project. Of course, most of the research on graying hair among humans focuses on the cosmetic side of things.

“There’s a lot of work done on trying to understand physiology and maybe how to override it,” Dr. Bradley notes. “But very little work done on an evolutionary framework for why is this something that seems to be so prevalent in humans.”

These women literally looked at pictures of chimpanzees and counted gray hairs, hoping that, eventually, this would somehow lead them to “override” the graying mechanism in humans. It is both funny and sad, until you remember that these women are considered scientists, at which point you should feel disgusted.

Given enough freedom, women will start having sex with chimpanzees and/or counting their grey hairs because women who are not under direct orders of men are utterly useless and totally incapable of doing anything worth doing.

With women, it’s always about how they look and what people think of them.

Female scientists making feeble attempts at figuring out how to stop themselves from aging is a blatant example of this, but the fact that most women in the workplace are not just unproductive but also an active attack on the productivity of others is also a consequence of it.

Women work jobs the same way they played house when they were little. To them, everything’s just a game of appearances.

“What’s the least amount of effort required to look as if I were doing something for real?”

A new study has been produced which shows that Blacks age quicker than Whites and their bodies are on average, 3 years older than Whites of the same age.

This really shouldn’t come as any surprise, as Blacks have a shorter gestation period, earlier puberty and in some cases in Africa, are left to fend for themselves from the age of four.

Rather than pointing to the obvious fact that we are different species however, the researchers are claiming that the difference in body-age must be the reason why Blacks die earlier than Whites.

The idea that Blacks might die earlier than Whites because they have a much higher propensity to kill one another, does not seem to have been included as a factor in their calculations.

Daily Mail:

Black people age more quickly than white people, a controversial new study has claimed.

Researchers say that the researcher could shed new light on higher mortality rates in black people.

They say the biological age differences by race increase up until ages 60-69, and then decline.

‘Our results showed that, on average, blacks tend to be more than three years older biologically than whites,’ Morgan Levine and Eileen Crimmins of the University of Southern California’s Davis School of Gerontology. wrote in the journal Social Science and Medicine.

‘Blacks experience morbidity and mortality earlier in the life course compared to whites,’

‘This is consistent with findings from previous studies reporting that blacks tend to have levels of biological risk factors that are indicative of someone significantly older chronologically.’

‘Such premature declines in health may be indicative of an acceleration of the aging process.’

The team found that the difference in age can be up to three years.

Differences in biological age between blacks and whites appear to increase up until ages 60-65 and then decline, presumably due to mortality selection.

The researchers calculated each participant’s ‘biological age’ by looking at 10 biomarkers that have been linked to aging, including C-reactive protein, serum creatinine, glycosylated hemoglobin, systolic blood pressure, and total cholesterol.