I don’t understand what this is or why we’re reporting on it.

We apparently just report on completely irrelevant shit no one even understands now.

I guess.

The Guardian:

New research claims that exposure to outdoor light at night may increase the prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease, especially in people under the age of 65.

The researchers who conducted the study, funded by a National Institutes of Health grant and published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience on Friday, said they have found correlations between areas of the US with excessive exposure to artificial light at night and the prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease.

Actually, maybe this is relevant.

Andrew Anglin has talked a lot about the risks of artificial light, particularly the new forms of really shitty light.

You know, an old fashioned lightbulb was basically like a candle. Now with fluorescent light, LED light, and whatever else they have, you’re basking in a chemical glow.

Obviously this causes health problems.

How could it not?

In the US, at least 19 states have legislation in place aimed at reducing light pollution, but the authors of the study say that despite this, the “levels of light at night remain high in many parts of the country”.

While “streetlights, roadway lighting, and illuminated signs can deter crime, make roads safer, and enhance landscaping”, undisrupted light, however, “comes with ecological, behavioral, and health consequences”, the authors said.

Behavioral.

Note that.

For this study, the researchers evaluated Alzheimer’s disease prevalence by looking at the average nighttime light intensity by state and county in the US from 2012 to 2018, using satellite-acquired light pollution data and Medicare data reports of Alzheimer’s prevalence. They also incorporated medical data about variables known or believed to be risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease into their analysis, they said.

While conditions such as diabetes, hypertension and others were associated more strongly with Alzheimer’s disease prevalence than nighttime light intensity, the authors said that nighttime light was more strongly associated with Alzheimer’s disease prevalence than “alcohol abuse, chronic kidney disease, depression, heart failure, and obesity”.

Wow, really?

Firstly, alcohol abuse is totally safe.

But it’s worse than obesity?

You have to wonder about these studies. Personally, I would not be surprised if fake light causes obesity. Or rather, contributes to it.

For people under 65, nighttime light exposure was more strongly associated with Alzheimer’s prevalence than any other disease factor examined in the study.

“This could suggest that younger people may be particularly sensitive to the effects of light exposure at night,” the researchers said.

…

Samuel Gandy, an Alzheimer’s researcher at Mount Sinai in New York, said the general findings of the new study made sense, as “light controls circadian rhythm and that controls sleep”, he said, adding that for Alzheimer’s, “bad sleep increases the risk”.

Living in an area with more intense outdoor light at night is associated with shorter sleep duration, increased daytime sleepiness and dissatisfaction with sleep quality, the study states.

This is not a small problem.

This is yet another reason why it is much better to live in a rural area than in an urban hellscape.

“Type 2 diabetes risk was higher in people exposed to brighter night light, and in people exposed to light patterns that may disrupt circadian rhythms. Avoidance of light at night could be a simple and cost-effective recommendation that mitigates risk of diabetes, even in those…

— ⚡️ The Blue Light Diet ⚡️ (@BlueLightDiet) June 6, 2024

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

Should we spot-check tired drivers?

A blood test to measure whether someone has caused an accident through lack of sleep could be available within a couple of years.

Would you be happy to see roadside tests for tiredness carried out? pic.twitter.com/35CaHEq9yr

— Jeremy Vine On 5 (@JeremyVineOn5) May 9, 2023

Frankly, you are probably a lot more likely to crash when you’re tired than when you’re drunk.

But why do Australians tolerate this level of intrusion into their lives? Over the past 5 or so years – boosted by covid – Australia has surpassed both the UK and Canada to become the ultimate nanny state.

The Guardian:

A blood test to measure whether a driver who has caused an accident was impaired by lack of sleep could be available within two years, making it easier to legislate against drowsy drivers or their employers.

The research, funded by the Australian Government Office of Road Safety, comes as fresh evidence suggests that driving on less than five hours’ sleep is as dangerous as being over the legal drink-drive limit in many countries.

It could also provide a “line in the sand” that could enable people to be prosecuted for driving while fatigued, which many sleep experts are calling for.

“There has to be a system to check whether someone has had enough sleep, because they could be putting other people’s lives at risk,” said Prof Steven Lockley, a sleep expert at Harvard medical school, who advises Nasa on sleep safety.

Prof Clare Anderson, at Monash University, in Melbourne, Australia, who is leading efforts to develop a blood-based test, said: “When you look at the major killers on the road, alcohol is one of them, speeding is another, and fatigue is one of them. But even though the solution to fatigue is quite simple, which is to get more sleep, our capacity to manage it is impaired because we don’t have tools to be able to monitor it like we do with alcohol.”

Many sleep experts agree that legislation is needed to reduce deaths from drowsy driving. Almost half of UK drivers have admitted to driving after less than five hours’ sleep, while experts estimate that fatigue-related crashes are likely to account for up to 20% of all UK vehicle collisions, and one quarter of fatal and serious crashes.

Anderson’s team has identified five biomarkers in blood that can detect whether somebody has been awake for 24 hours or more with greater than 99% accuracy.

If I knew I lived under a government that could prosecute me for not sleeping enough, it would keep me up at night.

It turns out that humans need to sleep. Kinda like the other animals.

I’m deeply shocked and offended by this on behalf of our overlords, who were CHOSEN to rule and deserve to have efficient slaves that don’t need to pause and rest.

Study Finds:

The “all-nighter,” in which students stay up all night studying or completing school work, has become synonymous with the modern college experience. While it’s obviously unhealthy to stay up all night frequently, the occasional all-nighter isn’t typically considered detrimental to one’s well being. Now, quite surprisingly, a new study conducted at Uppsala University in Sweden has found some alarming evidence to the contrary. When young, completely healthy men went just one night without sleeping, their blood showed elevated levels of the protein tau, a biomarker for Alzheimer’s disease.

Tau proteins are found in neurons, but they tend to become entangled and build up in the brains of those diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. While Alzheimer’s doesn’t actually reveal itself until old age, this accumulation of tau in the brain actually starts decades before any symptoms show themselves.

Moreover, this isn’t the first time that lack of sleep has been connected to tau, various prior studies with older adults had found that poor sleep habits lead to increased tau levels. Head trauma has also been identified as a cause of elevated tau levels.

“Many of us experience sleep deprivation at some point in our lives due to jet lag, pulling an all-nighter to complete a project, or because of shift work, working overnights or inconsistent hours,” says study author Jonathan Cedernaes, MD, PhD, from Uppsala University, in a release. “Our exploratory study shows that even in young, healthy individuals, missing one night of sleep results in a slight increase in the level of tau in blood. This suggests that over time, similar types of sleep disruption could potentially have detrimental effects.”

…

After just one night of sleep deprivation, the men saw their tau levels increase by an average of 17%. For comparison, tau levels only increased by an average of 2% following a normal night of adequate sleep.

“It’s important to note that while accumulation of tau in the brain is not good, in the context of sleep loss, we do not know what higher levels of tau in blood represent,” Cedernaes explains. “When neurons are active, release of tau in the brain is increased. Higher levels in the blood may reflect that these tau proteins are being cleared from the brain or they may reflect an overall elevation of the concentration of tau levels in the brain.”

If you need to skip a sleep cycle for work, college, projects, studies, or whatever reason, something that could work to protect your health would be to take a small nap instead of completely missing having any rest.

Having eight hours of uninterrupted sleep may not even be needed at all in order to be healthy, and some think that it may not even be optimal.

It was recently reported that Cristiano Ronaldo, who is an elite athlete, naps for an hour and a half, five times a day instead of sleeping for eight hours.

Daily Mail:

Professor Nick Littlehales wrote an important book on sleep, named: ‘Sleep: The Myth of 8 Hours, the Power of Naps… and the New Plan to Recharge Your Body and Mind.’

The sleep pattern for Ronaldo is not to rest for eight consecutive hours. Instead, he breaks it up. 

According to Littlehales, it is ideal for a professional athlete to have five small rests of ninety minutes divided up throughout the day.

And Ronaldo has embraced this theory and carries out this methodology every day, even when he is on holiday.

He appears to be doing pretty well following that unconventional schedule.

It may sound obvious, but now that there’s a study suggesting that staying up all night is potentially more dangerous than commonly expected, it would be better to have at least a small nap to let the brain do a bit of housekeeping.

Television is known to be a tool controlled by those who don’t have your best interests at heart. But on top of it being used as a propaganda device, there’s the less talked about problem of it being such a huge waste of time.

Now a recent survey has put into perspective just how much time, on average, is really wasted.

Study Finds:

Television has become such a common part of all of our lives that most don’t even think about just how much time they spend staring at their TV screen. Of course, all of those hours are undoubtedly adding up, and a recent survey of 2,000 British adults finds that the average TV viewer will watch an astounding 78,705 hours of programming (movies, sports, news, etc) in their lifetime. That’s a whole lot of screen time that may have been better spent on more productive endeavors.

On a day-to-day basis, the average adult watches TV for three-and-a-half hours, amounting to 1,248 hours each year.

78,705 hours over a lifetime… that’s about 3,279 days, or about 109 months, or about 9 years.

1,248 hours every year… that’s about 52 days a year, or about two months a year.

Imagine the things you could do with two months’ worth of free time every year.

Now imagine the things you could do with nine years’ worth of free time in your lifetime.

It gets even worse when you consider that many people are sleep deprived. There is something pulling tired people towards televisions instead of beds.

Something that makes people want to escape reality and their own thoughts, perhaps.

Something related to reality being such a nightmarish parody of what we thought the future should be like, perhaps.

The survey, commissioned by LG Electronics, broke down those numbers even further and concluded that the average adult these days will watch 3,639 movies at home, and 31,507 episodes of TV during their lifespan. As far as different programs, the average person will watch 11,278 different TV series as well.

Additionally, it seems that deciding what to watch is a very common problem among modern families. The average household will have two arguments every week simply over what to watch. Sadly, more than half of the survey’s participants say their household would struggle to get by with only one television for everyone.

That’s probably why, according to the research, the average home hosts at least two TV sets, which are usually thrown out in favor of newer models every six years.

Yeah, the TVs may still work, but if they’re not as crisp and as fancy as the NEW LATEST MODEL, then what’s even the point in watching them?

Here’s an especially noteworthy statistic: six in ten respondents actually admit they would be lost without their TV set.

…

Between traditional cable, smart television apps, and streaming services, viewers today have never had more choices of what to watch. Interestingly, the survey actually found that many people (15%) tend to get frustrated by having too many options. On that note, the average adult will spend 2,943 hours of their life just deciding what to watch!

What a huge time sink.

Look. I’m not saying we’re literally ruled by overlords from another species that think we’re their slaves.

I’m just saying that if we were ruled by overlords from another species that think that we are their slaves, they’d probably devise some scheme to keep people “busy” with nothing, distracted, tired and unproductive, as a way to protect their power structure.

Light pollution is the presence of man-made light in the night, and literally no one could have predicted that putting these bright lights in the dark could negatively affect insects and animals or even any lifeform that depends on natural day and night cycles.

Daily Mail:

Light pollution is helping to drive the so-called ‘insect apocalypse’, experts warn, contributing to fears that 40 per cent of all bug species will be lost within decades.

Artificial light at night can impact insects in various ways, from driving them elsewhere to changing their development and life cycles.

Declining insect numbers are having knock on effects to the global ecosystem — such as reducing North American bird numbers by 3 billion in the last 50 years.

The researchers note, however, that light pollution is — compared with other man-made environmental problems — relatively easy to address.

They encourage people to reduce their reliance on artificial lighting where possible and dim or filter outside light sources where not.

The paper is the latest in a series drawing attention to the increasingly worrying plight of the world’s insect populations.

A 2017 study, for example, reported that flying insect numbers in 63 nature protection sites in Germany had decreased by 76 per cent in the preceding 27 years.

Furthermore, various studies have predicted that around 40 per cent of insect species could become extinct within the next few decades.

A recent report puts pesticides at the center of the Insect Apocalypse and estimates that half of all bugs have been lost since 1970.

Both the use of pesticides and of artificial lights at night are likely to play big roles in the demise of bugs.

‘Light is the source of all life on this planet, a fundamental part of the perceptive ability of most animal taxa, and an environmental cue of time of day and year that has been constant throughout all of evolutionary history,’ the researchers wrote.

‘[Human-caused] changes to the natural light environment should be predicted to affect all life that has evolved within it — that is to say, almost all life on Earth.’

Artificial light is known to affect humans too, as it is often mentioned when talking about sleep disorders.

It can be considered a form of over-stimulation that increases the bad kind of stress in the body.

Daylight saving time messes up people’s sleep patterns and health, for example.

In their new paper, biologist Avalon Owens of the Tufts University in Massachusetts and colleagues synthesise the results of over 200 independent studies showing the myriad ways in which light pollution impacts the lives of insects across the globe.

‘Artificial light at night impacts nocturnal and diurnal insects through effects on development, movement, foraging, reproduction and predation risk,’ the researchers note in their paper.

Because of light pollution’s broad impact, it provides a threat that transcends individual insect species.

For example, experts believe that declining insect numbers are directly related to the loss of around 3 billion birds that feed on bugs in the US and Canada since 1970.

‘We also emphasise that artificial light at night is not merely a subcategory of urbanisation,’ the researchers added.

‘The ecological consequences of light pollution are not limited to urban and suburban centres, but widespread along roadways and around protected areas.’

Just as was the case for early climate change science, we have to take the Insect Apocalypse seriously,’ said the Zoological Lighting Institute’s James Karl Fischer.

Since climate change and global warming are basically an assortment of preposterous claims and predictions that have proven time and time again to be wrong, they are now kind of reinforcing the whole Climate Cult with other things that are actually plausible threats to the planet, like plastic contaminating water and bees dying, in an attempt to gain credibility.

It’s important to discriminate so they don’t get away with doing that.

Plastic contamination and dying bees are real problems.

You don’t have to be one of Greta Thunberg’s Climate Minions in order to oppose plastic and the death of bees.

Mornings are beautiful.

People should feel the morning light on their skin and wake up with the Sun. This thing we have now where digital clocks and artificial lights determine the sleep patterns of entire populations is not healthy.

Researchers looked into daylight saving time and its effects on the human body and they didn’t like what they found.

Study Finds:

Daylight saving time is typically considered nothing more than an annoyance or simple fact of life as we “spring forward” and “fall back” each year. But, are these bi-annual adjustments to our internal clocks actually having a larger effect on our bodies than we realize? According to a new research piece conducted at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, the answer to that question is yes.

Over the course of our lives, daylight saving time greatly reduces the amount of bright morning light we experience. While this may sound trivial, morning light is essential for the synchronization of our biological clocks, and not getting enough is associated with increased risk of heart attack and ischemic stroke. In fact, researchers say these disruptions can literally change the structure of the core genes within our circadian clocks. Additionally, lack of bright morning light has been linked to partial sleep deprivation.

If you can take morning walks, take morning walks.

Seeing nature wake up with you, hearing the birds celebrate life and feeling the sun caressing your skin strengthens your connection with that which is closer to your origins than concrete and glowing screens.

The more you’re exposed to the forces of nature, the stronger this connection becomes and the closer you are to becoming a force of nature yourself.

You already have it in you. You just have to wake it up and remember.

Rise with the Sun.

During each and every daylight saving time switch, the average adult’s sleep duration shrinks by about 15-20 minutes. The study’s authors say this also increases the likelihood of any number of fatal accidents.

“People think the one-hour transition is no big deal, that they can get over this in a day, but what they don’t realize is their biological clock is out of sync,” says Dr. Beth Ann Malow, professor of Neurology and Pediatrics in the Sleep Disorders Division at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, in a release.

“It’s not one hour twice a year. It’s a misalignment of our biologic clocks for eight months of the year. When we talk about DST and the relationship to light, we are talking about profound impacts on the biological clock, which is a structure rooted in the brain. It impacts brain functions such as energy levels and alertness,” she adds.

The research team say they decided to publish their findings, a comprehensive overview of previous research performed on the subject, in an effort to encourage the abolishment of the practice altogether.

People are feeling tired, have less energy and are less alert and more prone to accidents, in exchange for what?

What do people gain from this?

Why not move jobs and school hours depending on the seasons and sunrise?

What does it matter if a gadget says it’s “morning” time if it’s clearly still nighttime?

“Good morning.”

Modernity is really out to get you. This isn’t hyperbole.

Study Finds:

According to research conducted at Brown University, only 48% of school-age children in the U.S. get the recommended nine hours of sleep most weeknights. The study goes on to suggest that children who are able to get enough sleep are much more likely to display a positive outlook towards school, academia, and overall “childhood flourishing,” classified as a measure of behavioral and social well-being.

“Chronic sleep loss is a serious public health problem among children,” says study author Dr. Hoi See Tsao in a release by the American Academy of Pediatrics.  “Insufficient sleep among adolescents, for example, is associated with physical and mental health consequences including increased risk of depression and obesity and negative effects on mood, attention and academic performance.”

Some may dismiss it as a symptom of improper time management, but the reality is that school encourages sleeping disorders by sucking out the energy of kids without fulfilling their drive to do something fun and interesting, which results in kids feeling drained and bored and looking for something — anything — to entertain themselves with.

Then there’s the issue of parents not setting the example and not doing anything to solve the actual time management issues, presumably because they themselves are also in a similar position because of their jobs, being sleep deprived and all.

The researchers analyzed responses given from the parents and caregivers of 49,050 children, collected via the 2016 and 2017 National Survey of Children’s Health. Respondents answered questions regarding how many hours children in their household usually slept on an average weeknight. The study classified “sufficient sleep” as at least nine hours per weeknight.

Caregivers were also asked if their child was curious and interested in learning new things, if they cared about doing well in school, and if they routinely completed their homework. Furthermore, they were asked if their child usually made a habit of finishing tasks they started, and if their child usually stayed calm and in control when they encountered academic challenges.

Overall, only 47.6% of the 6 to 17-year-old children involved in the study were found to be sleeping at least nine hours each weeknight regularly. This group of children were also positively associated with numerous positive “flourishing” markers. In comparison to children who did not usually get nine hours of sleep, those who did had 44% better odds of showing interest and curiosity in learning; 33% better odds of regularly completing their homework; 28% better odds of caring about their schoolwork; and 14% better odds of finishing tasks they start.

As far as why so many children aren’t getting enough sleep, the study’s authors identified various risk factors, including: inadequate parental care, mental health conditions, time spent on digital devices, and adverse childhood experiences.

Dr. Tsao suggests that parents focus on limiting screen time before bed and establishing a set bedtime routine for school nights.

Screens are a real issue. They are the portals into realms designed to get people’s attention. Things like social media and mobile games are addictive by design, and they keep kids engaged even when they’re feeling tired and sleepy.

There’s multiple contributing factors to the problem, but if we want to point at a single thing to represent the whole bunch, that would be modernity.

Kids should be playing and socializing outside.

Instead, they are forced to sit for hours and hours and hours and to listen to mostly useless stuff that fails to spark their interest. Then they are given access to addictive glowing screens as some kind of sick reward.

It is a form of torture and they are suffering its consequences.