For your entire life, I’m sure, doctors and parents and everybody else who has an opinion has shoved the whole “get 8 hours” of sleep idea down your throat. Well, it turns out that eight hours of solid sleep is not actually optimal, and historically, not even normal. For a while now a small minority has voiced the idea that civilizations for thousands of years would sleep for four hours, wake up for an hour or two, then sleep for another four. During the break in between people would often chat with neighbors, read, write, pray, have sex, smoke tobacco, and just reflect. The evidence of this is almost irrefutable and makes me want to try it out. I think I might.

Since Scotland introduced a ban on smoking in public places in 2006 there has been a 10% drop in the country's premature birth rate, say researchers.

They believe this is a smoke-free benefit that can be chalked up alongside others, like reductions in heart disease and childhood asthma.

Tobacco smoke has been linked to poor foetal growth and placenta problems.

Plos Medicine analysed smoking and birth rates for all expectant women in Scotland before and after the ban.

It included data for more than 700,000 women spanning a period of about 14 years.

Simply stop eating during the 12-16 hour period before you want to be awake. Once you start eating again, your internal clock will be reset as though it is the start of a new day. Your body will consider the time you break your fast as your new "morning."

For example, if you want to start waking up at 2:00 am, you should start fasting between 10:00 am or 2:00 pm the previous day, and don't break your fast until you wake up at 2:00 am. Make sure you eat a nice healthy meal to jumpstart your system.

Another example: If you are traveling from Los Angeles to Tokyo, figure out when breakfast is served in Tokyo, and don't eat for the 12-16 hours before Tokyo's breakfast time.

Researchers in Sweden studied patients who had cataract surgery to remove their clouded lenses and implant clear intraocular lenses. They found that the incidence of insomnia and daytime sleepiness was significantly reduced. Another study found improved reaction time after cataract surgery.

“We believe that it will eventually be shown that cataract surgery results in higher levels of melatonin, and those people will be less likely to have health problems like cancer and heart disease,” Dr. Turner said.

En genomgång av varför det är bra att ta en tupplur och hur man gör det bäst.

At my height, 180 lbs. isn’t terrible, but the trajectory is obviously wrong. Without adjustments to my lifestyle, you can see what would happen. So I started paying attention.

In February, Laura and I got iPhones. Shortly after, I discovered Lose It!, a calorie-counting and weight-tracking app. I knew my eat-box-of-cheez-its-when-bored habit was bad, so I began simply tracking calories with Lose It!, hoping to break some bad habits. After all, if you give an engineer some data, he’ll optimize it.

A few weeks later, I ended up reading The Hacker’s Diet. It’s a quick, educational, and inspirational read. John Walker’s thesis is that anyone can lose weight if they correct the flawed feedback mechanisms causing them to eat more than they consume every day.

See, our bodies are complicated machines. We can’t entirely understand them, so we use models (created by people smarter than me) to help us predict how our bodies will behave under various inputs. Thus, there are tons of weight loss plans, and I’m sure they’ve all worked for someone: all raw, low-carb, no-carb, low-calorie, intense exercise, glass of red wine every night, protein shakes in the morning, seven snacks a day, etc. etc.

All of that is too complicated for me, so I chose the simplest model I knew: Calories In, Calories Out. It goes something like this:

The paper, published by Cato in April 2011, found that in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.

It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the problem far better than virtually every other Western country does.

Compared to the European Union and the US, Portugal drug use numbers are impressive.

Following decriminalization, Portugal has the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the EU: 10%. The most comparable figure in America is in people over 12: 39.8%, Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana.

The Cato paper reports that between 2001 and 2006 in Portugal, rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders fell from 14.1% to 10.6%. Drug use in older teens also declined.  Life time heroin use among 16-18 year olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8%.

New HIV infections in drug users fell by 17% between 1999 and 2003.

Death related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more than half.

The number of people on methadone and buprenorphine treatment for drug addiction rose to 14,877 from 6,040, after decriminalization, and the considerable money saved on enforcement allowed for increase funding of drug – free treatment as well.

Property theft has dropped dramatically (50% - 80% of all property theft worldwide is caused by drug users).

In the Apple accessory ecosystem, there are thousands of different items for the Mac, iPhone, iPod, and iPad. Out of that huge world, I can think of only one accessory that you can actually stand on -- The Withings Connected Body Scale (US$159.00). I've had the pleasure of using one of these internet-connected scales for about a year now, and I find it to be a help in my daily battle between being a foodie and trying to maintain a decent weight.

Although the Withings Scale can be used with any computer, I like to think of it as an Apple accessory, since I can use my Mac, iPhone, and iPad in various ways to check my diet progress. Withings provides a free iOS app (WiScale) that gives you password-protected access to your weight information, or you can visit the main Withings website to view the same data on your free account.

The scale measures and calculates your weight, fat mass, and BMI (Body Mass Index), and then it transmits that information to the Withings servers via a Wi-Fi connection to your network. Within a very short amount of time, that information can either be accessed privately via a variety of methods or can be sent to the world via Facebook, Twitter, or a blog widget.

The WiFi Body Scale
Your weight charts in your pocket

If the FDA won't go after diet sodas for all the dangerous chemicals they contain, maybe the FTC can take action for false advertising.

There's nothing "diet" about diet sodas. After all, studies have linked them to metabolic syndrome, diabetes, heart problems, and more.

And now, yet another study confirms that people who drink the most diet soda have the biggest bellies.

Researchers from the University of Texas medical school examined data on 474 seniors who took part in the San Antonio Longitudinal Study of Aging, and found that the waistlines of those who drank diet soda grew 70 percent more than those who didn't drink the stuff during the average follow-up of nearly 10 years.

And the more they drank, the more they grew: The researchers say those who drank two or more diet sodas a day had five times the increase in belly size than those who drank no soda, according to the study presented at a recent American Diabetes Association meeting.

In real terms, that means a diet soda habit will put you into pants with a waistline two inches bigger than the ones you're wearing now.

So much for "diet."

Sit-Stand Workstations
We have tested computer use when sitting and standing in different ways (see EHAW). The problem with standing is that when you raise desk height for keyboard/mouse use you need to also raise screen height above the desk or you get neck flexion. Also, for standing computer work the computer fixes the person’s posture there is greater wrist extension and pretty soon people end up leaning which also compromises their wrist posture, thereby increasing the risks of a musculoskeletal disorder like carpal tunnel syndrome.
 
In our field studies of sit-stand workstations we have found little evidence of widespread benefits and users only stand for very short-periods (15 minutes or less total per day). Other studies have found that the use of sit-stand stations rapidly declines so that after 1 month a majority of people are sitting all the time.
 
Others have proposed a treadmill workstation or a bicycle workstation. Both of these have been tested and shown to decrease computer work performance (typing and mousing slows down and significantly more mistakes are made).
 
Sit-stand workstations are expensive and generally ineffective in addressing the issues to hand.
 
The bottom line:
Sit to do computer work. Sit using a height-adjustable, downward titling keyboard tray for the best work posture, then every 20 minutes stand for 2 minutes AND MOVE. The absolute time isn’t critical but about every 20-30 minutes take a posture break and move for a couple of minutes.  Simply standing is insufficient. Movement is important to get blood circulation through the muscles. Research shows that you don’t need to do vigorous exercise (e.g. jumping jacks) to get the benefits, just walking around is sufficient. So build in a pattern of creating greater movement variety in the workplace (e.g. walk to a printer, water fountain, stand for a meeting, take the stairs, walk around the floor, park a bit further away from the building each day).
 
So the key is to build movement variety into the normal workday.

This summer, 28-year-old Anthony Shepherd and his wife of seven years, Cynthia, will fly from China, where they've been teaching English since 2009, to Wisconsin for a vacation. In addition to relaxing, catching up with friends, and attending her brother's wedding, they plan on stopping by a vasectomy clinic. The People's Republic may be notorious for its one-child policy, but the Shepherds' attitude toward reproduction is even more stringent. Call it the zero-child policy.

Even before the Shepherds left Asheville, North Carolina, for Sichuan province, they'd made their life decision based on the experiences of their "childed" friends. "We watched them struggle to pay bills, find suitable apartments or houses to fit their families, and work at jobs they didn't like because they needed the insurance," Cynthia says. So she and Anthony enthusiastically took a pass on parenthood, an increasingly common decision for America's couples.

Even limited exposure to tobacco or secondhand smoke can lead to cardiovascular and other health problems, a new US public health report said Thursday.
The US Surgeon General's report, the latest update to its first study in 1964 highlighting tobacco dangers, said that even an occasional cigarette or exposure to secondhand smoke is harmful.
The latest report "substantiates the evidence that there is no safe level of exposure to cigarette smoke," said Surgeon General Regina Benjamin, who serves as the top public health adviser to the White House.
"You don't have to be a heavy smoker or a long-time smoker to get a smoking-related disease or have a heart attack or asthma attack that is triggered by tobacco smoke," said the report.
"Low levels of smoke exposure, including exposures to secondhand tobacco smoke, lead to a rapid and sharp increase in dysfunction and inflammation of the lining of the blood vessels, which are implicated in heart attacks and stroke."

(Reuters) - Around one in a hundred deaths worldwide is due to passive smoking, which kills an estimated 600,000 people a year, World Health Organization (WHO) researchers said on Friday.

In the first study to assess the global impact of second-hand smoke, WHO experts found that children are more heavily exposed to second-hand smoke than any other age-group, and around 165,000 of them a year die because of it.