"When you're out in the field," said Dr Thornton, "if you're studying certain groups, you always set your alarm a bit later because they're consistently lazy." The new study revealed that this laziness or liveliness has a "cultural basis".

"If a nasal spray can improve memory, perhaps we're on our way to giving some folks a whiff of common sense, such as accepting the realities of evolution," said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal. "This is exciting piece of interdisciplinary science, since IL-6 had previously been considered a by-product of inflammation, not an agent that affects cognition."

"The scientists were searching the samples for variations in several genes thought to be related to the sleep cycle. In what amounts to finding a needle in a haystack, they spotted two DNA samples with abnormal copies of a gene called DEC2, which is known to affect circadian rhythms. They then worked back to find out who provided the samples and found a mother and daughter who were naturally short sleepers. The women routinely function on about 6 hours of sleep a night; the average person needs 8 to 8.5 hours of sleep."

"Nothing like the image of a condom 100 times its actual size lying on your bed to remind you to wrap before it up before you get it on!"

"Me: Oh, did you think that was my wake-up alarm? It’s actually my snuggle alarm."

In other words, our constant exposure to artificial light is leaving our bodies out of sync with the light rhythms of the natural world. One way to get the body's natural rhythms back in sync is to rough it, Czeisler said. "People who camp report they sle