Kat Duff's Blog

What do we humans have in common with ocean plankton – specifically  the marine ragworm, Platynereis dumerilii? Melatonin. Scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory recently discovered that melatonin, the hormone that regulates our sleep and waking cycles, also regulates the rising and falling of Platynereis larvae. (1) The Platynereis dumerilii are centipede-like worms that produce larvae […]

Jeff Mann (over at Sleep Junkies) has put together a great info-graphic summarizing recent research on how poor sleep promotes weight gain. It’s a multifaceted relationship that is both physiological and psychological, and he has kindly made it available for re-posting. (Unfortunately, I can’t make the graphic smaller, so there’s overlap on my site. You […]

Sleeping pills are among the most advertised, prescribed and profitable medications available. Last week, a market research group revealed that $54.9 billion were spent on sleep aids worldwide in 2013, and predicted the figure would rise to $55.8 billion this year . (1) The figures continue to rise despite the fact that the use of […]

Now that school is out, the days are long (for those of us living in the northern hemisphere), and summer’s heat is kicking in, it’s a perfect time to sleep outdoors. Whether you are camping in the back yard or in a national park, sleeping on the porch or the roof, or taking a nap […]

It used to be that New York City alone claimed the title of “The City That Never Sleeps.” Then Berlin, Hong Kong and London joined in, followed by Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Tel Aviv, Mumbai, Cairo, Madrid, Barcelona and Belgrade. Now, most every urban center in the world can lay claim to the title, with […]

The kind folks at Beyond Words (an imprint of Simon & Schuster) are publishing a book I’ve been working on for years, and it comes out tomorrow, March 11. For those of you who have been following this blog for some time, I want to assure you that it’s not just a compilation of my […]

If the results of the world’s largest sleep survey are accurate, it only gets better after 60. 156,000 adults answered questions about their sleep, health, and daytime alertness, and the results (published in the March issue of the journal Sleep) surprised everyone, including the researchers: Sleep problems and daytime tiredness declined across the lifespan, and […]

Sleep poses a serious problem for space travel. Many factors – tight quarters, ambient noise,  zero gravity, and the absence of earth-based day/night cycles – make it hard to fall and stay asleep. Astronauts compensate by sleeping in bags velcroed to the wall (so they won’t float off), wearing eye masks to keep out the […]

It’s a common experience: You’re making that long drive home, miss your turn and don’t realize it until much later. What happened? Highway hypnosis. White line fever. Driving Without Attention Mode (DWAM). Whatever you call it, when we are tired and performing monotonous, routine activities like driving, it’s easy to slip into auto-pilot, a state […]

Neuroscientists at the University of Rochester Medical Center recently made a remarkable discovery: toxic wastes are flushed out of our brains while we sleep. (1) They watched it happen in sleeping mice – and since people are not that different from the little whiskered critters – it’s probably fair to assume the same happens when […]