March 18, 2024: The benefits of snoozing, better boiling, and is time travel possible? —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | Well it's Monday again, and I have some good news for my fellow alarm snoozers. A recent study found that hitting the snooze button to give yourself 30 minutes more of sleep improved or did not affect cognition compared with people who woke up the first time their alarm went off. This adds to research in 2022 that also found chronic snoozers generally felt no sleepier than nonsnoozers.
How it works: Snoozing in the final minutes of sleep could effectively shift the brain out of deep sleep and help people wake up during lighter sleep. It might also help to decrease "sleep inertia"--that state of waking disoriented from deep sleep– so you feel more alert and energetic in the morning.
What the experts say: For people who are getting enough sleep, the optimal snooze time is about 20 to 30 minutes, says Thomas Kilkenny, director of the Institute of Sleep Medicine at Staten Island University Hospital. That's equivalent to hitting the snooze button every five to 10 minutes for a total of three or four times. For those of us who dread the sound of the alarm clock, this is music to the ears. | | | There's now a better way to boil water. Researchers installed an array of 80-micron-diameter cavities and 40-micron-wide grooves on a boiling chamber's bottom. This microstructure gave forming bubbles specific sites on which to latch and grow, resulting in smaller, more closely packed bubbles. Changes in surface energy helped pairs of coalesced bubbles to snap free, jump-starting their ascent, overall creating more, regularly released bubbles. In a typically-heated liquid, bubbles form irregularly along the bottom of the container and only rise when they are as large as several millimeters in diameter.
Why this matters: Bubbles rising through boiling liquid are some of the most naturally efficient ways to transfer heat away. Creating more efficient surfaces on which bubbles can form and rise up could help improve heat-transfer efficiency in liquid-cooling systems for data centers and power plants.
What the experts say: The new microstructured surface might be easily stamped or 3-D printed on various materials, says Kansas State University microfluidics engineer Amy Betz. "It could have far-reaching implications in heat exchangers, boilers and electronics cooling," she adds. | | | • A government auditor warned a congressional hearing last week that FEMA likely will run out of money in summer to cover disaster recovery after hurricanes, tornadoes and floods. | 3 min read | | | • People over 65 are particularly vulnerable to COVID and should get another vaccine against the disease this spring, doctors say. | 4 min read | | | • Our space editors have a friendly debate over whether time travel is possible. | 9 min listen | | | • The largest and most comprehensive studies of "Havana syndrome" show no brain damage or medical illness. | 7 min read | | | • A number of researchers, including political scientists and mathematicians, have developed sophisticated tools to identify gerrymandering where it exists now and to guide in the creation of new districts. But such tools only take us so far in the presence of biased lawmakers with differing values, writes Matthew R. Francis, theoretical physicist and science writer. "It irks me to say that math can't solve the problem, because math didn't create gerrymandering. Politics did. And politics, however necessary, ain't governed by science," he says. | 5 min read | | | Credit: ESO/A. Garufi et al.; R. Dong et al.; ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO) (CC BY 4.0) | | | Dust swirls around the MWC 758 planet-forming disk, located about 500 light-years away from Earth in the Taurus region, in this composite image from two different observatories. The yellow regions show scattered light from the dust; the blue regions correspond to light emitted from the warm dust. Such detailed views are helping astronomers learn more about the mysterious process of planetary birth. | | | Have you not quite adjusted to the shift to daylight saving time? Apparently, depending on your "chronotype"--that is, how your behavior is synced to the 24-hour day--the loss of one hour has varying effects. Naturally early risers (called "morning larks") adapt over a few days to the change, whereas "night owls" can feel the jet-lag-type effects for up to a week or more. Fascinatingly, our chronotypes fluctuate throughout life, especially between childhood and adulthood. Children start as morning larks and grow later and later until their "owlness" peaks around age 20. After 20 they become earlier risers as they age. | To all the owls and larks out there: Thank you for making time to read Today in Science. Reach out anytime with ideas and feedback: newsletters@sciam.com. Until tomorrow! | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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