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On June 14, 2011, Dr. Charles Czeisler stood by the side of a small stage, listening as a colleague introduced him to a crowd of fellow researchers.

Just as he prepared to ascend the steps, his cell phone vibrated in his pocket. He’s not sure why he answered it. Maybe he thought it was an emergency; maybe he just wanted to silence it. Either way, he took the call. From the other end of the line he heard the plea of a team physician for the Boston Bruins, calling from Vancouver. Deadlocked with the hometown Canucks, the hockey team was one game away from its first Stanley Cup title in 39 years.

Each team had won every game at home—to win the Cup, the Bruins would need to take away the home-ice advantage. “What should we do?

We need to win this one,” Czeisler recalls the physician asking. He thought it was strange timing, to call the night before Game Seven. He’d never spoken to the Bruins, and he didn’t have time to speak right then. He’d call him back after his lecture.

'If you don't sleep the night after training, then even if you sleep the next night or the next night, you never learn.' Czeisler is a tenured professor at Harvard Medical School and a go-to expert for professional sports teams from every major league. In the age of analytics-as-religion, teams are looking for every possible way to squeeze more skill out of elite athletes. They consult experts on everything from the number of minutes a player should be on the court to how many fourth down conversions they should attempt.

But Czeisler recommends something much simpler: more sleep. Professional athletes need the same thing as new parents. The director of the, Czeisler is known around the National Basketball Association (NBA) as the Sleep Doctor.

Jovial, he presents most of the research with a slight laugh, as if to say none of this should come as a surprise. It’s sleep. And yet, it’s so poorly understood. Beyond sports, he’s also consulted with NASA and the Secret Service. Czeisler offers the generally accepted advice—naps before games or shifts, seven to nine hours each night. But when he addressed a group of analytics-crazed team officials, sportswriters, and entrepreneurs at the 2014 Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, he said something less expected: It’s the sleep after an event, a lesson, a game, that is most important.

“Interestingly, if you don’t sleep the night after training, then even if you sleep the next night or the next night, you never learn,” he told me in a follow-up interview. In a 2011 on the literature related to sleep, his colleagues Richard Stickgold and Erin Wamsley explained, “During all stages of sleep, the mind and brain are working to process new memories, consolidating them into long-term storage and integrating recently acquired information with past experience.” Offering a rudimentary explanation of circadian cycles, Czeisler explains that when we sleep, we repeatedly go through 90-to-120-minute cycles. Within those cycles, there are two main types of sleep: deep and rapid-eye-movement (REM).

At first, the cycles are dominated by deep sleep, as our brains drain toxins that have built up throughout the day. The brain also flushes out excess synapses—the connections between neurons—that form during waking hours. In the process, the brain consolidates memories and rebuilds energy stores. As the night goes on, the balance shifts, with more active REM dominating the final cycles. Most of the dreams we remember occur during REM. Stickgold had proven the importance of sleep in integrating new memories in a 2010 study that tested the memories of 60 people.

Split into two groups, learned a set of words, some real and some made up, that sounded similar to common words—like “cathedruke,” similar to cathedral. The first group learned the words in the evening, took a test, slept for the night, and took another test. The tests involved recalling as many words as possible in three minutes—free recall—and recalling words when prompted with the first few sounds—cued recall. Participants had 10 seconds to recall a word with cued recall. The second group learned the words in the morning, took a test, stayed awake for the day, and then took the second test.

The subjects in the first group showed improved free and cued recall after sleeping the night; the subjects in the second group, who stayed awake between tests, showed no measurable improvements in free recall and were worse when asked to recall the words on cue. Both groups were tested for a third time one week later. This time, the sleeping group showed no improvement from the previous week. The subjects in the second group, though, showed improved recall once they had had a chance to sleep, indicating that sleep is crucial to integrating new words into existing vocabulary. Czeisler also loves to point to a conducted at MIT in 2009. By studying the brains of mice as they navigated through a maze, and then as they slept afterwards, researchers were able to determine that the mice were replaying new experiences in their brains as they slept.

This replay during sleep proved vital to forming long-term memories and remembering how to navigate the maze. Fully integrating the day’s lessons requires seven to nine hours of sleep, Czeisler says. “If you lop off the last two hours of the night, you’re missing most of the REM time of sleep that you would have,” and therefore missing out on important steps in integrating the new memories. For the teams he advises, sleep is never more important than in extended series, like the potential seven-game bouts that NBA and National Hockey League (NHL) teams are embarking on this week as the playoffs for both sports begin.

“You notice some teams seem to learn the moves of the other team, so they can actually counter their offense more effectively in later games,” he explains. “So that team that might’ve lost the first few games starts winning.”. * * * When Czeisler started working with Portland’s basketball team, the Trail Blazers, in 2009, the players and coaches were rarely getting more than two or three hours of sleep between back-to-back games. When traveling, they were expected to just sleep on the plane. At home, they had early morning practices. So not only were they missing out on that crucial post-game sleep, they were just sleep-deprived in general. While many of the benefits of getting enough sleep—clearer thinking, more consistent metabolism—are well-established, the particular effects of sleep deprivation are less understood.

'Asking athletes to play on minimal sleep degrades their ability to get the most benefit out of training. They spend all this time practicing but never get to sleep.' Asking athletes to play on minimal sleep is the same as asking them to “play with one hand tied behind their back,” Czeisler says. “It’s making them do something we know degrades their reaction time, their ability to take in their training, to get the most benefit out of it. They spend all this time practicing but never get to sleep.” “Definitely, we know that sleep deprivation leads to depression, high blood pressure, weight gain, heart disease, and probably mortality,” Dr.

Steven Feinsilver, the director of the at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, 2013. Additionally, a detailed how sleep deprivation increases a person’s risk of developing Type 2 diabetes.

Earlier studies have shown that when a person pulls an all-nighter. Normally about a quarter of a second, it increases to 800 to 900 milliseconds. Introduction To Protein Science Lesk Pdf To Excel. It’s as the difference between being sober and being legally drunk. For elite athletes, emergency room doctors, and cab drivers, among others, losing that half of a second is costly. As Czeisler detailed the detriments of sleep deprivation at the conference, one particular effect caught the attention of just about every guy in the packed room—the lucky ones in seats, the latecomers kneeling on the floor, the ESPN analyst sharing the stage: After just one week of sleeping five hours or less each night, a man’s testosterone levels drop as if he’s aged about 11 years.

In other words, a 22-year-old NBA rookie will have the testosterone levels of a 33-year-old veteran if he doesn’t sleep. Testosterone fuels muscle and impacts decision-making abilities. There’s no way a player is performing at his peak when testosterone is depleted. These numbers come from a in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Previous studies, the authors explained, had shown that “the majority of the daily testosterone release in men occurs during sleep,” and “testosterone is critical in male sexual behavior and reproduction, but also has important beneficial effects on muscle mass and strength, adiposity, bone density, and vigor and well-being.” To draw a connection between these previous findings, Rachel Leproult and Eve Van Cauter studied the testosterone levels of 10 healthy male students at the University of Chicago. After restricting their sleep to 4 hours and 48 minutes each night for one week, their daytime testosterone levels had decreased 10 to 15 percent. The levels were lowest between 2 p.m.

And 10 p.m.—prime hours for working, whether you make a living playing in the NBA or running a small business. By comparison, when men are well rested and aging normally, their testosterone levels drop about 1 to 2 percent each year. How quickly testosterone levels regenerate after sleep loss is still in question. A showed that younger rats bounced back much faster than elderly rats. Testosterone stores started to regenerate in the first day after sleep recovery for the 12-week-old rats; 20-week-old rats had to wait five days for the levels to start restoring. 'We would never say, 'This person is a great worker! He's drunk all the time!'

Yet we continue to celebrate people who sacrifice sleep for work.' Brain scans show that when a person is up all night, the connections between the prefrontal cortex—the area of the brain responsible for judgment—and the amygdala—responsible for emotion—are decreased. Overtired, the amygdala is 60 percent more reactive, according to a. “So now you have the emotional brain and it’s going off on its own without being kept in check by the judgment area of the brain,” Czeisler says. Looking at this, it’s no wonder the number of technical fouls increases after back-to-back road games, he adds. If there is a benefit to lowered testosterone from sleep loss, it could be lowered aggression. A conducted at Brock University in Ontario determined that when men are sleep-deprived, they are less likely to react to something aggressively.

Sleep deprivation had no impact on female aggression. In the NBA, performance in general plummets in back-to-backs, possibly because players are playing more emotionally than strategically; possibly because decreased testosterone levels are hindering their game. In Major League Baseball, home teams score 1.24 more runs when the visiting team has flown in on a red eye, according to a.

There’s minimal impact when the visiting team flies west, indicating that the sleep lost on a red eye is the determining factor. Sleep research has helped countless elite athletes perform at their peak, but athletes are clearly not the only sleep-deprived group of workers. According to Van Cauter, at least 15 percent of U.S. Workers get less than five hours of sleep each night. Czeisler and others have said that we live in a chronically sleep-deprived society. “Today, 30 percent of all employed U.S.

Adults and 44 percent of night workers report averaging less than 6 hours sleep per night, whereas 50 years ago less than 3 percent of the U.S. Adult population slept so little,” he wrote in a.

In a with Harvard Business Review, Czeisler advised that companies should not expect workers to log more than 16 hours in a row, or to drive or work after an overnight flight. 'We now know that 24 hours without sleep, or a week of sleeping four or five hours a night induces an impairment equivalent to a blood alcohol level of.1 percent,” he said. “We would never say, 'This person is a great worker! He's drunk all the time!' Yet we continue to celebrate people who sacrifice sleep for work.'

The culture of overworking employees was brought into question in August 2013 after a 21-year-old intern at Bank of America’s London office died suddenly. He had worked about 72 hours without sleep leading up to his death. An autopsy later ruled it an epileptic seizure—which can be brought on by exhaustion, as The New Yorker's Ruth Margalit —but the tragedy led many Wall Street firms to at least review workloads. The old-school approach of toughing it out is completely bogus, not to mention counterproductive. Long before reaching the workplace, there are countless instances when sleep deprivation impacts performance.

College exam season is quickly approaching. Many of the students will sit through a review session, head home, and cram over the material all night. If they do, they’ll be making a huge mistake.

They’re less likely to retain any of the information learned during that review session, and they’ll be exhausted when they sit for the exam. The same goes for lawyers prepping for a case or traders burning the midnight oil to get an edge. “Sleep plays such a big role in learning and memory,” Czeisler says. “It’s a simple way to have an edge and be able to perform at your best.” When he works with a team, Czeisler’s first move is often encouraging teams to cancel early morning flights and practices. The old-school approach of toughing it out, attempting to beat jet lag, he says, is completely bogus, not to mention counterproductive. That’s what he told the Bruins’ physician on the eve of Game Seven of the 2011 Stanley Cup Finals.

Calling back after his lecture, he asked about the team’s plans for the next day, how they would spend the hours leading up to the 5 p.m. They had a practice scheduled at 10:30 a.m., he was told. That’s when he made his first suggestion: cancel the practice. The guys need to take a nap instead. It would be the equivalent of a 1:30p.m.

Nap in Boston, and would help them make up some of the sleep they’d lost while traveling. The front office listened.

Instead of practicing, the players napped. And that night, the Bruins handily captured the title, winning 4-0 and hoisting the Cup for the first time since 1972. Maybe the nap made the difference; maybe the Vancouver Canucks were more sleep-deprived. Either way, by the time a team makes it to Game Seven, after playing more than 100 games together in the regular season, there are few things it can change to see an immediate impact. A call to the Sleep Doctor, though, could make all the difference. This year, podcasts got funnier, sharper, and even more niche.

Our recommendations here pass a vigorous audio smell test. First, the arrival of a new podcast episode must send you into an ethical quandary: How do I get out of at least some of my obligations today to listen to this?

Second, you must be able to recommend this to a colleague with the knowledge that your reputation is at stake. A podcast that teaches you how to prepare your taxes by hand might blow your hair back, but it’s doubtful you’ll recommend it to anyone aside from your accountant.

Third, we recused ourselves from ranking any podcasts produced by The Atlantic, including and. Finally, the podcast world, like any other sphere, is about what have you done for me lately. The best shows don’t paint themselves into a corner. They evolve and progress or risk their listeners hitting “unsubscribe.” Podcasts, like cowboys, shouldn’t get fenced in.

These shows generated maximum buzz, kept us refreshing our apps, broke boundaries, and made our future selves romanticize the golden years of podcasting. Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News by Kevin Young It’s too bad that Bunk, published just last month, had the misfortune to come out during a time that finds hoaxes and lies to be no longer releva—just kidding. Kevin Young’s rich history of fakery could not, in fact, be more urgent: This is a moment of deeply earned anxiety about the fate of truth itself, one in which science and fact and empiricism are threatened by the same choose-your-own-reality impulses that have been presaged by the forces Young outlines in his subtitle. Young is a poet as well as a critic, author, and professor—he directs the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and recently became the poetry editor of The New Yorker—and Bunk is accordingly deep in its research, profound in its insights, and lyrical in its prose. It begins with the “winged men on the moon” stories published in the New York Sun, the 1835 version of fake-news-y clickbait, and from there offers a wide-ranging biography of B.S., from P.T. Barnum’s “humbugs” to the false fairies of Cottingley to the familiar fakers of the present day: James Frey, Jayson Blair, Lance Armstrong, Rachel Dolezal.

While the details of this chronicle are revelatory in themselves— Bunk offers nearly 500 pages’ worth of folly to explore—the book is even more compelling as an argument: that hoaxes, so tangled with stereotype and systemic lies, are inextricable from race, “a fake thing pretending to be real.” As Young puts its, in one of the many sentences I underlined and margin-starred and will keep thinking of for years to come: “The hoax reminds us, uncomfortably, that the stories we tell don’t just express the society of the self.” Instead, “they construct it.' After the UN General Assembly Thursday voted to reject America’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, Nikki Haley, the U.S. Ambassador to the UN, everyone who sided with the U.S., by voting “no” or by abstaining, to a reception to thank them for their “friendship to the United States.” So who gets to come to the party as official friends of America? The invite list includes seven countries, mainly on Pacific islands and in Central America, plus one in Africa, that joined the U.S. And Israel in voting “no.” That’s not necessarily the set of guests one would expect at an American influence party, since America’s main treaty allies in Europe and Asia didn’t vote with Washington.

(Also invited were the 35 countries that abstained, even though some, like Canada, reportedly abstained as a to the U.S. One hundred and twenty-eight countries voted “yes” and will not be invited.) But the friends list may not be so much a reflection of American influence as Haley’s invitation would suggest. In most of the cases, Israeli diplomacy has been softening the ground for this decision for years, even as President Donald Trump’s America First policy alienates world leaders. The vote, in other words, may say more about Israel’s global standing than America’s. TOKYO—Japan’s population is shrinking.

For the first time since the government started keeping track, there were fewer than 1 million births last year, as the country’s population fell by more than 300,000 people. The blame has long been put on Japan’s young people, who are accused of, and on women, who, the narrative goes, put their careers before thoughts of getting married and having a family. But there’s another, simpler explanation for the country’s low birth rate, one that has implications for the U.S.: Japan’s birth rate may be falling because there are fewer good opportunities for young people, and especially men, in the country’s economy. In a country where men are still widely expected to be breadwinners and support families, a lack of good jobs may be creating a class of men who don’t marry and have children because they—and their potential partners—know they can’t afford to.

It’s Christmastime for workers, and companies want everybody to know. After Congressional Republicans passed their $1.5 trillion package of tax cuts on Wednesday, a number of companies responded by announcing raises or bonuses for their workers.

Comcast it would give $1,000 bonuses to more than 100,000 workers. Fifth Third Bancorp said it would give out bonuses and boost its minimum wage, with the cut, in its words, “the opportunity to reevaluate its compensation structure and share some of those benefits with its talented and dedicated workforce.” AT&T, Boeing, Washington Federal, and Wells Fargo the same. The announcements seemed the result of some basic financial logic: Lower corporate taxes— the Republicans’ bill cut the corporate rate to 21 percent from 35 percent and included provisions to encourage businesses to bring cash back from overseas—would mean higher corporate profits and thus more money to pay workers with. In one illustrious study of love (“human sexual selection”) in 1986, psychologists David Buss and Michael Barnes asked people to 76 characteristics: What do you value most in a potential mate? The winner wasn’t beauty, and it wasn’t wealth. Number one was 'kind and understanding,' followed by 'exciting personality' and then 'intelligent.' Men did say they valued appearances more highly than women did, and women said they valued 'good earning capacity' more highly than men did—but neither ranked measures of physical attractiveness or socioeconomic status among their top considerations.

People, though, are liars. Experiments that don’t rely on self-reporting regularly show that physical attractiveness is exquisitely, at times incomparably, important to both men and women. Status (however you want to measure it: income, formal education, et cetera) is often not far behind. In real-life dating studies, which get closer to genuine intentions, physical attractiveness and earning potential strongly predict romantic attraction. Good news for the environment comes from California today, and from a part of the state very near the hillsides that have suffered the economic and environmental devastation of the recent wildfires.

A renowned tract of undeveloped California coastal land totaling more than 24,000 acres, or about 38 square miles, has been purchased by The Nature Conservancy (TNC) for permanent preservation, thanks to a $165 million donation by a wealthy tech-industry couple. The donation, the largest single gift TNC has ever received, is significant in its immediate effects, and it has the potential to matter even more through the longer-term example it aspires to set. The tract includes hills and canyons, grasslands and brush, 2,000 acres of coastal live-oak stands containing perhaps 1 million trees, a creek, parts of the Santa Ynez mountain range—and a full eight miles of the bluffs and beaches that make up the coastline around Point Conception, west of Santa Barbara. The benefactors are Jack and Laura Dangermond, who founded and still run the Esri mapping company in the small southern California town of Redlands where they both grew up. (For the record: I have known the Dangermonds for many years, having grown up in the same town at about the same time.). BEHZANE, IRAQ—On a recent Friday afternoon, Yezidi musicians led a procession of worshipers toward a newly rebuilt temple on a hillside in northern Iraq. Women burned incense and the congregation threw handfuls of sweets at the flute and drum players.

Hundreds of local Yezidis from the town of Behzane, near Mosul, had gathered to reopen one of the temples blown up by ISIS. “We are so excited to be back,” said a flute player, Arean Hassan. The spiraling, rhythmic music played by Yezidi musicians, known as Qawwals, had been absent from the hills of Behzane for three years under ISIS. Around the newly rebuilt temple stood the charred stumps of olive trees that ISIS had burned to the ground. Behzane fell to ISIS in the summer of 2014, after the group seized Mosul. Ces Cambridge Engineering Selector Software Programs. In August of that year, ISIS massacred and kidnapped thousands of Yezidis in Sinjar, 90 miles west of Behzane. More than 6,000 women were enslaved, and men were lined up and shot outside their towns.

Many more Yezidis died of dehydration and exhaustion during the siege of Sinjar mountain. Thousands of survivors remain displaced or in exile. Twice a day, HQ Trivia players tune in to a smartphone game-show app, where an emcee poses 12 wholesome questions, each with three possible answers. Players who answer all of them correctly split a cash prize. The winnings started at a few hundred bucks when the app launched in the summer, and now average around $1,500. But they go $10,000 or more. The app, created by two former founders of the defunct short-video start-up Vine, has become a sensation.

Around half a million people tune in each session, and less than 100 typically win, making the prize substantial enough to motivate users beyond the usual pleasure of quiz games. That all sounds great.

So why do I feel such dread when I play? It’s not the terror of losing, or even that of being embarrassed for answering questions wrong in front of my family and friends. It’s the dread that the app represents some awful, plausible future not yet realized, but just over the horizon: one where expertise isn’t measured by knowledge, but by instinct tripped out on illusion.

Key players in Jackson wrongful death trial – Dr. Conrad Murray: He was Michael Jackson's personal physician in the two months before his death, giving him nightly infusions of the surgical anesthetic that the coroner ruled led to his death. Murray, who is appealing his involuntary manslaughter conviction, has sworn that he would invoke his Fifth Amendment protection from self-incrimination and refused to testify in the civil trial.

There is a chance that Murray will be brought into court from jail to testify outside the presence of the jury to allow the judge to determine if he would be ordered to testify.