Articulatory Loop

I'm finding it harder and harder to wake up in the morning. I don't know if this is a result of hating my job, getting older, or something else, but there it is. A new study suggests that the Accepted Logic of college, that an all-nighter is almost always preferable to an inadequate night's sleep, is in fact true. As long as your test is within 30 minutes of your waking up. This effect seems only really relevant to people like the night doctors mentioned in the article, but it's still interesting.

Pretty much everything else falls to the wayside of work, and it's clearly not healthy. Yet another part of our work-obsessed culture that may be harming us is a bit subtler: eating lunch alone at our desks. This is something I really, really hate, and I'd never even thought about the unsanitary aspects of it. On (rare) days when I eat in the conference room with coworkers, or (even more rarely) go out, I come back feeling much more refreshed, and work more productively for the rest of the afternoon. Yet another healthier habit the French have on us: a long lunch!

And, one of my favorite proteins, Hedgehog, seems to have an inhibitory action on fat formation, and that the decrease in Hedgehog signaling as we age could account for later-life weight gain. More cowbellhedgehog!