M.J. Rose

It’s no wonder we never got any rest at those sleepovers when we were kids…

Half Your Brain Stands Guard When Sleeping In A New Place

Heard on All Things Considered

When you sleep in unfamiliar surroundings, only half your brain is getting a good night’s rest.

“The left side seems to be more awake than the right side,” says Yuka Sasaki, an associate professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences at Brown University.

The finding, reported Thursday in the journal Current Biology, helps explain why people tend to feel tired after sleeping in a new place. And it suggests people have something in common with birds and sea mammals, which frequently put half their brain to sleep while the other half remains on guard.

Sleep researchers discovered the “first-night effect” decades ago, when they began studying people in sleep labs. The first night in a lab, a person’s sleep is usually so bad that researchers simply toss out any data they collect…”

Read the rest here.

Listen below:

The Menehune. Are they the stuff of myth, or were they the original settlers of Hawaii? What is the evidence?…

From Ancient Origins,

The Menhune of Hawaii – Ancient Race or Fictional Fairytale?

“In Hawaiian mythology, the Menehune are said to be an ancient race of people small in stature, who lived in Hawaii before settlers arrived from Polynesia. Many scholars attribute ancient structures found on the Hawaiian Islands to the Menehune. However, others have argued that the legends of the Menehune are a post-European contact mythology and that no such race existed.

The mythology of the Menehune is as old as the beginnings of Polynesian history. When the first Polynesians arrived in Hawaii, they found dams, fish-ponds, roads, and even temples, all said to have been built by the Menehune who were superb craftspeople. Some of these structures still exist, and the highly-skilled craftsmanship is evident.  According to legend, each Menehune was a master of a certain craft and had one special function they accomplished with great precision and expertise. They would set out at dusk to build something in one night, and if this was not achieved, it would be abandoned.

Some scholars, such as folklorist Katharine Luomala, theorize that the Menehune were the first settlers of Hawaii, descendants of the Marquesas islanders who were believed to have first occupied the Hawaiian Islands from around 0 to 350 AD….”

For the rest, click here to go to Ancient Origins.

The Long Now Foundation offers a series of seminars on long term thinking. The speakers are always incredibly interesting. Their most recent speaker was Priyamvada Natarajan. She is a professor in the Departments of Astronomy and Physics at Yale University and at the Dark Cosmology Center, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She is an active proponent for the public understanding and study of science.

“These days,” says Priyamvada Natarajan, “data is coming in from the universe faster than theory can keep up with it. We are in a golden age of cosmology.”

Click here to go straight to her seminar.

The darkness of dark matter and dark energy
ALL THAT WE KNOW of the universe we get from observing photons, Natarajan pointed out. But dark matter, which makes up 90 percent of the total mass in the universe, is called dark because it neither emits nor reflects photons?—?and because of our ignorance of what it is. It is conjectured to be made up of still-unidentified exotic collisionless particles which might weigh about six times more than an electron.

Though some challenge whether dark matter even exists, Natarajan is persuaded that it does because of her research on “the heaviest objects in the universe“?—?galaxy clusters of more than 1,000 galaxies. First of all, the rotation of stars within galaxies does not look Keplerian?—?the outermost stars move far too quickly, as discovered in the 1970s. Their rapid rate of motion only makes sense if there is a vast “halo” of dark matter enclosing each galaxy….”

For the rest of the description and the entire recorded seminar, click here to go to the Long Now Foundation website.