Sleep

In an age of long commutes, late sports practices, endless workdays and 24/7 television programming, the image of Mom hanging up her dish towel at 7 p.m. and declaring "the kitchen is closed" seems a quaint relic of an earlier era. It also harks back to a thinner America. And that may be no coincidence. A new study, conducted on mice, hints at an unexpected contributor to the nation's epidemic of obesity - and, if later human studies bear it out, a possible way to have our cake and eat it too, with less risk of weight gain and the diseases that come with it. Just eat your cake - or better yet, an apple - earlier.

"If people were meant to pop out of bed, we'd all sleep in toasters," a wise, unnamed observer of the human condition once opined. (Some credit Garfield the cat.) Failing that, we could all sleep with gadgets that monitor our sleep and wake us at the moment we're most ready to hit the ground running - or at least not stumbling around in a bleary-eyed daze. A variety of devices are claimed by their makers to do just that - by keeping tabs on your sleep cycle and rousing you at a moment when waking is most natural.

Manny Hamelburg, 68, a retired businessman, had fought prostate cancer for years. First, he tried radiation, then a drug with side effects that nearly killed him, and finally Lupron, a drug that blocks production of testosterone, the hormone that can fuel prostate cancer. The cancer disappeared. But life was miserable. Without normal levels of testosterone, Hamelburg says, he had no energy, and "zero libido for seven years. I was like a eunuch. I was chemically castrated. Sex was just hugs."

SAN FRANCISCO - Dustin Moskovitz, at 27 the world's youngest billionaire, gained fame and fortune after founding Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg. He also gained the "Facebook 15. " He packed on the extra pounds while chowing down on free snacks and guzzling four sodas a day at the social networking giant. Today, Moskovitz is a svelte version of his former self. He runs Asana, a start-up named after the Sanskrit word for traditional yoga sitting positions. That's fitting since the company holds twice weekly group yoga classes at its San Francisco offices.

You're ON the verge of falling asleep, and then it starts. The snorting. The choking sounds. Sometimes there's even a little whistle to it. A family member or roommate sleeping nearby has launched into an all-night bout of snoring, and you're the one who is going to lie awake all night listening to it. According to the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, 45% of normal adults snore at least occasionally, and 25% are habitual snorers....

How can you tell if you or someone you know is having a heart attack? Sometimes the symptoms can be surprisingly subtle. "They can be very different from person to person, between women and men and even within an individual who has more than one heart attack," says Dr. David Rizik, director of Interventional Cardiology for Scottsdale Healthcare Hospitals, in Scottsdale, Ariz. Men and women may experience atypical heart attack symptoms. In contrast to the "classic" chest-splitting, gasping-for-breath symptoms, many heart attacks begin with symptoms that are so mild they are often mistaken for indigestion or muscle ache.

After eight nights in the hospital for debilitating headaches, Laurel Carpenter was ready to go home and finally get what the doctor ordered -- a good night's sleep. From a private room in a Los Angeles hospital last summer, Carpenter had endured a torrent of interruptions and noise that could wake even the sedated.

Geoff Long was having trouble getting the words out. It was an easy question and he knew the answer right off. But Long, press secretary to the chairman of the state Assembly Ways and Means Committee, was astonished to find himself tripping over his tongue and tumbling into long, embarrassing pauses when he tried to reply. "I knew what I wanted to say but the words just wouldn't come," he remembers.

IF it's been a year or two since you've shopped for a mattress, you're in for some surprises. That memory foam bed that once seemed so novel? It's now decidedly mainstream. Latex is the hot material of choice. And that's not all that's changed. Choices are multiplying -- especially on the luxury end -- and prices are too.

It's a universal truth: When you're in your 20s, you can stay out all night and look fresh the next morning. Unfortunately, as we age, lack of sleep affects us more deeply and shows more prominently on our faces -- lackluster complexions, dark circles, fine lines and, in more extreme cases, rashes and eczema. Progressive loss of cellular water may be one reason sleepless nights affect our skin more visibly as we age, says board-certified dermatologist Dr. Howard Murad. Water retention is key to keeping skin moisturized and supple, which can translate to fewer lines and a smoother complexion.

George Karl tends to get up early when he's home in Denver. Having two black Labrador retrievers that expect to be fed at sunrise can create that habit. It was during a reflective moment just after daybreak Monday that something dawned on the Denver Nuggets coach. "I sat on my porch and just kept saying to myself, 'They're not that much better than we are,' " Karl recalled Wednesday. He was referring to the Lakers, who were supposed to easily brush aside Karl's Nuggets in their first-round playoff series on the way to bigger challenges.

Feeling a little sleepy? You're not alone. According to a report this week from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 30% of American workers are sleep-deprived - and that has big consequences for public health. First, let's take a closer look at the numbers. Three out of 10 working adults reported getting six or fewer hours of shut-eye per night, according to data from the 2010 National Health Interview Survey. That translates to about 40.6 million people. The burden wasn't felt equally across the board.

Can Lonely Planet fans give up their Bible-sized guidebooks for a teeny-tiny app? Name: Lonely Planet Country Guides Available for: iPhone, iPod Touch What it does: Get thousands of recommendations for places to eat, sleep, sight-see and more. Lonely Planet's guides to Italy, Ireland, Australia, France, Spain and Costa Rica are the first to become apps. Cost: $9.99 What's hot: The entire app is available offline, so there's no sweating data or roaming fees.

Give a little, get a little. That's the idea behind a package at Tenaya Lodge in Yosemite National Park that this month will donate 10% of each visitor's stay to the nonprofit Yosemite Conservancy . Guests receive a reward too: two guided hikes for the price of one. The deal: The Yosemite Give Green Package gives nods to a slew of planet-friendly holidays such as National Park Week (April 21-29) and Earth Day (April 22). The package includes deluxe and cottage room stays that start at $215 plus tax per night.

They touch down at another NBA city and check their smartphones to help them adjust to a new time zone while their own bodies struggle. They arrive with bags under their eyes and often depart that city a day later sleepless, jet-lagged, stowing sore joints and heavy legs. During this lockout-shortened NBA season, it's been a grueling routine: 66 games played in 124 days, a pace of one per 1.88 days, or 8.5% faster than a usual season. Every team has played back-to-back-to-back sets and stretches such as nine games in 12 days; the Clippers played 20 games in 31 days in March, a marathon that has not been on the NBA schedule in 45 years.

Too little sleep - or disrupted sleep - seems to increase the risk of diabetes and obesity, scientists found during a recent lab experiment. Orfeu Buxton, a neuroscientist and sleep researcher at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, placed 21 test subjects in isolation for nearly six weeks.  For the three weeks before the experiment began, he and his colleagues instructed the volunteers to spend 10 hours in bed, to make sure they got an optimal level of sleep.   Then the subjects moved into dimly lit, isolated suites in the laboratory, where the research team removed "time cues" and otherwise disrupted the volunteers' sleep, allowing them only about five hours of per 28-hour period, scattered over various times of the day and the night.  Participants were not allowed visitors or Internet access.  One person came in with 20 years' worth of photo-stuffed boxes and came out with well-organized photo albums, Buxton said.  Another wrote a long paper.

The not-for-kids picture book "Go the F--- to Sleep" by Adam Mansbach has become a viral sensation after excerpts from the book were circulated over the Internet. It appears to be wildly successful; even though it's not even out yet it's become the No. 1 book sold on Amazon.com. Why are parents flocking to this off-color book? And does it provide welcome release for tired parents or an excuse to behave badly about child-rearing? Commenters on a L.A. Times article about the book weighed in — some denounced the foul language and blamed bad parenting for insomniac toddlers; others found it funny and advised other commenters to lighten up. Studies have shown that children's sleeping patterns may dictate their parents' functioning, quality of life and marital happiness.

Forgotten how to do something you just learned yesterday? Consider the possibility that last night's sleep was punctuated by mini-awakenings, robbing you of the ability to commit that new skill to memory. You might have gotten eight hours of sleep, and may not even feel tired. But when sleep is interrupted frequently--as it is in a wide range of disorders, including sleep apnea, alcoholism and Alzheimer's disease--the ability to learn new things can be dramatically impaired, says a new study conducted on mice.

A year ago, Adam Mansbach was an award-winning novelist and aspiring screenwriter wrapping up a two-year teaching job at Rutgers University. That was before his off-color picture book, "Go the F - to Sleep," became an international phenomenon, catapulting the sleep-deprived father of one to the tops of bestseller lists and into the eye of a parenting maelstrom. Since its publication last June, actor Samuel Jackson and director Werner Herzog have recorded audio versions and Fox 2000 plans to make it into a major motion picture.

SEATTLE -- For the city of Seattle, Amazon.com has long been the 500-pound gorilla. But it isn't on fine display at the zoo, where the city can preen and show off the $48-billion-a-year company to visitors. Rather, the company is more like King Kong in the jungle, a powerful, largely invisible and vaguely threatening presence. Started in 1994 in the Seattle suburbs, the online retailer is one of the city's biggest downtown tenants, spread across a dozen buildings in the city's up-and-coming South Lake Union neighborhood.