Fed2 Star - the newsletter for the space trading game Federation 2

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by ibgames

EARTHDATE: January 26, 2014

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REAL LIFE NEWS: LARK OR OWL: IT’S ALL IN THE GENES

by Hazed

Anyone who knows me is aware that I am not a morning person. Like Garfield, I would happily sleep till noon then stay up all night. By contrast, Alan is one of those annoying people who gets out of bed several hours before dawn – around the time I would prefer to be just dropping off to sleep. In other words, I’m a night owl, and he’s a morning lark.

According to new research, the reason for our wildly different sleep patterns is in our genes. That’s what Dr Louis Ptacek, a neurogeneticist at the University of California, says: “Whether we like it or not our parents are telling us when to go to bed – based on the genes that they gave us.”

He is studying the families of extreme larks who suffer from Familial Advanced Sleep Phase syndrome – which is a fancy way of saying being a lark runs in the family – as well as the extreme owls who suffer from Familial Delayed Sleep Phase syndrome. It means that people’s body clocks don’t run to a strict 24 hour schedule, but are shorter for larks or longer for owls.

They have discovered that the cause is down to a mutation in a gene. If it’s mutated in one way it makes you a lark, if it’s mutated a different way, you’ll be an owl.

Presumably if an owl marries a lark, their kids could end up either way – unless the conflicting sleep patterns cancel each other out and produce someone with completely normal body clocks!

Read more about these sleep phase syndromes, and other sleep disorders, at the source link below.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-25777978

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