THANKS Grandad for saving me from untimely demise at the teeth of wildlife - well, maybe.
New research out of Duke University, USA, has demonstrated that in a hunter-gather community, through the full range of chronotypes (members of a group with different circadian rhythms), one or more individuals will be awake for 99.8% of the time.
"Chronotype variation and wakeful older individuals in modern humans may be a legacy of natural selection acting to reduce the dangers of sleep," authors concluded.
They had tracked the sleep activity of modern day hunter-gatherers in Tanzania finding that, over a period of twenty days, there were only eighteen minutes when no-one was awake.
Wake up Jeff!
CLICK HERE for the study.
Bigger than Ben Hur? Actually completely the opposite.
Scientists in the USA have encoded a short movie into the DNA of living bacteria cells.
The Harvard University researchers transferred the "mini film" - just five frames long, depicting a galloping horse - onto nucleotides and then used CRISPR technology to encode them into E.coli bacteria.
They believe the technology could be used as a future storage medium, saying DNA is "much more stable than silicon memory if you want to hold something for thousands of years".
The above article was sent to subscribers in Pharmacy Daily's issue from 14 Jul 17
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