Person-directed, non-pharmacological interventions for sleepiness at work and sleep disturbances caused by shift work.

Background: Shift work is often associated with sleepiness and sleep disorders. Person-directed, non-pharmacological interventions may positively influence the impact of shift work on sleep, thereby improving workers' well-being, safety, and health.

Objectives: To assess the effects of person-directed, non-pharmacological interventions for reducing sleepiness at work and improving the length and quality of sleep between shifts for shift workers.

The discovery of slowness: Time to deconstruct Gretzky's and Messi's predictive brains.

Jafari and Smith hypothesized that time during games may pass slower for the world's best football player, Lionel Messi, from Argentina. This hypothesis leads to two questions: How can we explain such temporal paradox and how could this explain his dominant performances? Remarkably, the Argentinian's case was preceded by the equally astonishing case of Wayne Gretzky: The Canadian considered ice hockey as a rather slow game and was the best player in the sport's history. Whether Messi's and Gretzky's motor neurons fire faster, (inter)act differently or whether other mechanisms are at (inter)play warrants targeted research.

Chronomedicine: an old concept's fledging? A selective literature search.

Chronomedicine may be conceptualized as dealing with the prevention, causation, diagnosis, and treatment of diseases in humans with a particular focus on the role "time" [Greek: chrónos] plays in our physiology, endocrinology, metabolism and behavior at many organizational levels. While it has been used as a term and somewhat pursued as a discipline for decades, it appears that chronomedicine has captured a broader interest as a promising specialty only more recently. This commentary addresses roots of chronomedicine in the 1900s and perspectives for chronomedicine in the 21st century.

Effects of noise in primary schools on health facets in German teachers.

Empirical research indicates that children and teachers are exposed to mean sound levels between 65 and 87 dB (A) and peak sound levels of 100 dB (A) in schools, which may lead to hearing loss and mental health problems. A questionnaire containing 13 targeted questions about noise and sensitivity to noise was distributed to 43 teachers aged between 25 and 64 years at five different primary schools in the Cologne municipal area. The small number of interrogated teachers leads to a wide range of deviation and little significance in the results.

Sound levels and their effects on children in a German primary school.

Considerable sound levels are produced in primary schools by voices of children and resonance effects. As a consequence, hearing loss and mental impairment may occur. In a Cologne primary school, sound levels were measured in three different classrooms, each with 24 children, 8-10 years old, and one teacher.

The chronosense -- what light tells man about biological time.

In the past 10 years, experimental studies have provided further evidence for the suggestion that the eye serves man as a dual sense organ, viz as a sense organ for sight but also for time and the regulation of biological rhythms. A small group of scientists interested in the adjustment of biological rhythms to the key Zeitgeber light wanted to answer the question whether rods and/or cones and/or other uncharacterized retinal photoreceptors contribute to this function in mammals. Intriguingly, in the course of elegant research, a number of laboratories around the world have been zeroing in on a novel non-rod, non-cone ocular photopigment which serves a number of responses to non-image-forming (NIF) photoreception in mammals.