Breakthroughs Today

Something humans let go for centuries since they adapted to modern conventions turns out to be an effective cure of insomnia.   THE ex-Marine protagonist in Andrew Peterson’s novel First to Kill (2008) believed in this rule: “Sleep when you can.” This serves well in military operations when, at the sight of enemies, no sleep becomes necessary until the mission has been accomplished.   But insomnia can make ordinary civilians behave like soldiers to their detriment. Who can beat insomnia at its peak? People of advanced age mostly have it, or at least their sleeping hours get shorter and shorter with age. Adults who have an increasingly hectic city lifestyle can be so primed up with stress that they may not put their heartbeats or their minds to rest even as the dawn breaks. Chronic insomnia has been estimated to cost tens of billions of dollars annually in the United States alone.   You cannot just pop down sleeping pills whenever you want it. Drug dependence can be as de

Sleep is a natural recharger of physical and mental energies that is available to human beings even if some would prefer to ignore this God-given gift for whatever reason. A few still would have wanted to sleep sound like a baby who have forgotten their midnight crying routine, and cannot do so no matter what they do. Again, science tries to look for a solution, and somehow recently found one. And yet like many scientific solutions, a "cure" can be as easily considered a vector of a disease or disorder on account of their side effects alone. Here's a recent one on the matter. SPANISH author Leon de Rotrou wrote in his work Vencelas: “What I take from my nights, I add to my days.” But what happens when night takes from your days, and adds it to your nights? The United States Food and Drug Administration approved on Nov. 23 2011 a new sleeping pill called Intermezzo to help middle-of-the-night insomniacs to get back to sleep. Transcept Pharmaceuticals desig