Sleeping in fragments, as opposed to getting a full night’s rest of about 7-8 hours, negatively affects the brain’s ability to build memories. According to a study on mice conducted by Stanford University, disrupting sleep made it harder for mice to recognize familair objects.

BBC reports:

A UK sleep expert said the brain used deep sleep to evaluate the day’s events and decide what to keep.

This study looked at sleep that was fragmented, but not shorter or less intense than normal for the mice.

It used a technique called optogenetics, where specific cells are genetically engineered so they can be controlled by light.

They targeted a type of brain cell that plays a key role in switching between the states of being asleep and being awake.

Mouse memory test

This meant they could disrupt their sleep without affecting total sleep time or the quality or composition of sleep.

The animals were then placed in a box with two objects, one of which they had encountered before.

Mice would naturally spend more time examining the newer object, and those who had been allowed uninterrupted sleep did just that.

But those whose sleep had been disrupted were equally interested in both objects, suggesting their memories had been affected.

Writing in the journal, the researchers, led by Dr Luis de Lecea, said: “Sleep continuity is one of the main factors affected in various pathological conditions that impact memory, including Alzheimer’s and other age-related cognitive deficits.”

Broken sleep also affects people addicted to alcohol, and those with sleep apnoea – a condition in which the throat repeatedly narrows or closes during sleep, restricting oxygen and causing the patient to wake up.

The researchers add there is no evidence of a causal link between sleep disruption and any of these conditions.

But they added: “We conclude that regardless of the total amount of sleep or sleep intensity, a minimal unit of uninterrupted sleep is crucial for memory consolidation.”

Independent sleep expert Dr Neil Stanley, a former chairman of the British Sleep Society, said: “During the day, we accumulate all these memories.

“At some point we have to sort through what’s happened during the day.

“There are some things that we need to ‘lock down’ as a permanent hard memory.

“That process occurs in deep sleep. So anything that affects sleep will have an effect on that process to a greater or a lesser extent.”

Dr Stanley said there was particularly striking evidence that people with sleep apnoea had particular problems “locking down” memories.

And he added that people with Alzheimer’s often had trouble sleeping, but said: “There is something there. But whether it’s the degeneration of the brain that causes poor sleep, or poor sleep that aids the degeneration of the brain has not been determined.”

If Aubrey de Grey’s predictions are right, the first person who will live to see their 150th birthday has already been born. And the first person to live for 1,000 years could be less than 20 years younger.

A biomedical gerontologist and chief scientist of a foundation dedicated to longevity research, de Grey reckons that within his own lifetime doctors could have all the tools they need to “cure” aging — banishing diseases that come with it and extending life indefinitely.

“I’d say we have a 50/50 chance of bringing aging under what I’d call a decisive level of medical control within the next 25 years or so,” de Grey said in an interview before delivering a lecture at Britain’s Royal Institution academy of science.

“And what I mean by decisive is the same sort of medical control that we have over most infectious diseases today.”

De Grey sees a time when people will go to their doctors for regular “maintenance,” which by then will include gene therapies, stem cell therapies, immune stimulation and a range of other advanced medical techniques to keep them in good shape.

De Grey lives near Cambridge University where he won his doctorate in 2000 and is chief scientific officer of the non-profit California-based SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) Foundation, which he co-founded in 2009.

He describes aging as the lifelong accumulation of various types of molecular and cellular damage throughout the body.

“The idea is to engage in what you might call preventative geriatrics, where you go in to periodically repair that molecular and cellular damage before it gets to the level of abundance that is pathogenic,” he explained.

CHALLENGE

Exactly how far and how fast life expectancy will increase in the future is a subject of some debate, but the trend is clear. An average of three months is being added to life expectancy every year at the moment and experts estimate there could be a million centenarians across the world by 2030.

To date, the world’s longest-living person on record lived to 122 and in Japan alone there were more than 44,000 centenarians in 2010.

Some researchers say, however, that the trend toward longer lifespan may falter due to an epidemic of obesity now spilling over from rich nations into the developing world.

De Grey’s ideas may seem far-fetched, but $20,000 offered in 2005 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Technology Review journal for any molecular biologist who showed that de Grey’s SENS theory was “so wrong that it was unworthy of learned debate” was never won.

The judges on that panel were prompted into action by an angry put-down of de Grey from a group of nine leading scientists who dismissed his work as “pseudo science.”

They concluded that this label was not fair, arguing instead that SENS “exists in a middle ground of yet-to-be-tested ideas that some people may find intriguing but which others are free to doubt.”

CELL THERAPY

For some, the prospect of living for hundreds of years is not particularly attractive, either, as it conjures up an image of generations of sick, weak old people and societies increasingly less able to cope.

But de Grey says that’s not what he’s working for. Keeping the killer diseases of old age at bay is the primary focus.

“This is absolutely not a matter of keeping people alive in a bad state of health,” he told Reuters. “This is about preventing people from getting sick as a result of old age. The particular therapies that we are working on will only deliver long life as a side effect of delivering better health.”

De Grey divides the damage caused by aging into seven main categories for which repair techniques need to be developed if his prediction for continual maintenance is to come true.

He notes that while for some categories, the science is still in its earliest stages, there are others where it’s already almost there.

“Stem cell therapy is a big part of this. It’s designed to reverse one type of damage, namely the loss of cells when cells die and are not automatically replaced, and it’s already in clinical trials (in humans),” he said.

Stem cell therapies are currently being trialed in people with spinal cord injuries, and de Grey and others say they may one day be used to find ways to repair disease-damaged brains and hearts.

NO AGE LIMIT

Cardiovascular diseases are the world’s biggest age-related killers and de Grey says there is a long way to go on these though researchers have figured out the path to follow.

Heart diseases that cause heart failure, heart attacks and strokes are brought about by the accumulation of certain types of what de Grey calls “molecular garbage” — byproducts of the body’s metabolic processes — which our bodies are not able to break down or excrete.

“The garbage accumulates inside the cell, and eventually it gets in the way of the cell’s workings,” he said.

De Grey is working with colleagues in the United States to identify enzymes in other species that can break down the garbage and clean out the cells — and the aim then is to devise genetic therapies to give this capability to humans.

“If we could do that in the case of certain modified forms of cholesterol which accumulate in cells of the artery wall, then we simply would not get cardiovascular disease,” he said.

De Grey is reluctant to make firm predictions about how long people will be able to live in future, but he does say that with each major advance in longevity, scientists will buy more time to make yet more scientific progress.

In his view, this means that the first person who will live to 1,000 is likely to be born less than 20 years after the first person to reach 150.

“I call it longevity escape velocity — where we have a sufficiently comprehensive panel of therapies to enable us to push back the ill health of old age faster than time is passing. And that way, we buy ourselves enough time to develop more therapies further as time goes on,” he said.

“What we can actually predict in terms of how long people will live is absolutely nothing, because it will be determined by the risk of death from other causes like accidents,” he said.

“But there really shouldn’t be any limit imposed by how long ago you were born. The whole point of maintenance is that it works indefinitely.”

$INS01; Line LNY Insave:- TI line name (Map report)

Last month, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, a branch of the World Health Organization, declared cellphone radiation “possibly carcinogenic to humans.” The scientific evidence linking cellphone use to brain cancer isn’t conclusive, the agency said, but there is some evidence that brain cancer rates are higher among people with the highest levels of cellphone exposure, and cellphone users should take precautions until more is known.

Now, some scientists are claiming that certain types of cellphones could be more “possibly carcinogenic” than others.

“I’ve been telling friends and family members to seriously consider switching to CDMA [cellphones] if they’re using GSM cellphones,” said Joel Moskowitz, the director of the Center for Family and Community Health at the University of California, Berkeley.

CDMA, or Code Division Multiple Access, is the type of cellular network used by the phone companies Verizon and Sprint. GSM, or Global System for Mobile Communications, is the type used by AT&T and T-Mobile.

Higher power

There is accumulating evidence that cellphones that operate on GSM networks emit significantly more radiation than do cellphones operating on CDMA networks. This is not apparent when you look at a phone’s specs, Moskowitz said, because phone companies are required to list only the “specific absorption rate” (SAR) — the measure of the rate at which energy from a radio frequency electromagnetic field is absorbed by the body — of a phone at its maximum radiation output. “The SAR can be misleading as it measures the maximum radiation a cellphone emits and does not reflect the average amount of radiation it emits,” Moskowitz told Life’s Little Mysteries.

Several recent studies have shown that CDMA phones normally emit a small fraction of their maximum radiation output, while GSM phones emit, on average, half the maximum, he explained. This comes down to the different radio frequency (RF) bands that the two networks operate on, and the different methods by which the two networks carry phone transmissions.

“When a GSM phone transmits, it immediately goes to the peak power, and then the power control circuitry ratchets down the power to an acceptable level,” explained Mark McNeeley, an electrical engineer at Exponent Engineering and Scientific Consulting services and co-author of a recent study comparing GSM and CDMA networks. “CDMA networks share the same frequency among many different phone calls, so all phones transmit at the lowest possible power level necessary to maintain the fidelity of the call.” It’s like people talking quietly at a party, he said.

The radiation spikes at the beginning of GSM phone calls means that they emit, overall, up to 28 times more radiation than CDMA phones, according to a study co-authored by McNeeley and published last year in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology.

There are exceptions. If you have a CDMA phone in a rural area and the nearest CDMA cellphone tower is far away, then you have to broadcast at a radiation level that is equal to or greater than GSM to reach the tower, McNeeley said. If there is a GSM tower much nearer to you, you might be better off going with a GSM network, he said; but in most parts of the country, where both CDMA and GSM towers are ubiquitous, CDMA phones will emit less radiation than GSM phones.

What does radiation do to the brain?

Although dozens of international studies have been conducted over the past decade, some of which point to higher incidences of certain types of brain cancers in people who use cellphones heavily, the negative side effects of cellphone usage remain undetermined.

A possible consequence of the higher radiation output of GSM phones was seen in a study published in the International Journal of Science Technology & Management in April. Researchers compared brain scans of people talking on GSM phones and CDMA phones and found that the former stimulated much more brain activity than the latter.

Although it’s still unclear what that extra brain activity is, how it’s caused or whether it’s bad, other studies have also shown varying health consequences of using GSM versus CDMA phones. Of 37 studies that have examined GSM phones, 43 percent have found harmful biological effects from the phones — such as a decrease in the expression of genes that help suppress tumors — Moskowitz said, while only 15 percent of the 33 studies that looked at CDMA phones have identified harmful effects.

When reached for comment on the possible hazards of GSM phones, AT&T referred to previous statements by the Federal Communications Commission and the Food and Drug Administration that said the available scientific evidence shows no proven health risk of radiofrequency (RF) energy. The FDA states: “Although evidence shows little or no risk of brain tumors for most long-term users of cellphones … people who want to reduce their RF exposure can: reduce the amount of time spent on the cellphone, and use speaker mode or a headset to place more distance between the head and the cellphone.” T-Mobile did not return telephone calls or emails.

What to do?

GSM and CDMA networks work so differently that a phone built for one cannot operate on the other. Furthermore, AT&T and T-Mobile cellular networks, which are GSM, cannot simply switch and become CDMA networks. Given these facts, if you own a GSM phone, should you switch to a carrier that supports CDMA? Experts have mixed opinions.

It is difficult to say whether higher radiation output is bad, simply because the jury is still out on whether cellphone radiation is bad in the first place, says Ken Foster, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania who has been studying the effects of radiofrequencies for 40 years. The radiation level of cellphones — all cellphones — is so low it is considered “non-ionizing.” It isn’t powerful enough to knock electrons off atoms in cells and potentially change the structure of DNA molecules, which is the way that ionizing radiation (like gamma-rays and X-rays) causes harmful mutations. No one knows by what mechanism non-ionizing radiation, such as RF from cellphones, could possibly damage DNA, Foster says.

Though Foster grants that consumers could probably reduce their exposure by choosing CDMA rather than GSM phones, he doesn’t think it’s likely a higher radiation output actually makes GSM phones  more hazardous than CDMA phones. The radiation levels of both phone types are so low, he said, that there is no known way they could harm DNA.

“If you take a shower at 160 degrees Fahrenheit, that could burn you. But I personally don’t fear a shower at 65 degrees Fahrenheit more than one at 63 degrees — neither temperature is dangerous,” he said. In his view, cellphone radiation on either type of network is as harmless as two cold showers of slightly different temperatures.

If cellphones are a biohazard, Foster said, that can’t be related to the amount of the radiation they emit. “Presumably, some parameter other than [radiation output] would be involved.” No one has identified what aspect of cellphone radiation is dangerous, Foster said, so there is no way of knowing whether GSM phones are worse for you than CDMA phones, or vice versa.

Hazardous frequencies

However, according to other scientists, there is some evidence that the potentially hazardous aspect of cellphone radiation may be the way in which transmissions are modulated — the way individual pulses of radiation are constructed out of a range of frequencies. The modulation pattern is different for CDMA and GSM phones, and some scientists think GSM pulse modulations may have adverse biological effects.

A review article in the April issue of the journal BioElectroMagnetics by Jukka Juutilainen and colleagues at the University of Eastern Finland suggested that specific types of RF modulation may well have biological consequences.

“While the majority of recent studies have reported no modulation-specific effects, there are a few interesting exceptions indicating that there may be specific effects from amplitude-modulated RF fields on the human central nervous system. These findings warrant follow-up studies,” the researchers wrote.

According to Moskowitz, the study found that GSM phones contain radiation at a frequency of 8 hertz, or 8 cycles per second, which “is in the range of ‘possibly carcinogenic’ because our cells have processes on that frequency level, with which the phone radiation may be interfering,” he said.

Foster, on the other hand, thinks there is no robust evidence that one type of modulation is more dangerous than the other. “To my knowledge, nothing shows a clear effect of pulse modulation,” he said.

Wanted: more evidence

Do some mobile phone networks pose more of a health risk than others? Though some researchers suspect so, it is too soon to say for sure. “Clearly more comparative studies are needed,” Moskowitz said.

At this point, all cellphone users should be cautious. “My first recommendation is to keep a safe distance from your phone. Text instead of calling. Use the speakerphone. Use a headset,” Moskowitz said. Radiation levels fall off rapidly with distance — so rapidly that you can decrease your brain’s exposure to a negligible level simply by keeping your phone antenna just a few inches away.

Moskowitz also thinks people should avoid keeping their cellphones on in their pockets. “There’s accumulating evidence of a risk to sperm and male fertility,” Moskowitz said. “People are forgetting where they’re keeping their cellphones all day long.”

Foster doesn’t believe cellphone radiation poses a significant danger, but he still suggests that people take precautions if they’re worried, just for peace of mind. “My best advice to consumers: If they are concerned about possible radiation risks from cellphones, use a hands-free kit, which actually does reduce exposure and costs very little.”