[...] humans get about seven hours of sleep per night. That’s less than half the time that animals like mouse lemurs devote to sleeping. Some primates sleep up to 17 hours a day. And it holds true in both highly technological societies and those that steer clear of technology and keep to cycles of natural light.We do, however, dream more than other primates:
When humans do sleep, they’re in REM (random eye movement) sleep for about 25% of the time. REM sleep is associated with dreams. Although other primates may dream, researchers estimate that they spend only about five percent of their time in REM sleep.Why are we different? Perhaps in our evolutionary development, we found that sleep deprived us of social interaction and exposed us to threats:
According to the study authors, once humans moved from the trees to the ground, there were probably three main selective pressures keeping them awake: “increased predation risk in terrestrial environments, threats from intergroup conflict, and benefits arising from increased social interaction.”
A teenager from Melbourne, Australia, is fighting to stop a young,
orphaned deer from being put down following a court ruling.
Authorities claim the fawn named Rudolph is a threat to public safety,
but 19-year-old Andy Foots plans to head to court to prove them wrong.
Andy found the hungry fawn abandoned next to a tree stump, a few kilometers from Mansfield about a fortnight ago.
| 1154 | Henry II is crowned king of England. | |
| 1562 | The French Wars of Religion between the Huguenots and the Catholics begins with the Battle of Dreux. | |
| 1793 | French troops recapture Toulon from the British. | |
| 1862 | Confederate General Nathan B. Forrest begins tearing up the railroads in Union generals Grant and Rosecrans rear, causing considerable delays in the movement of Union supplies. | |
| 1900 | The French Parliament votes amnesty for everyone involved in the Dreyfus Affair. | |
| 1909 | American socialist women denounce suffrage as a movement of the middle class. | |
| 1941 | Japanese land on Hong Kong and clash with British troops. | |
| 1941 | Adolf Hitler assumes the position of commander in chief of the German army. | |
| 1942 | The British advance 40 miles into Burma in a drive to oust the Japanese from the colony. | |
| 1944 | During the Battle of the Bulge, American troops begin pulling back from the twin Belgian cities of Krinkelt and Rocherath in front of the advancing German Army. | |
| 1945 | Congress confirms Eleanor Roosevelt as U.S. delegate to the United Nations. | |
| 1950 | The North Atlantic Council names General Dwight D. Eisenhower as supreme commander of Western European defense forces. | |
| 1959 | Reputed to be the last civil war veteran, Walter Williams, dies at 117 in Houston. | |
| 1974 | Nelson Rockefeller is sworn in as vice president of the United states after a House of Representatives vote. | |
| 1982 | Four bombs explode at South Africa’s only nuclear power station in Johannesburg. | |
| 1984 | British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang sign an agreement that committed Britain to return Hong Kong to China in 1997 in return for terms guaranteeing a 50-year extension of its capitalist system. Hong Kong was leased by China to Great Britain in 1898 for 99 years. | |
| 1998 | President Bill Clinton is impeached. The House of Representatives approved two articles of impeachment against President Clinton, charging him with lying under oath to a federal grand jury and obstructing justice. Clinton was the second president in American history to be impeached. | |
| 2001 | The highest barometric pressure ever recorded (1085.6 hPa, 32.06 inHg) occurs at Tosontsengel, Khovsgol, Mongolia. | |
| 2001 | Rioting begins in Buenos Aires, Argentina, during the country’s economic crisis. | |
| 2012 | Park Geun-hye elected President of South Korea, the nation’s first female chief executive. |
Wingnuts are FURIOUS that a “racist” black female CEO promoted
diversity in hiring — and they are willing to be total racists to prove
it!
The mystery of a bright green pond in Farmington, Utah, has been solved.
The Environmental Protection Agency had closed off Farmington Pond aa there was a concern over toxic chemicals.
They're saying someone dumped a 5 gallon bucket of non-toxic dye.
A restaurant in eastern China has been caught charging customers an "air cleaning fee" on top of their food bills. 
Seven hundred and fifty light-years from Earth, a young, sunlike star has been found with jets that blast epic quantities of water into interstellar space, shooting out droplets that move faster than a speeding bullet.
The discovery suggests that protostars may be seeding the universe with water. These stellar embryos shoot jets of material from their north and south poles as their growth is fed by infalling dust that circles the bodies in vast disks.
"If we picture these jets as giant hoses and the water droplets as bullets, the amount shooting out equals a hundred million times the water flowing through the Amazon River every second," said Lars Kristensen, a postdoctoral astronomer at Leiden University in the Netherlands...
After tracing the paths of these atoms, the team concluded that water forms on the star, where temperatures are a few thousand degrees Celsius. But once the droplets enter the outward-spewing jets of gas, 180,000-degree-Fahrenheit (100,000-degree-Celsius) temperatures blast the water back into gaseous form.
Once the hot gases hit the much cooler surrounding material—at about 5,000 times the distance from the sun to Earth—they decelerate, creating a shock front where the gases cool down rapidly, condense, and reform as water, Kristensen said.
