| Exposure to light can help travelers avoid jet lag
Q . Any suggestions on how to minimize jet lag when traveling either east or west? A . I must admit, when I called one of the nation's leading authorities on sleep and its many enemies, Cornell professor James Maas, I didn't expect to hear some breaking news from the world of jet lag. And it's not as if the best-selling author of the 1998 book "Power Sleep" retracted any of his previous tips on avoiding travel's greatest malady. It's still important to "limit the alcohol, make sure you don't get dehydrated, wear loose clothing, walk up and down the aisle several times during the flight and avoid red-eye flights," Maas reiterated. When flying west, you should still try to absorb some afternoon sun upon arrival even if your biological clock is telling you it's nighttime.
SCIENCE JOURNAL
The consequences of too little sleep can be dire. Almost half of all heavy-truck accidents can be traced to driver fatigue, while decisions leading to the Challenger space-shuttle disaster, the Chernobyl nuclear-reactor meltdown and the Exxon Valdez oil spill can be partly linked to people drained of rest by round-the-clock work schedules. Weary doctors make more serious medical errors, while sleepy airport baggage screeners make more security mistakes, researchers reported at the Associated Professional Sleep Societies. All told, the frayed tempers, short attention spans and fuzzy thinking caused by sleep deprivation may cost $15 billion a year in reduced productivity, the National Commission on Sleep Disorders Research estimated. The expectation of a nap, however, is by itself enough to measurably lower our blood pressure, researchers at the Liverpool John Moores University in England reported in October in the Journal of Applied Physiology.
Plaxico's prediction doesn't upset Giant teammates
But no one criticized him for saying Monday that the Giants will beat the Patriots, 23-17. For a team that's been counted out before each of its last two playoff wins, no one thinks victory is out of reach against the perfect Pats.
"Are we supposed to say we're going to lose? What do you want us to say?" Antonio Pierce said yesterday at Super Bowl Media Day. "We want to win the game. We're not here to be second-best to anybody. We came here to win a game. If you want to consider that a guarantee, it's not. We're not going to think negative and say we're going to lose and have the same perception everybody else has about us."
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