The modern world is so marked by sharp political divides and rampant misinformation that it’s led to the creation of a new term to describe the phenomenon: the “reality gap.”But even if we can’t agree on things like whether the entire country is being run by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles or not, there are some things we all know are true. Vaccines don’t cause autism; Nessie is real; and 3 or 4 am is just the worst time to be awake.“As a cognitive therapist, I sometimes joke the only thing good about 3 am waking is that it gives us all a vivid example of catastrophizing,” wrote Greg Murray, Director of the Centre for Mental Health at Swinburne University of Technology, Australia.“Waking and worrying at 3am is very understandable and very human,” he continued in his 2021 article for The Conversation. “But in my opinion, not a great habit to get into.”But what’s behind this collective wee-hours waking? If you regularly find yourself staring at the ceiling at 3 or 4 am, you’re in good company: it’s a phenomenon reported by around one in three of us, and probably more since the pandemic started.That’s because, according to sleep experts, these early ruminations are related to stress – though not quite directly. Being stressed doesn’t make us wake up more in the night, Murray explained, but it does make us more aware of it happening.“We actually wake up many times each night, and light sleep is more common in the second half of the night,” he wrote. “When sleep is going well for us, we are simply unaware of these awakenings. But add a bit of stress and there is a good chance that waking will become a fully self-aware state.”And stress isn’t the only factor that can jolt us awake at 3 am. Erratic schedules; doomscrolling; even a lack of fresh air can muddy our sleep hygiene enough to wake us up in the night.“Wake up at the same time every day, and don’t get in bed until you feel sleepy,” advised Stephanie Romiszewski, a sleep physiologist and director of the Sleepyhead Clinic, in Metro.co.uk.“You’ll notice that if you’re waking up at the same time every day, that will start to become your regular time,” she explained. “Try to keep up with exercise and [get] bright light exposure in the mornings. Make sure you have social time, too. We need … our brains to understand the only opportunity to sleep will be the usual nighttime.”So we know some reasons why we wake up in the night – but why does it seem to happen so specifically at 3 or 4 a.m.? Well, consider the following: most of us typically nod off between 11 pm and midnight, and wake up between seven and eight in the morning. What times sit slap-bang in the middle of those intervals?“Throughout the night, our sleep cycles between rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep and non-REM sleep. Each stage of sleep has a different threshold for how easy it is to be woken up,” explained Aneesa Das, assistant director of the Sleep Medicine Program at the Ohio State Wexner Medical Center.“One likely explanation for waking up at the same time each night is that you go to sleep at the same time and then, at the same time each night, you reach a light stage of sleep and wake up,” she wrote.You might think of the body’s sleep cycles as being just a repeating pattern, but in fact, we spend different lengths of time in each stage as the night goes on. Crucially, as the morning gets ever-closer, the amount of time we spend in REM sleep increases – meaning we’re spending more and more time in a comparatively light and dream-filled slumber.“Maybe it's possible that some of this [waking up in the early hours] reflects waking from anxiety dreams,” Michael K. Scullin, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Baylor University in Texas, told Newsweek. That needn’t be from nightmares about beasts from the dungeon dimensions either: “Scientists have suspected for about a hundred years now that unfinished tasks rest at a heightened level of activation in the brain until they can be completed,” he said.Luckily, this means that there’s a fairly simple fix: keep a to-do list.“Keeping a notepad by the bedside and writing out everything on your to-do list, as well as any other worries or stressors circulating in your mind, has been shown to help,” Scullin said. He was the author of a 2018 paper which showed that spending five minutes before bed compiling a list of future tasks made a significant difference in how quickly study participants fell asleep – and, he told Newsweek, the same principle should apply to nighttime waking too.This would make sense, according to Colin Espie, a professor of sleep medicine at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Oxford, who advocates what he calls “putting the day to rest.” Simply put, this means taking some time before sleep to review the past day’s events and plan ahead to tomorrow’s.“When people wake up during the night the thing that comes to mind that may worry them is usually quite predictable,” he told Newsweek. “That is, something that has been happening the previous day or something that's coming up the next day.”The practice of a to-do list could, therefore, “[assist] the brain” to process things without waking you up, he said.If that doesn’t work, though, it may be time to see a specialist – especially if the problem has been bothering you for more than a couple of months, advised Romiszewski.“If it’s been over three months, then absolutely [see a doctor],” she told Metro.co.uk.“After three months, any kind of sleep problem can become habitual, like a pattern for your brain. At that point, no amount of getting rid of the original trigger is going to get rid of the problem. You may get rid of the stress, for example, but the sleep [issue] can remain.”“That’s when you need insomnia treatment, such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), to help change the behavior pattern,” she said. “For [that] you’ll need to see your [doctor] or a sleep expert.”An earlier version of this article was published in December 2023.

The mystery of the pair of Early Bronze Age axeheads that were mailed anonymously to the National Museum of Ireland last month has been solved. The sender has come forward to tell his story. His name is Thomas Dunne, and he’s a farmer from County Westmeath. He found the axes on his land while looking for a lost piece of equipment. Thomas Dunne said he had found the items by chance on his silage field at Banagher at the end of June. “I was cutting silage [grass fodder for beef cattle] one day and a bit of metal fell off a mower,” he told the Irish Times. He said: “We started looking for it then because we thought it might go into the silage harvester and break it up. So, I got a man with a metal detector to look for it and that’s how it was found. It was in the side of a field underneath a row of beech trees; there would have been ancient forts on the land around here.” At first Dunne thought they were horse plough fragments or some other kind of scrap metal and almost tossed them back in the ditch, but the person who was helping him out thought they might be archaeologically significant, so he decided to send them to the museum instead of throwing them in a ditch. He packed them up carefully in a oat bar box and send them anonymously because any archaeological finds made in Ireland are property of the state, and there are serious penalties for people who illicitly seek them out. Dunne was not looking for archaeological objects, so he wasn’t actually breaking the law that requires written prior permission for metal detectorists or risk a large penalty of up to three months in prison or a $70,000 fine. He just figured discretion was the better part of valour and kept mum. He only found out their age and function when he read about his donation in the newspapers a week later. National Museum archaeologists are now surveying the find site, logging everything they can find that might shed light on the Bronze Age people who created the handaxes 4,000 years ago.

Visiting our nearest stellar neighbor will take near-light-speed travel.

“Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said, Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof; When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? … The post The Editors’ Quote of the Day: appeared first on SurvivalBlog.com.

To be prepared for a crisis, every Prepper must establish goals and make both long-term and short-term plans. In this column, the SurvivalBlog editors review their week’s prep activities and planned prep activities for the coming week. These range from healthcare and gear purchases to gardening, ranch improvements, bug-out bag fine-tuning, and food storage. This is something akin to our Retreat Owner Profiles, but written incrementally and in detail, throughout the year.  We always welcome you to share your own successes and wisdom in your e-mailed letters. We post many of those — or excerpts thereof — in the Odds … The post Editors’ Prepping Progress appeared first on SurvivalBlog.com.

(Continued from Part 1.  This concludes the article.) What to store in the trailer truck box? Because of the current mindset of theft with little to no penalty in many states, I do not have a truck box attached to my personal truck any longer. Since I do not take my trailer out, except for outdoor activities where I am typically within eyesight of it, I feel comfortable having a toolbox permanently attached to the trailer frame. The following is a list of what I carry in my toolbox and why. This is an extremely personal list suited to what … The post Building a Utility Trailer – Part 2, by Lodge Pole appeared first on SurvivalBlog.com.

The first test flight of the F-15 Eagle air superiority fighter took place on July 27, 1972, at Edwards Air Force Base, California. McDonnell Douglas Chief Experimental Test Pilot Irving L. Burrows was at the controls. — July 27th is the birthday of Captain Samuel Whittemore (born in 1694, died February 3, 1793). He was an English-born American farmer and soldier. He was eighty years of age when he became the oldest known colonial combatant in the American War of Independence. — On July 27, 1377 there was the first example of a quarantine. In the city of Rugusa (now … The post Preparedness Notes for Saturday — July 27, 2024 appeared first on SurvivalBlog.com.

It’s not always possible to observe the night sky from the surface of the Earth. The blocking effects of the atmosphere mean we sometimes need to put telescopes out into space. The Chandra X-Ray Observatory is one such telescopes and it has just completed its 25th year of observations. To celebrate, NASA have just released 25 never-before-seen images of various celestial objects in x-rays. The collection includes images showing the region around black holes, giant clouds of hot gas and extreme magnetic fields. Sadly though, NASA is planning on shutting down the mission to save budget so best to enjoy the images while you can.  Back in the 1970’s NASA received a proposal from Riccardo Giacconi and Harvey Tananbaum to launch an x-ray telescope into space. An orbiting observatory was necessary because the Earth’s atmosphere blocks x-rays from reaching the surface. The x-rays Giacconi and Tananbaum were hoping to capture come from some of the hottest and most energetic places in the universe.  The proposal eventually became the Chandra X-Ray Telescope and it was chosen to be part of NASA’s Great Observatories along with the Hubble Space Telescope with each instrument exploring different wavelengths.  Artist’s illustration of Chandra Chandra was launched in July 1999 from the space shuttle Columbia and is undoubtedly one of the most successful and powerful x-ray telescopes ever built. It was named after Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar the nobel prize winning astrophysicist. It orbits the Earth in a highly elliptical orbit varying between 16,000 kilometres and 133,000 kilometres (almost a third of the distance to the Moon) altitude so it can operate for most of its time above the radiation belts around Earth.  The strange shape of the telescope is necessary due to the high energy of x-rays. In a conventional telescope, the mirror is placed perpendicular to the incoming light so it strikes it head on before being reflected back up the tube. If the same approach was tried with high energy x-rays they would just fly straight through the mirror. Instead, incoming x-rays catch a mirror at an angle, deflecting them a little to their focus.  The first reflection surface is a paraboloid and the second a hyperboloid. The arrangement is known as the Wolter 1 configuration.  It is important to study x-rays because it gives us an opportunity to study high energy events. Supernova remnants, galaxy clusters and neutron star mergers are just some of the events we can study. Before Chandra, high altitude balloons had been used to try and get above much of the atmosphere for x-ray astronomy but Chandra was a real game changer in helping to understand the high energy physics in the cosmos.  A composite image of the remnant of supernova 1181. A spherical bright nebula sits in the middle surrounded by a field of white dotted stars. Within the nebula several rays point out like fireworks from a central star. G. Ferrand and J. English (U. of Manitoba), NASA/Chandra/WISE, ESA/XMM, MDM/R.Fessen (Dartmouth College), Pan-STARRS With 25 years of successful operation, Chandra continues to be used in conjunction with other observatories such as James Webb Space Telescope, the Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer and of course Hubble. 25 years on though and to celebrate, NASA has released a new image set from nearly 25,000 observations and they reveal objects in stunning new detail.  It’s difficult to pick a favourite among the images but I think the Crab Nebula is one of my favourites. Visually it looks pretty unimpressive but switch the view to x-rays and it suddenly looks stunning. As a star that has exploded at the end of its life the true majestic nature of this supernova remnant is unveiled.  Despite 25 years of superb operation, a letter written by Patrick Slane, the director of Chandra explain budget challenges may mean Chandra will be shutting down. Such a shame for such a successful observatory that really has changed our view of the universe.  The full image can be seen at : 25 Images to Celebrate NASA’s Chandra 25th Anniversary The post Update your Desktop Wallpaper with 25 New Images from Chandra appeared first on Universe Today.