Video How Light at Night Affects Preschoolers' Sleep Patterns (Video) 51
Slashdot: Lameese, you are a graduate student working on your doctoral dissertation. Can you talk about your research?
Lameese: Yes. The real focus of my doctoral dissertation is trying to understand the factors that influence the timing of the circadian clock of young children. So we know that lights from well established research in adults, we know that light exposure is the strongest environmental factor, it can affect our internal circadian timing. So the study in particular is going to assess how light at night affects the timing of – or I’m sorry, affects melatonin levels and alertness and sleep, in preschool children.
Slashdot: So what age children are you going to be studying in this study?
Lameese: We are looking at three- or four-year olds, so around pre-school age.
Slashdot: And what sort of factors are you looking at in determining what the effect is, what outcomes are you trying to measure?
Lameese: So our main outcome measures for the study are melatonin levels, and we measure with that by having subjects chew on cotton balls. We have them chew on the cotton for about two minutes and then we spin that down to extract the saliva and that saliva is later tested for melatonin levels.
Slashdot: Can you talk a little bit more about the methodology of this, that’s a good painless we got, _____ painless way to measure for any kind of level, I keep getting shots.
Lameese: So we know that light actually suppresses melatonin levels, so we have to control for that, and our lab is unique in that we do all the research within the children’s homes, so we basically go into the children’s home and make their house into what we like to called a cave, by putting up black plastic on the windows. We use dimmers and low wattage bulbs to create a dim light environment, we do this usually in the early afternoon, and then we start taking saliva samples of the children every half an hour, and just by having them chew for a couple of minutes and spin that down and then later on that saliva is going to tested for melatonin levels.
Slashdot: Is it difficult to find enough three- to four-year old volunteers?
Lameese: We actually have unique ways of recruiting as well, we are very involved in the community, we go to festivals, and different events for kids and we do coloring, or face painting and we get to know lot of families by doing that and just getting their interest from the get go we actually do get a lot of families that are interested in being involved in our work.
Slashdot: How many will there be in this particular study?
Lameese: Well, we are planning on actually studying 10 preschool children for this study.
Slashdot: Now talk a little bit about the lab you’re doing this, that is to say your department, I realize you said you sort of created portable sleep labs for each subject here, but with the department how is it that this falls into your research area?
Lameese: So the department of integrative physiology is very diverse, people study everything from exercise, to sleep, endocrinology, hormones, stress, physiology etc. So our department is where you can have – everybody has kind of an different area that they focus on. But we do actually have another sleep lab in our department that studies sleep kind of the same thing but in adults. So I guess it is fitting into the larger picture and helping us understand how sleep and circadian physiology are basically just fundamental sleep physiology in early childhood.
Slashdot: It is interesting that this is not part of a department of a medicine.
Lameese: Yes, yes. So I guess we’re unique in that not many physiology departments I guess are located on non-medical campuses but I think that’s definitely changing a lot of other universities have that.
Slashdot: So, your study is about the effect of light on alertness and how easily children fall asleep, what are some sources of light that you’re going to be testing?
Lameese: So, we’re actually going to be using what’s called the light box. We are going to expose the children to the light stimulus for an hour and we will measure melatonin levels during that full exposure just to see how melatonin levels are changing once they are exposed to light.
Slashdot: Is that light box, is that tuned to approximate the light output of a particular thing, is like an iPad or computer screen or television or how do you calculate, what’s the kind of light exposure that you’re trying to measure it for.
Lameese: So the light exposure that we plan on using in the study isn’t exactly identical to what you see from like device iPad or TV, it’s actually a lot more. But since there is no research at all looking at how melatonin or how light exposure suppresses melatonin, and then actually we are kind of starting from a larger stimulus of light, and I think future studies definitely need to do more work using iPads or TVs and using smart phones.
Slashdot: Now, one of the things you’ve been measuring besides how long it take kids to fall asleep after light exposure of different levels is their alertness. How do you quantify that? What are you going to use to determine alertness level?
Lameese: So there are certain behavioral tasks that have been used in the field of sleep research like reaction time, doing an addition task, things like that just to measure how alert people are. I don’t know if you guys know them, the exact tasks we put in our study, but that is going to something along the lines of reaction time.
Slashdot: So, Monique, crowd funding is not what I think of as the traditional way that scientific experiments are funded. So can you explain why it is that a university that collects tuition and probably gets some grants what’s the significance and why did you choose this crowdfunding to actually support this upcoming experiment?
Monique: So, C’s crowd funding platform is relatively new and we’re really excited to be part of the first research studies as in features, in support of this mechanism and it probably is very intriguing it’s important for a number of reasons. I think first and foremost it allows the general public to drive the science that they think is most important and not you know, National Institute of College, Or NSF National Science Foundation, and what’s very important also is that the solution, the crowdfunding solution helps us close the gap for getting novel, very cutting edge science that has yet to receive federal funding. And a project with Lameese is that’s extremely cutting edge and it has never been attempted in this age group it is going to give her not only the funds to complete her dissertation work, but it allows our lab to collect pilot data which are central for us getting larger federal research grants and the C crowd funding site especially is really awesome because the donors of the university instead of just turning into the general fund they can actually – or department – they can actually donate to a specific project that they are very interested in.
Slashdot: That makes a lot of sense.
Monique: Yeah.
Slashdot: One thing about crowdfunding in general is that usually there are some interesting perks that people get for the donating, the people donate to a scientific project
Monique: Yeah.
Slashdot: It should be nice to get all the data or some other kind of backstage view of what’s going on with the experiment, well, people get a webcam into your lab or anything like that?
Monique: I really like that. So anyone who donates to our project is going to be receiving an acknowledgment section of the paper that results from this project, we’ll also send them a copy of the project and they’ll be invited to Lameese’s doctoral dissertation defense, if they are local, and they want to come, but I really like your idea about maybe getting a web tour of the lab, or maybe some kind of interview with the researcher students that would be a lot of fun.
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As soon as I saw the pictures I assumed that this thread would include the usual cadre of people who could not see past the gender of the principles.
Man, I feel totally lost. I couldn't begin to tell you the gender of the principles, let alone see past it.
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Apparently one of the long-term effects is to turn males into mysognistic Aspies
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Thank you for proving my point. How many night lights did you have as a child?
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Seeing two researchers explaining an experiment, and the first thing you care to say about it is some variation of "nice tits" suggests a misogynist.
Let me sum up the results of all medical studies (Score:4, Funny)
"Everything fun is bad for you"
There, now you don't need that grant.
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Ah, but think of all the grants you *could* get.
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This comment shouldn't have taken three hours to write, but I've been spending most of my time Googling images entirely unrelated to this.
Re:Coming soon! (Score:4, Funny)
Tsk, tsk, tsk. Such a wasted opportunity.
Should have been:
"Know what I like even more than video articles?" ... " :)
"Tune in tomorrow to see
Nonsense. (Score:2)
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I have no problem with turning my kid into a lab rat [amazon.com]
Part two will run tomorrow (Score:4, Funny)
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Crowdfunded Science Not Unique (Score:4, Insightful)
its funding is unique; the money for this study is coming, at least in part, from crowdfunding.
This isn't unique. In fact, three times I've submitted [slashdot.org] news of a crowdfunded, already completed, ground-breaking scientific discovery published in Nature Chemistry, and /. couldn't be bothered to run it. But somehow, this study gets the "deluxe" Slashdot video treament, plus a pointless second article, plus a call to action to "pitch in."
/. rather read about a major discovery in the hard sciences or about this unfinished (unstarted?) study asking all of us for money?
/. receives) didn't get accepted, but I've tried submitting this recent scientific discovery [slashdot.org] (published in Nature Chemistry [nature.com]) a few times. IMO it's perfect material for Slashdot: an interesting new hypothesis (about a supposedly "well-understood" reaction) put to the test via regularly evolving experiments and apparatuses. And it was even largely funded through Youtube viewers (who the lead scientist thanks in the paper) and documented with (at least one) well-done video [youtube.com].
/. never ran it. I can't help but think that part of the problem is that the scientist is Dr. Phil Mason, aka thunderf00t, who is known for his vids that expose Atheism+ and anti-Gamergate types as fools. Think about the lousy submissions that do often make it on the front page, especially those that push an agenda.
So, would
repost [slashdot.org] that sums it up (don't feel like typing it all again):
-----
I know how it sounds to complain that your one submission (out of the many
But
This is why things like Gamergate (and Slashdot's atrocious coverage of it) matter, even if you yourself don't personally care about videogames; it is a fight against neo-puritans who want to filter ALL types of content (not just games, comics, music, movies, etc) you're allowed to see, and refuse to acknowledge the work of those who don't buy into the "narrative."
P.S. Clearly I'm biased, so if any of you think that my article submission is unworthy for some other reason, let me know (seriously).
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Because it doesn't just affect preschoolers, and although you can't tell from TFA, the wider problem is not just about BRIGHT light at night.
I wrote up a summary for a nutrition forum. It's a subscription site, but as far as I know the whole thing is freely visible:
Attention Shoppers: Blue Light Special
https://www.cureality.com/forum/topics.aspx?id=17654
If you really care about health in a broken healthcare system, diet isn't the only thing that needs to get a lot more paleo.
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re: Considering that the paleo diet is a bunch of bull, ...
Well, there is no single unambiguous paleo diet, and arguing about any which tend toward my characterization of "more paleo" is getting off-topic for this thread.
re: I'm not sure I should believe the rest of that link.
It wasn't written to enroll believers. It was written to provide keywords for searches, and motivation, so people could make up their own minds.
re: Dealing with lighting issues at night is important, ...
Just how important is not yet fu
Oops (Score:4, Informative)
@page { margin: 0.79in } p { margin-bottom: 0.1in; line-height: 120% }
Careful. Your CSS is showing.
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I don't mind seeing this here, although I was a little confused about why it is something that the editors thought that most of the audience was interested in on Slashdot.
I do realize that articles tend to run far afield on occasion, especially on politics, but there does seem to be a certain sort of article that tends to draw interest here, let alone two parter video article.
It is sort of like the History channel playing something that isn't Hitler or Aliens. Or Hitler being an alien. Or Nostradamus... p
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It's biomedical research, which is interesting to at least some Slashdot readers. The fact that Timothy dotes on his toddler-age niece is surely irrelevant.
So something like this is interesting to a subset of Slashdot users, including Timothy Lord (and me, to a lesser extent since I have a toddler-age granddaughter). Not everything on Slashdot is interesting to every user. This one should be interesting to parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and anyone else who may be attached to a trainee human in the fu
No Worries! (Score:2)
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My daughter is only eight months old, but she generally wakes up between 5:30 and 6:30 on her own. Being eight months old, that means that yes, her bedtime is between 6:30 and 7:30 at night. Not sure why a bedtime for children while the sun is up should be an issue. Thick curtains help a lot, for one.
On the other side, she also is already fascinated by our phones and other pieces of technology, including ones that don't seem like they should be terribly interesting, like television remotes and computer ca
Don't!! (Score:2)
Don't crowdfund research. It's bad for publicly funded research. As soon as the government, the universities and the grant organizations find out that crowdfunding works, they'll cut budgets or make their funding dependent on privately acquired money. That means only public darlings will get funded, or projects with corporate backing, and that the research results can end up in a drawer if there are larger backers that have made such provisions. In short, by funding research, you're killing it. Instead, wri
Scientists (Score:2)
Quit crying and screaming! No, there are no monsters, and no you can't have a nite-light! That's bad for you. I read it online a week ago. Just sit there and snivel in the darkness!
Scientists ... traumatizing children since the Renaissance.