First Evidence of Sleep in Flight | Hacker News Reader

First Evidence of Sleep in Flight

maxplanck.nautil.us

62 pointsdnetesn17 comments

While this may be the "first evidence" in the sense of measurements of brain activity, swifts apparently sleeping at 10,000 feet were directly observed 100 years ago: https://www.rspb.org.uk/globalassets/downloads/documents/con...

Technically we've known for decades that humans can sleep while flying airplanes :+/

When the birds circled on rising air currents the hemisphere connected to the eye facing the direction of the turn was typically awake while the other was asleep, suggesting that the birds were watching where they were going. “The frigatebirds may be keeping an eye out for other birds to prevent collisions much like ducks keep an eye out for predators,” says Rattenborg.

Earlier it said these brief periods of sleep would start as the sun went down; does it mean that they would only catch some sleep at dusk/twilight, or this would continue throughout the night? And if it's at night, do the birds have good enough night vision to see anything flying nearby or swimming on the surface below (such as their prey, squid and flying fish)?

Imagine what we could achieve if humans needed only 42 minutes of sleep per day…

Exactly what we're achieving now, just faster?

More war, consumption, etc?

I think it would give a constant time advantage. If humanity operates on O(f(t)) in that case we would operate on O(C f(t)). That is, as opposed, improvements that change the model itself (i.e. f) such as increased productivity, automation, cultural shifts etc...

I thought about this argument some more. Instead of spending ten times longer awake, you could say the same for living ten times longer. It's also just a linear increase your reasoning would apply.

But I feel that if all geniuses of history had lived 800 years they could have achieve more and we would be further along.

It changes the model because along the way we make meta discoveries about learning and methodology and science itself, and even just discoveries that we build upon. That feeds back into our progress.

Time isn’t the biggest constraint, it’s our inability to do reasonable things in large groups. Ha.

In business class, maybe.

Could anyone ever been able to subscribe to their print edition on shop.nautil.us? I like the look and feel of their magazines and would like to support them. But, the subscription webpage has been broken forever. I twitted their support staff a month ago and hasn’t heard anything yet. What a shame.

I subscribed in early 2018 and have only received two issues since. Sometime in the summer I received an email that they were having issues raising the funds necessary to publish the upcoming print edition.

Apparently a tough chicken and egg problem for them: not having enough money to print so they stop accepting new subscriptions and hence will not getting any more funding. I really want to pay for their print magazines.

I've had multiple copies mailed to me.in South East Asia over the past couple of years, but they sent an email out recently saying they were a bit behind schedule ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Because of the delays in getting the next issue out, Nautilus suspended new print subscription sales until we got back on track with the printing. The print subscriptions will be back on sale in November.

Are there plans to ship on a regular schedule such as monthly afterward?

There are several other articles about this dating from 2016 [0][1]. Still, the articles back in 2016 also come as a big surprise for me, since I remember having a kids encyclopaedia back in 1994 [2] that had a small snippet mentioning a certain migratory bird that travelled an insane distance and used warm currents that generated lift to basically take a nap mid-flight. So unless this is ruled out and not considered "flying", I really don't understand how many "first times" there have been.

[0] https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-just-seen-birds...

[1] https://gizmodo.com/we-finally-know-how-birds-sleep-during-f...

[2] Sorry, I can't provide a source at the moment, will try to find it later.

Edit: to be fair, this article is citing the ones in 2016. I found other articles from as early as 2014 [3] but maybe this is just about how for the first time the theory is actually based upon measured, empirical data. Like an article that was recently in HN about semi-automatic weapons being more deadly than non-automatic ones.

[3] http://sabersabor.es/una-vida-de-record-los-10-hechos-porten...

> This article was originally published by Max Planck Neuroscience on Aug. 3, 2016. The relevant study can be retrieved here.

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