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October 7, 2016
Q. How much sleep do you normally get? But first, are you female or male? Young or old? Have a job starting at an early or later time?
A. Using a smartphone sleep-tracking app called Entrain, Daniel Folger and his team at the University of Michigan monitored the sleep patterns of 5,000 people worldwide, noting their bedtime, waking time, time zone and daytime light exposure, says David Shultz at New Scientist magazine online. They found that women get the most sleep, especially those under the age of 25, while middle-aged men sleep the least. The strongest indicator of amount of sleep is the time a person awakens, suggesting that having a job that starts early often means not getting as much sleep as someone whose job begins at a later hour. Furthermore, older folks tend to go to sleep and wake up earlier, perhaps because the window for when a person can sleep narrows with age.
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