Losing sleep over late-night television

Almost seven in 10 Americans spend some part of their final two waking hours each day in front of the television, and most let television programming— not their level of sleepiness or their need for a full night’s rest—dictate when they go to sleep, a new study has found.

“We were expecting people to watch a lot of TV,” said Dr. Mathias Basner of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine’s department of psychiatry, one of the study’s authors. But, said Basner, “it was astonishing” to learn that even when they had to get up early for work, Americans were unlikely to pare their habit of nighttime TV.

On average, Americans spent almost half of their last two waking hours of each day watching the tube.

In spite of technologies that allow U. S. viewers to record and watch a show later or on hand-held devices, “they just wait till the show ends” to turn off the tube and go to sleep, said Basner.

Roughly 40 percent of American adults sleep less than seven to eight hours, even though doing so raises their risk of daytime sleepiness, obesity, illness and even death.

Broken vase sets an antiquity record

Chinese and Israeli archaeologists have discovered the oldest known pottery, remains of an 18,000-year-old cone-shaped vase excavated from a cave in southern China.

After flint tools, pottery is one of the oldest human-made materials, and tracing its development provides insight into the evolution of culture.

The shards were discovered four years ago in Yuchanyan Cave in the Yangzi River basin by a team led by Elisabetto Boaretto of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. The cave shows signs of human occupation from about 21,000 years to 13,800 years ago.

The problem with caves is that remains from fires and other artifacts get scrambled by the activities of humans and burrowing animals, mixing layers of artifacts and making dating difficult. Boaretto, Xiaohong Wu of Peking University in Beijing and their colleagues skirted this problem by excavating an area only a quarter of a yard square and analyzing each layer of sediment.

They reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that radiocarbon dating of charcoal and bone fragments from the excavation produced dates that were consistently older with increasing depth. Fragments found immediately above and below the pottery shards indicate they are between 18,300 and 17,500 years old.

The team has been able to reassemble the shards into the partial remains of an unadorned cone-shaped pot or vase, about 11.4 inches high, that may have been used for cooking or storage.