Do you need eight hours of sleep?

A survey is suggesting that only a tiny minority of us are getting eight hours' sleep a night. But do we really need that much?

[...]It's become an increasingly common sentiment that too much work and stress and missing out on our eight hours is the modern plague.

But the good news, says Prof Jim Horne, director of Loughborough University's Sleep Research Centre, is that we don't need eight hours at all.

"It's nonsense. It's like saying everybody should have size eight shoes, or be five foot eight inches.

"There is a normal distribution - the average sleep length is seven, seven and a quarter hours."

Lots of people report having more or less than the average, he said. It may all be down to genes, and what people are accustomed to. [...]

In a nutshell, if you sleep for eight hours a night go to work and find yourself lolling and drooling on the keyboard, you aren't getting enough. If you're sleeping five hours and running the country, you probably are getting enough. [...]

Read the full article here.

Fourth State Of Matter?

Up till now, I've only known of three states of matter - solid, liquid and gas. Now a fourth state of matter has been discovered?

The first hint that a new type of matter may exist came in 1983. In the experiment, electrons moving in the interface between two semiconductors behaved as though they were made up of particles with only a fraction of the electron's charge. This so-called fractional quantum hall effect (FQHE) suggested that electrons may not be elementary particles after all. However, it soon became clear that electrons under certain conditions can congregate in a way that gives them the illusion of having fractional charge - an explanation that earned Laughlin, Horst Störmer and Daniel Tsui the Nobel prize.

Read more here.

USM Top Malaysian Research University

Saw this article in The Sunday Star - Education section.

Last month, USM was named the top research university in the country by the Higher Education Ministry.

This is based on a five-year evaluation against eight criteria: research quality, research quantity, researcher quality and quantity, postgraduate quality and quantity, level of innovation, support such as facilities and human expertise, level of networking and internationalisation, and number of awards and recognition received.

According to Prof Dzulkifli, the university scored high marks in all eight areas used in the appraisal, which took place from 2000 to 2005.

USM received 100% for innovation, awards and recognition and at least 88% in most categories.

A lot of interesting points brought up in the article such as a better remuneration scheme to attract more postgraduate students and how USM will spend the RM153 million grant received by all research universities.

Read the full article here.