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Brief Points, February 2005

Sleep less, weigh more? Compared with people who sleep eight hours, five-hour snoozers produce 15 percent more gherlin, a hunger hormone, and 15 percent less leptin, an appetite suppressor.

PLoS Medicine, December 7, 2004

Anatomy shaper: the driving force behind the evolution of theHomospecies fromAustralopithecusmay have been the ability to run long distances, for hunting or scavenging across Africa's vast savannas.


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Nature, November 18, 2004

Detecting neutrinos typically means looking for faint flashes that occur when the ghostly particles collide with atoms in water. An astrophysicist suggests that Jupiter's icy moon Europa could serve as a sensor of neutrinos a million times more energetic than those that can be caught on Earth.

physicsweb.org, November 25, 2004

Antibodies from narcoleptic people induced a narcolepsylike symptom in the muscle of mice, suggesting that an autoimmune process plays a role in the sleep-wake disorder.

Lancet, December 11, 2004

Scientific American Magazine Vol 292 Issue 2This article was originally published with the title “Brief Points” in Scientific American Magazine Vol. 292 No. 2 (), p. 33
doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0205-33d