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Permanent Daylight Saving Time would lead to darker mornings from November to March. This would mean darker commutes for everyone, but how much would it affect children going to school? Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ researchers did the math for 14 out of the 19 states that preapproved the change. Using school start times, enrollment data, and latitude and longitude measurements, the team calculated just how many days each child would be commuting to school in the dark and then added the trips together.

With several university athletic programs around the country — including the Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ — announcing moves to new conferences that will likely increase travel for student-athletes, a group of sleep and circadian scientists and physicians have published a white paper describing the significance of repeated, chronic jet lag on student-athlete health and performance — both in academics and in sports, and suggesting strategies to reduce the consequences of travel across time zones.

A study measuring the sleep patterns of students at the Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ found that students fell asleep later in the evening and woke up later in the morning during winter, when daylight hours on the Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµâ€™s Seattle campus are limited and the skies are notoriously overcast. Researchers believe the students’ natural circadian clocks were being “pushed back” or delayed in winter because they were not getting enough exposure during the day to natural light, and that getting more daytime light exposure can help reverse this.

Sleep cycles in people oscillate during the 29.5-day lunar cycle: In the days leading up to a full moon, people go to sleep later in the evening and sleep for shorter periods of time. The team, led by researchers at the Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ, observed these variations in both the time of sleep onset and the duration of sleep in urban and rural settings — from Indigenous communities in northern Argentina to college students in Seattle, a city of more than 750,000. They saw the oscillations regardless of an individual’s access to electricity, though the variations are less pronounced in individuals living in urban environments.