Word: short
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...between 6.5 hr. and 7.5 hr. a night, as they report, live the longest. And people who sleep 8 hr. or more, or less than 6.5 hr., they don't live quite as long. There is just as much risk associated with sleeping too long as with sleeping too short. The big surprise is that long sleep seems to start at 8 hr. Sleeping 8.5 hr. might really be a little worse than sleeping...
Morbidity [or sickness] is also "U-shaped" in the sense that both very short sleep and very long sleep are associated with many illnesses-with depression, with obesity-and therefore with heart disease-and so forth. But the [ideal amount of sleep] for different health measures isn't all in the same place. Most of the low points are at 7 or 8 hr., but there are some at 6 hr. and even at 9 hr. I think diabetes is lowest in 7-hr. sleepers [for example]. But these measures aren't as clear as the mortality data...
...muddled responses, governments and international agencies are racing to allay the damage. Headway will not come cheap. U.N. officials warn that boosting agricultural production enough to feed the world could cost about $20 billion extra a year. Warning that a decade of progress against poverty could be obliterated in short order, World Bank president Robert Zoellick announced the bank would quickly spend about $1.2 billion to boost crop production in the world's poorest countries. U.S. President George W. Bush has committed about $360 million in U.S. emergency food aid, while the Asian Development Bank has vowed to give...
...consistently met that target. "We have been warning of the dangers for a long time," says Simon Scott, head of statistics for the OECD, which has tracked how several African countries have gone from being food exporters in the 1980s to relying heavily on foreign food aid today. In short, the world is suddenly hungry because of decades of neglect. "It is as much a question of complacency as anything else," says Charles Riemenschneider, head of the FAO's Investment Center in Rome...
...student, our lives were changed. And often, these tales are made even more compelling by the fact that the person we were talking to did not suspect that the conversation would be pivotal. I’ve heard former University President Derek C. Bok tell a story about a short conversation he had with a law school professor in whose class he was not faring well. The conversation convinced Bok not to give up on law school and to consider that his talents might not be sufficiently on display in this one class but would be in others...