Posts tagged PLOS

Nocturnal sleep and daytime napping facilitate memory consolidation for semantically related and unrelated word pairs. We contrasted forgetting of both kinds of materials across a 12-hour interval involving either nocturnal sleep or daytime wakefulness (experiment 1) and a 2-hour interval involving either daytime napping or wakefulness (experiment 2). Beneficial effects of post-learning nocturnal sleep and daytime napping were greater for unrelated word pairs (Cohen’s d = 0.71 and 0.68) than for related ones (Cohen’s d = 0.58 and 0.15). While the size of nocturnal sleep and daytime napping effects was similar for unrelated word pairs, for related pairs, the effect of nocturnal sleep was more prominent. Together, these findings suggest that sleep preferentially facilitates offline memory processing of materials that are more susceptible to forgetting.

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0108100

Despite its relative youth (less than two decades), the ecological footprint (EF) is a commonly used term in environmental science, policy discussions, and popular discourse. The motivation behind the concept is sound—we must account for, and quantify, the impacts of humanity on Earth’s ecosystems if we are to manage the planet sustainably for the benefit of both human well-being and our natural heritage. The EF seeks to measure humanity’s use of renewable biological resources, which can then be compared to the planet’s capacity to regenerate these resources. The result of EF calculations that is quoted most widely is that humanity currently uses the equivalent of 1.5 Earths to support human needs. Therefore, we are already exceeding the planet’s carrying capacity in what amounts to “ecological overshoot”

http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001700