> Some emerging research suggests Earth’s magnetism matters, as well. Being barefoot on the ground versus 30 stories high in a downtown skyscraper puts you in a completely different magnetic environment.

Really? My instinctive reaction to this statement is that it's quackery. Would be very interested to see headlines appear about this if it's true.

More fragmented sleep, with people talking in the night, etc. I guess that's different from the low, unnatural, rumbles of cars and aeroplanes the majority of people have to put up with.

> Sleep is critical to human functioning, and yet, we sleep fewer total hours than any other ape, and are still arguably the most evolutionarily successful of the primates

> humans are weird outliers—we’re the shortest sleeping primates, yet we pack in the most REM sleep relative to this short duration

Isn't that sort of the point? Sleep is a detrimental necessity and the more efficient an organism is in needing less of it, the more effective it can be because it simply has more time to get ahead of the others?

It's still very odd that no species has ended up evolving a continuous maintenance system that can run while conscious, the benefits when hunting other animals that need sleep would be enormous, so there has to be significant evolutionary push for it. I suppose the single hemisphere sleep some marine mammals do is part of the way there, but it is at most a lazy workaround. Practically all other organs have evolved to run 24/7 for up to a century without a single break, what makes brains so universally different?