Science

Slumber particularly helps with math, says a new study.

Sorry, parents, but you might need to start enforcing bedtime. Or letting your kids sleep in.

While no one likes a bedtime battle, a new study shows that a good night’s sleep can translate to improved academic performance. Researchers at McGill University and the Douglas Mental Health University Institute in Montreal found that children who had a better quality sleep performed better in math and languages.

Specifically researchers found a link between academic performance and something called sleep efficiency, which is more or less how well you sleep at night. “Sleep efficiency is the proportion of the amount of time you slept to the amount of time you were in bed,” says clinical psychologist Reut Gruber, lead author of the study. “Simply put, you go to bed, you lie down and spend time in bed, but if you’re not able to sleep through the time in bed, that’s not efficient sleep.”

“Short or poor sleep is a significant risk factor for poor academic performance that is frequently ignored,” says Gruber, and while there are other studies out there that linked sleep and academic performance, she wanted to take a slightly different tack. “I wanted to look at specific subject areas, not to lump them together, knowing that different skills are needed for different subjects.”

When it comes to math and language skills specifically, Gruber says, it’s a question of brain anatomy. “For math and languages, we need to use the skills that are called ‘executive functions’—things like working memory, planning, not being distracted. The hardware that supports those skills is in the pre-frontal cortex of the brain, which is very sensitive to the effects of poor sleep or insufficient sleep.”

So Gruber’s team looked 75 healthy children between the ages of 7 and 11. The children were each given a wristwatch-like device called an “actigraph” that is used to evaluate sleep by monitoring their night time activity, averaged the data over five nights and correlated the data with the kids’ report-card grades.

They then controlled for variables already known to be associated with academic performance—socio-economic status of the parents and the age of the child and used the sleep variables to predict the report cards grades. “Math, English, French, each one separately,” said Gruber. “Then we looked at how much variability in the specific grade or subject was explained by the sleep variables after controlling for the other what we call ‘confounders.’”

What they found was a “significant” performance variable in math and languages that was related to a good night’s sleep. Especially math. “We found that 14% of the variability we found in math …was explained by sleep deficiency,” said Gruber. “It was 7% and 8% for English and French.”

While parents are on the hook for enforcing bedtime, Gruber thinks pediatricians should ask about the quality and quantity of sleep during routine checkups. “I think many kids might have some sleep issues that nobody is aware of,” she says. “Regular screening for possible sleep issues is particularly important for students who exhibit difficulties in math, languages or reading.”

The National Sleep Foundation recommends that children ages five to 12 get 10-11 hours of sleep a night. (Teenagers need about 9 hours, but studies suggest only 15% of them get it.) If your child currently clocks in less than that, it might be time for a bed time reevaluation. In previous studies, Gruber and her team looked at sleep extension—adding hours to sleep time—and while they didn’t look at math, they did study behavior and attention and saw an improvement in both areas.

To develop healthy sleep habits, the National Sleep Foundation suggest parents establish a consistent bedtime routine, emphasize the need for a regular sleep schedule, keep television and computers out of bedrooms and teach children about healthy sleep habits.

Jeffrey Kluger is Editor at Large for TIME.

The happiest place on Earth catches a bad case of measles—and the usual suspects are to blame

Somewhere in Orange County, Mary Poppins may be running a fever. The same could be true for her coworkers—an unsuspecting Ariel, say; a suddenly swoony Goofy or Pluto or any of the other 23,000 people (OK, or characters) who punch in for work at Disneyland every day. And the same could be true too for any one of the estimated 16 million people who will pour into the theme park this year.

The reason? Measles. The cause? This may not come entirely as a surprise: the anti-vaccine crowd.

Just when you think they’ve been run to ground, shamed into silence, and just when you can watch a whole evening of Jenny McCarthy co-hosting the New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square and not hear her utter a word of unscientific nonsense, the anti-vaxxers come roaring back. Less than two weeks into 2015 come the year’s first stories about the latest victims of the nation’s declining vaccine rate. And this time, ground zero is the self-proclaimed Happiest Place on Earth, which is in danger of becoming the decidedly less consumer-friendly Most Expensive Disease Vector on Earth.

The epidemiological numbers seem small, but the implications are big: from Dec. 15 to Dec. 20, at least 20 people are reported to have have entered Disneyland’s gates healthy and exited with measles. Of those victims, 15 were unvaccinated. Those infections occurred in a year in which California as a whole had its highest measles caseload in two decades—66, with 23 of them in Orange County. The U.S. recorded 610 cases total in 2014, triple the number as recently as 2011.

It’s no coincidence, as TIME has reported, that the areas of the country with the highest vaccine refusal rates—Orange County; New York City; Columbus, Ohio; Silicon Valley—have higher rates of outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases, too. What gives the anti-vaccinators so much power to do so much harm is that once vaccine rates fall below 95%, herd immunity—the protection that a well-vaccinated community offers to the few people in its midst who must remain unvaccinated for legitimate medical reasons—starts to break down. In 2012, California was right at that baseline 95% vaccination rate for measles and whooping cough. It’s now at 92%.

Those small percentages can make huge differences. In 2003, a few provinces in northern Nigeria banned polio vaccines, when local religious leaders claimed the drops were designed to sterilize Muslim girls and transmit AIDS. Within three years, 20 previously polio-free countries recorded cases of the disease—all of them the Nigerian strain.

American anti-vaxxers seem impervious to this and other warning flags, like the ongoing whooping cough epidemic in California or last year’s outbreaks of measles in New York and mumps in Columbus. As the Disneyland outbreak is reported here and here and here and here, the reaction is likely to be more of the same—which is to say denial coupled with a lot of echo-chamber prattle about a bought-off media carrying water for big pharma, plus the usual scattering of glib Twitter code like #CDCWhistleblower, which purports to be final proof of the great vaccine coverup, but which is nothing of the kind.

Hashtag science is not real science, and conspiracy theories have nothing to do with facts. The problem is, children infected with measles—or polio or whooping cough or mumps—are indeed very real. In the age of vaccines, there ought to be no place they feel unsafe—least of all Disneyland.

The appointment is part of a broader reshuffle

Texas Senator Ted Cruz was appointed the chair of the Senate subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness last week — which means he will be in charge of overseeing space agency NASA in Congress.

The Republican lawmaker’s appointment is part of a larger reshuffle following the GOP’s win in the 2014 Congressional election.

The Verge reports that Cruz has previously denied climate change exists and also unsuccessfully attempted to reduce NASA’s funding in July 2013.

But Cruz, whose role at the subcommittee’s helm will be confirmed later this month, has also previously said that it was “critical that the United States ensure its continued leadership in space.”

NASA and Nissan team up to create autonomous vehicles for other worlds

Nissan has begun developing a self-driving car in partnership with NASA, in the hopes that some of the technology will one day be used to ferry passengers around on other planets.

The Japanese car manufacturer and the U.S. space agency announced a five-year partnership on Thursday to jointly engineer vehicles capable of self-operation, Wired magazine reports.

The cars will be developed at NASA’s Ames Research Center, close to Nissan’s Silicon Valley facility in California. They will also be zero emission, modeled on the electric Nissan Leaf.

“This is a perfect blend of the capability of what the robotics folks at NASA Ames have and the autonomy that we bring,” said Martin Sierhuis, the director of Nissan’s Silicon Valley research center. Sierhuis, incidentally, is a former NASA scientist.

NASA said that it was looking forward to using some of the automation technology pioneered by Nissan in its space programs. “We have a rover on Mars. It is not very autonomous. As we go deeper into space, into more and more dangerous locations, we need to add that autonomy,” Pete Worden, director of the Ames Research Center, told Wired.

[Wired]