Science News Round-Up: Health, Wealth … and Surgical Sponges
And another way work leads to unhealthy behaviour: The office candy dish. It is now scientifically proven that the more visible and accessible it is, the more you eat! New support for the “If I can’t see it, it’s not there” problem solving technique! Just hide the candy, and hope that, by the time you find it, it’s all icky, stuck together, and generally unappealing.
Even waking up to go to work can be bad for your health. Another study has found that half of people in urban societies suffer from “social jet lag” because their work schedules differ substantially from their body clocks. The study suggests that employers tell their employees to wake up naturally and arrive to work on their own schedules. That sounds awesome, but I’m not sure if I’d ever get out of bed. I guess it beats calling in hung-over, but it might not be as good as taking an apathy day.
But really, you snooze, you lose. Weight that is. Another study linking sleep deprivation to obesity contributes to the growing body of knowledge on the importance of sleep to good health. So really, we’ve gone full circle here. You work too long, you eat more crap. You wake up early to go to work, you get fat. Time to either quit your job or throw caution to the wind and pig out on peanut butter and deep-fried oreos.
Speaking of unhealthy, a new study found that people who live in neighborhoods that are lacking in grocery stores, but plentiful in fast food restaurants, are more prone to premature death, diabetes, cancer and heart problems. But they are much less likely to cause alcohol-related oven explosions, as occurred in this ill planned pot roast attempt.
Are you one of those people that always sets off the security alarm at the mall? Have you recently had major surgery? You just might have an errant surgical sponge in your abdomen. At Stanford’s Medical School they are testing a program where radio frequency identification tags are attached to surgical sponges in hopes of preventing the pesky loss of surgical implements inside of patients. This beats the previous program, where first year medical students were subjected to the cut-rate educational film, “Dude, Where’s My Sponge?” and the follow-up, “Sponge Bob Dead Pants”, which I hear is a total bummer.
