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A Young Man Reading by Candlelight, Matthias Stom (ca. 1630). A night owl, evening person, or simply owl, is a person who tends or prefers to be active late at night and into the early morning, and to sleep and wake up later than is considered normal; night owls often work or engage in recreational activities late into the night (in some cases, until around dawn), and sleep until relatively ...
[7] [4] More specifically, geckos, which were thought to be naturally nocturnal have shown many transitions to diurnality, with about 430 species of geckos now showing diurnal activity. [4] With so many diurnal species recorded, comparative analysis studies using newer lineages of gecko species have been done to study the evolution of diurnality.
A more stringent study conducted in 1999 by Harvard University estimated the natural human rhythm to be closer to 24 hours and 11 minutes: much closer to the solar day. [87] Consistent with this research was a more recent study from 2010, which also identified sex differences, with the circadian period for women being slightly shorter (24.09 ...
Humans still don’t need to hibernate, Weiss said, nor can we afford to due to our social and occupational obligations. “But we can make adjustments to perform in a better way, to rest in a ...
Humans are normally diurnal creatures that are active in the daytime. As with most other diurnal animals, human activity-rest patterns are endogenously regulated by biological clocks with a circadian (~24-hour) period. [citation needed] Chronotypes have also been investigated in other species, such as fruit flies [1] and mice. [2]
A circadian rhythm is an entrainable, endogenous, biological activity that has a period of roughly twenty-four hours. This internal time-keeping mechanism is centralized in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) of humans, and allows for the internal physiological mechanisms underlying sleep and alertness to become synchronized to external environmental cues, like the light-dark cycle. [4]
The kiwi is a family of nocturnal birds endemic to New Zealand.. While it is difficult to say which came first, nocturnality or diurnality, a hypothesis in evolutionary biology, the nocturnal bottleneck theory, postulates that in the Mesozoic, many ancestors of modern-day mammals evolved nocturnal characteristics in order to avoid contact with the numerous diurnal predators. [3]
Sleep can follow a physiological or behavioral definition. In the physiological sense, sleep is a state characterized by reversible unconsciousness, special brainwave patterns, sporadic eye movement, loss of muscle tone (possibly with some exceptions; see below regarding the sleep of birds and of aquatic mammals), and a compensatory increase following deprivation of the state, this last known ...