A look at hypersomnolence, a condition that causes a person to sleep excessively, and the difficulty of treating a rare sleeping disorder:

Sumner needed sleep like an addict needs a fix. ‘It was this overpowering desire in me, a physical urge,’ she says. ‘And there was always the hope that, maybe this time, I would wake up feeling better.’

Sumner was almost 30 before finally confronting her problem. She had joined a high-profile law firm in Atlanta and, for the first time in her life, didn’t have a flexible schedule. She couldn’t nap without raising eyebrows. ‘That’s when it finally hit me,’ she says. ‘This is not how you’re supposed to feel.’

In the fall of 2005, she sought help at the Emory Clinic Sleep Center. She learned that her problem, known as hypersomnolence, was rare but not unheard of. Over the next six years, a team of doctors there analyzed the chemicals in her brain and in the brains of 31 other hypersomniacs. They fingered one mysterious substance as the culprit.

“Re-Awakenings.” — Virginia Hughes, The Last Word on Nothing

“The Long Shot.” — Lee Billings, Seed Magazine

Does our body tell us when we can’t go any farther, or does our brain? A look at marathon runners and the science behind human endurance.

A classic situation in which athletes believe they have hit a true physical limit is ‘bonking’ during a marathon: you stagger to a halt, ostensibly because your body runs out of carbohydrates. When Noakes started running in the 1970s, the standard advice was to drink only water during long races. Then, in the late stages of a sixty-four-kilometre race one year, he tried a few spoonfuls of corn syrup. ‘Five minutes later, I just started running. I finished that race faster than I ever finished,’ he recalls. ‘It was like the brain released something.” The discovery led to the first external funding (‘a thousand rand in a brown paper packet,’ he says) for his nascent sports science lab, to study the effects of corn syrup on participants in South Africa’s Stellenbosch marathon.

The fact that the corn syrup worked seems to support the idea that the body is limited by its finite store of carbohydrates. But it almost worked too well, and Noakes began to question whether carbohydrates could even reach the muscles that quickly. Sure enough, recent experiments in Britain have shown that your brain picks up the presence of carbohydrates in your mouth via previously unknown sensors, anticipates that fuel is headed to your muscles, and allows you to go a bit faster — even if you trick it by spitting out the carbs rather than swallowing them to replenish your muscles.

“The Race Against Time.” — Alex Hutchinson, Walrus Magazine

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A look back at James Watson’s book The Double Helix and the controversy it stirred in the science community.

In telling the story, he produced a great work of literary nonfiction. Watson expanded the boundaries of science writing to include not only the formal, public face of Nobel-winning discoveries but also the day-to-day life of working scientists—both inside and outside the lab.The Double Helixrejuvenated a genre that had been largely academic or hagiographic. Its success showed that there was and is an appetite for thestoryof science; that the stories can be human and exciting; that scientists can be flawed characters; that the whole endeavor doesn’t collapse if you depict it with something less than reverence.

Although the book caused an international scandal that winter, I don’t think any word of the controversy reached me at Classical High School. As a freshman, I read The Double Helix as a story of pure triumph. Now, of course, I can see what I couldn’t then: an epic of the loss of innocence, writ small and large. And I can see the arc of Watson’s life since 1968, which has been another epic of triumph and hubris, ending with a fall. So now I see the darkness around the shining cup.

“Laboratory Confidential.” — Jonathan Weiner, Columbia Journalism Review

More #longreads from CJR

Researchers study a small group of patients who underwent surgery that split their brains:

Through studies of this group, neuroscientists now know that the healthy brain can look like two markedly different machines, cabled together and exchanging a torrent of data. But when the primary cable is severed, information — a word, an object, a picture — presented to one hemisphere goes unnoticed in the other. Michael Gazzaniga, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the godfather of modern split-brain science, says that even after working with these patients for five decades, he still finds it thrilling to observe the disconnection effects first-hand. ‘You see a split-brain patient just doing a standard thing — you show him an image and he can’t say what it is. But he can pull that same object out of a grab-bag,’ Gazzaniga says. ‘Your heart just races!’

“The Split Brain: A Tale of Two Halves.” — David Wolman, Nature

See also: “A Piece of Their Mind.” — Ken MacQueen, MacLean’s, Nov. 2, 2010

Scientists are discovering how chemicals can affect the way memories are formed, paving the way for a future where it could be possible to forget anything we wanted by taking a single pill:

This isn’t Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind-style mindwiping. In some ways it’s potentially even more effective and more precise. Because of the compartmentalization of memory in the brain—the storage of different aspects of a memory in different areas—the careful application of PKMzeta synthesis inhibitors and other chemicals that interfere with reconsolidation should allow scientists to selectively delete aspects of a memory. Right now, researchers have to inject their obliviating potions directly into the rodent brain. Future treatments, however, will involve targeted inhibitors, like an advanced version of ZIP, that become active only in particular parts of the cortex and only at the precise time a memory is being recalled. The end result will be a menu of pills capable of erasing different kinds of memories—the scent of a former lover or the awful heartbreak of a failed relationship. These thoughts and feelings can be made to vanish, even as the rest of the memory remains perfectly intact. “Reconsolidation research has shown that we can get very specific about which associations we go after,” LeDoux says. “And that’s a very good thing. Nobody actually wants a totally spotless mind.”

“The Forgetting Pill Erases Painful Memories Forever.” — Jonah Lehrer, Wired

See also: “Remember This.” — Joshua Foer, National Geographic, Nov. 1, 2007

Scientist Tyrone B. Hayes discovered a link between the herbicide atrazine and male frogs developing female body parts. His work led to a bizarre battle with atrazine manufacturer Syngenta, in which the two taunted each other over email:

When a batch of these emails became public in 2010, Hayes’ supporters and critics alike were stunned. Here was one of the top scientists in his field, provoking one of the world’s largest agrichemical companies with crude sexual innuendos and LL Cool J-inspired raps:

tyrone b hayes is hard as hell

battle anybody, i don’t care who you tell

you object! you will fail!

mercy for the weak is not for sale

“It hasn’t been productive in the debate, and it hasn’t helped him,” Skelly says. “I mean, why do that?”

“The Frog of War.” — Dashka Slater, Mother Jones

See more science #longreads

But a scientific revolution that has taken place in the last decade or so illuminates a different way to address the dysfunctions associated with childhood hardship. This science suggests that many of these problems have roots earlier than is commonly understood—especially during the first two years of life. Researchers, including those of the Bucharest project, have shown how adversity during this period affects the brain, down to the level of DNA—establishing for the first time a causal connection between trouble in very early childhood and later in life. And they have also shown a way to prevent some of these problems—if action is taken during those crucial first two years.

The first two years, however, happen to be the period of a child’s life in which we invest the least. According to research by the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, children get about half as many taxpayer resources, per person, as do the elderly. And among children, the youngest get the least. The annual federal investment in elementary school kids approaches $11,000 per child. For infants and toddlers up to age two, it is just over $4,000. When it comes to early childhood, public policy is lagging far behind science—with disastrous consequences.

“The Two Year Window.” — Jonathan Cohn, The New Republic

See more #longreads from The New Republic