Night Owls and Lone Wolves

Dancing With Wolves: Today's Lone Wolf Terrorists

Night vision in barn owls: visual acuity and contrast sensitivity under dark adaptation.

Barn owls are effective nocturnal predators. We tested their visual performance at low light levels and determined visual acuity and contrast sensitivity of three barn owls by their behavior at stimulus luminances ranging from photopic to fully scotopic levels (23.5 to 1.5 × 10⁻⁶). Contrast sensitivity and visual acuity decreased only slightly from photopic to scotopic conditions. Peak grating ...

Circadian Polymorphisms in Night Owls, in Bipolars, and in Non-24-Hour Sleep Cycles

People called night owls habitually have late bedtimes and late times of arising, sometimes suffering a heritable circadian disturbance called delayed sleep phase syndrome (DSPS). Those with DSPS, those with more severe progressively-late non-24-hour sleep-wake cycles, and those with bipolar disorder may share genetic tendencies for slowed or delayed circadian cycles. We searched for polymorphi...

‘Night owls’: Reset the physiologic clock in delayed sleep phase disorder

Vol. 8, No. 3 55 R. Robert Auger, MD Assistant professor of psychiatry and medicine Mayo Clinic College of Medicine Consultant, Mayo Center for Sleep Medicine Rochester, MN C A R L M EN Z FO R C U R R EN T PS YC H IA TR Y Jason, age 16, has had diffi culty with sleep initiation for 2 years. He describes going to bed at 10:30 PM on school nights but falling asleep no sooner than midnight and typ...

Early Birds, Night Owls, and Tireless/Recurring Itinerants: An Exploratory Analysis of Extreme Transit Behaviors in Beijing, China

This paper seeks to understand extreme public transit riders in Beijing using both traditional household survey and emerging new data sources such as Smart Card Data (SCD). We focus on four types of extreme transit behaviors: public transit riders who (1) travel significantly earlier than average riders (the ‘early birds’); (2) ride in unusual late hours (the ‘night owls’); and (3) commute in e...