Sleepless Harvest

Sleep disorders: sleepless in Singapore.

Sleep disorders are common afflictions in both the paediatric and adult populations, increasingly recognised as major public health concerns. Recently, the Institute of Medicine (USA) convened an ad hoc committee of experts in public health, academic and medical administration, and health sciences research to address sleep health issues, including the impact of sleep loss and sleep disorders on...

Sleepless in the surgical ward.

Sleepless in Seattle No Longer

In enterprise networks, idle desktop machines rarely sleep, because users (and IT departments) want them to be always accessible. While a number of solutions have been proposed, few have been evaluated via real deployments. We have built and deployed a lightweight sleep proxy system at Microsoft Research. Our system has been operational for six months, and has over 50 active users. This paper f...

Identification of SLEEPLESS, a sleep-promoting factor.

Sleep is an essential process conserved from flies to humans. The importance of sleep is underscored by its tight homeostatic control. Through a forward genetic screen, we identified a gene, sleepless, required for sleep in Drosophila. The sleepless gene encodes a brain-enriched, glycosylphosphatidylinositol-anchored protein. Loss of SLEEPLESS protein caused an extreme (>80%) reduction in sleep...

Harvest and Post-harvest Operations

Harvest and post-harvest operations constitute principal constraints to rice production, especially in irrigated systems, because of the larger yield that has to be handled. Post-harvest crop losses of up to 35% have been reported and attributed to inefficiency of manual threshing of rice by small-scale farmers. This leads to poor grain quality and rejection of locally produced rice. The Africa...