Sleepless in Cydonia – hacking the human sleep cycle

Jet-lag is no fun, as anyone who has experienced it is sure to tell you. But if you were staying on Mars for any length of time, the slightly longer than 24-hour days would make you feel like you had an unshakeable case of jet-lag – which wouldn’t be conducive to working efficiently, to say the least. Hence NASA’s recent experiments, which have discovered that brief exposures to bright light in the evening can help the Circadian rhythms of the body adjust to longer days. They hypothesise that this may be a useful treatment for insomnia and other sleep disorders, too, but I doubt it’ll offer much help to the crazy guy trying to break the world record for sleep deprivation.