You Can’t Do Your Job if You Don’t Sleep – Tony Schwartz – Harvard Business Review

You always hear about the effects of diet and exercise on cardiovascular health, but why not sleep?

… sleeping less than 6 hours a night increases the risk of developing or dying from heart disease by an astonishing 48 percent.

and:

There is no single behavioral change we’ve seen in our work with thousands of executives that more quickly and powerfully influences mood, focus, and productivity than a full night’s sleep.

Cool Down With A Hot Drink? It’s Not As Crazy As You Think : The Salt : NPR

I’ve been told this is why Indian food is so spicy. Looks like science can explain what a billion people figured out intuitively.

So when you eat or drink something hot, these receptors get that heat signal, and that tells the nerve to let the brain know what’s going on. When the brain gets the message “It’s hot in here,” it turns on the mechanism we have to cool ourselves off: sweating. Yes, the hot drink makes you hotter … but it does something else, too. “The hot drink somehow has an effect on your systemic cooling mechanisms, which exceeds its actual effect in terms of heating your body,” says McNaughton. One other interesting thing. These TRPV1 receptors respond to hot heat, but they also respond to chemicals in chili peppers, which is why chili peppers seem hot. “That’s probably why chili peppers are so popular in hot countries because they cause sweating and activate a whole raft of mechanisms which lower the temperature,” he says.

Social power and morality

We’ve probably all heard the saying “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Well, there is a great deal of research concerning the link between social power and morality, and most of it suggests that absolute power is not required to change people’s morals; sadly it tends to show that more power leads to less care for others, and less moral behavior.

D10: Aaron Sorkin on Steve Jobs, Aristotle, and I Love Lucy – TechHive Beta Blog