Any book of Why We Sleep's length is bound to contain some factual errors. Therefore, to avoid potential concerns about cherry-picking the few inaccuracies scattered throughout, in this essay, I'm going to highlight the five most egregious scientific and factual errors Walker makes in Chapter 1 of the book. This chapter contains 10 pages and constitutes less than 4% of the book by the total word count.

At its root, the problem we face is that we have entered a space age world with Stone Age genes – genes that evolved to produce jaws adapted to a hunter-gatherer diet. Today's jaws epidemic is concealed behind the commonplace. Its most obvious symptoms are oral and facial: crooked teeth (and the accompanying very common use of braces), receding jaws, a smile that shows lots of gums, mouth breathing, and interrupted breathing during sleep. A bother, but hardly an 'epidemic' – at least until one recognizes the relationship between malocclusion and a veritable host of downstream health consequences.

Stringfoot is a term used to describe pigeons whose feet have become entangled with foreign matter, whether actual string, thread, monofilament, real or artificial human hair (most common), dental floss, yarn, or the many other materials discarded by the human population of cities.

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Whether adult birds or chicks, these foreign materials wrapped around their feet or legs — and sometimes binding their feet together — results in pain, infection, loss of digits or entire feet, and the subsequent inability to walk, stand, perch, land, feed or bathe properly, sometimes leading to illness or death...

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On a continent famous for its welfare systems, school closures threaten to widen divisions of education, ethnicity and class. Compared with the rest of the world, Europe has not done badly during the pandemic. Most of its schools reopened in the autumn, while in South America and South Asia they largely stayed shut. But covid-19’s second wave has forced many European schools to close again.

This hurts all pupils, but it hits the poor and vulnerable ones harder. France’s education ministry says that last spring’s lockdown increased the gap in exam scores between normal schools and ones in hard-up areas by several points. In Germany, that first lockdown cut studying time from 7.4 hours per day to 3.6. An analysis of last year’s national exam results in the Netherlands came up with the depressing finding that during the spring lockdown the average pupil had learned nothing at all. Those whose parents were poorly educated did even worse: they emerged from their first two months of schooling by internet knowing less than when they started.

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The disease poses a grave and fast-moving threat to every nation. Governments have, quite reasonably, assumed emergency powers to counter it. But such powers can be abused. Governments have selectively banned protests on the grounds that they might spread the virus, silenced critics and scapegoated minorities. They have used emergency measures to harass dissidents. And they have taken advantage of a general atmosphere of alarm. With everyone’s attention on covid-19, autocrats and would-be autocrats in many countries can do all sorts of bad things, safe in the knowledge that the rest of the world will barely notice, let alone to object.

グループで食事をするときの唾の広がり方も調べました。前に座った人より隣に座った人に唾が５倍多くかかりました。チームの人は、隣に座ると、ウイルスがうつる危険が高くなると言っています。

(A group of researchers found the risk of coronavirus spreading among people sitting together eating was five times higher when they were seated next to each other, compared to when they were sitting opposite.)

Styrketräning kan förlänga livet och minska risken för hjärt- och kärlsjukdomar, diabetes och cancer. Även minnet förbättras. Ändå har styrketräning hamnat i bakvattnet av konditionsträning. Är det dags för en förändring?

That’s because we eat a ton of meat, and the vast majority of it comes from factory farms. In these huge industrialized facilities that supply more than 90 percent of meat globally — and around 99 percent of America’s meat — animals are tightly packed together and live under harsh and unsanitary conditions.

“When we overcrowd animals by the thousands, in cramped football-field-size sheds, to lie beak to beak or snout to snout, and there’s stress crippling their immune systems, and there’s ammonia from the decomposing waste burning their lungs, and there’s a lack of fresh air and sunlight — put all these factors together and you have a perfect-storm environment for the emergence and spread of disease,“ said Michael Greger, the author of Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching.

To make matters worse, selection for specific genes in farmed animals (for desirable traits like large chicken breasts) has made these animals almost genetically identical. That means that a virus can easily spread from animal to animal without encountering any genetic variants that might stop it in its tracks. As it rips through a flock or herd, the virus can grow even more virulent.

Greger puts it bluntly: “If you actually want to create global pandemics, then build factory farms.”