Science Friday - Why Cold Plasma Could Help Sustainable Farming, How To Get Teens The Sleep They Need. April 8, 2022, Part 2

Episode Date: April 8, 2022

The Future of Sustainable Farming Could Be Cold Plasma Plasma is a fascinating medium. It’s considered the fourth state of matter—alongside solid, liquid and gas—and it’s everywhere. In fact, more than 99.9% of all matter in the universe is assumed to be in plasma form. You may be most familiar with plasma as the material inside those glowing novelty lamps found in museum gift shops, but it’s naturally found in the sun, lightning, and the northern lights. Research into plasma and how it intersects with various industries has been increasing, especially in the area of agriculture. Cold plasma specifically is being tested as a way to speed up plant growth and make fertilizer that’s better for the environment. And it works: Lots of research has shown that exposure to cold plasma makes seeds germinate faster. While this sounds like a sci-fi concept, farmers have seen for decades that plants grown on the site of lightning strikes grow faster. The strangest part? Scientists don’t know why this works, only that it does. Joining Ira to talk about cold plasma and its possible future in the agriculture world is Jose Lopez, professor of physics at Seton Hall University, based in South Orange, New Jersey. Lopez is also program manager for plasma physics at the National Science Foundation.   Why Are Teenagers So Sleep Deprived? Teenagers have a reputation for being moody, making rash decisions, and maybe even being a bit lazy. Turns out, lack of sleep may be partly to blame for some of this stereotypical behavior. Contrary to popular belief, teens actually need more sleep than adults—about 9 to 10 hours a night—to help support critical brain development. But American teens are getting less sleep than they ever have before due to a perfect storm of biology, increased homework, early school start-times, and technology. Over the past three decades, the average American teens’ sleep has shrunk to just 6.5 hours a night. Ira talks with Heather Turgeon and Julie Wright, psychotherapists and sleep specialists. They’re co-authors of the new book, Generation Sleepless: Why Teens and Tweens Are Not Sleeping Enough and What We Can Do to Help Them. The teen voices you heard during this segment were: Zion, Ro’Shell, LaRon, Aleathia, Zahriah, Trysten, Londyn, Jairus and Cix. All are 8th grade students at Manchester Academic Charter School, and recorded by SLB Radio at its Youth Media Center, in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato. What do the sun, fluorescent light bulbs, and the northern lights all have in common? They're all made of or give off plasma. Plasma is a fascinating medium. It's considered the fourth state of matter alongside solid liquid and gas, and it is everywhere. Experts say that more than 99.9% of all matter in the universe is in plasma form. Now, you may be most familiar with plasma as the stuff inside those glowing novelty lamps you can find at a museum gift shop, but plasma is being used in a lot of places, including agriculture. Cold plasma specifically is being tested as a way to speed up plant growth and make fertilizer that's better for the environment. And since plasma is everywhere, using it could be a sustainable solution for the future of farming. Joining me today to talk about this is my guest, Dr. Jose Lopez, Professor of Physics at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey. He's also a program manager for plasma physics at the National Science Foundation. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you, Ira. It's a pleasure to be

with you. Nice to have you because this is one of my favorite subjects. Let's start with the definition, please. What is cold plasma? How is it different than, say, hot plasma? So I guess we'll start from the beginning, Ira. So plasma, everybody says they're the fourth state of matter. I always counteract that by saying, no, they're the first state of matter. So when the universe formed, when the big bang happened, and you started to have the formation of electrons and then eventually the nucleus and all atoms, that very, very first state of the existence of the universe was the plasma state. Then you had gas, then you had liquids, and then you had solids. So it's a fundamental state. And as you're saying, there's generally categorized in two types of plasmas.

One are hot plasmas, and those tend to be your astrophysical plasmas, your stars. And then the second type of plasma is what we like to call are cold plasmas. And those type of plasmas, the trick there is my favorite subatomic particle is the electron. You funnel energy into the electron, and then the electron, whatever is in the background there, whatever atoms are in the background there are molecules there. It ionizes them. It rips off more electrons, and it causes a cascading effect. And it creates a plasma, but the rest of the majority of the other stuff, the ions and the neutrals

there, are all in cold states. So what that means is you can touch them. A biological organism like us or a plant can touch a cold plasma. All right. Let's get together about plants. What does cold plasma do when you put it together with plants and agriculture? So this is still an emerging field. I mean, it's extremely active area right now. To the surprise of many folks, I mean, I'm a plasma physicist, as you, mentioned, I know about biology, I know about living organisms, but I'm constantly surprised at what plasmas can do. So one of the interesting things that we've seen over the last decade is that when you take

one of these cold plasmas that you make out of air or atmospheric gases, is that you interact them with plants. And what we've seen is that it stimulates the plant to grow better, especially in the early stages of the plant. So you can treat seeds with these types of plasmas, with these cold plasmas. you can treat them at atmospheric pressure or even, you know, in vacuum systems, low pressures, like the types of plasmas that are used for semiconductor processes to make microchips. And what we see there is that when those seeds are planted, they grow more robust to plants.

They're healthier and they grow larger. And we see the same thing when we keep doing plasma treatments for only a few seconds, you know, up to a minute or so. And we see that it stimulates the growth of these plants. And what's happening? That's what we're trying to figure out. So we don't know what's happening. We just know that it happens.

Yeah. So the fascinating thing about plasmas, as I said, it was that first state of matter. And they expand, you know, the scales of the universe from the largest of the largest, the size of the cosmos all the way down to these type of plasmas, these coplasmas that you can make in laboratories and you can make them out of air. And once again, with electrons, with electricity, you can make these types of plasmas. And what we're seeing is not entirely clear. I mean, it seems to be that the biochemistry in the plant is stimulate it.

Some people say that it's what's in air. It's that nitrogen and oxygen that's in air that mimics natural reactions that would happen in these plants. And that causes the biochemistry and them to just get going. And the seeds, we believe, it wakes them up from their dormant state. And it just causes them to grow even faster. Was this noticed in nature before you physicists came along with your ideas about plasma that, hey, something's going on when the lightning is out or something and my plants are growing better. You're right, Ira. I mean, there are historical reports, and these aren't greatly documented,

but we have seen in the historical scientific records in locations where lightning bolts hit soil, that those were the most fertile places. And kind of, you know, it makes sense, because when a lightning bolt happens, it's not a cold plasma in that case. It's very much a hot plasma, thermalized plasma, but it just channels nitrogen or what we would say fertilizer into that soil. And we actually are seeing similar effects when we take cold plasmas, especially ones that are made mostly of air. We see that there's an increase in nitrogen uptake. So in other words, it's acting like a fertilizer, like ammonia wood, for example.

Okay, let's talk about that because we don't like what fertilizers, common fertilizers are doing for climate change. could plasmas be one of the answers for that? Possibly. I mean, you look at different reports, but anywhere from one and a half to three percent of all our electrical power consumption goes into making fertilizer.

And that's just, I mean, just think of the scale of the world and how much power that is. So with these types of plasmas, you can have a localized situation where you can create a fertilizer. I mean, right now you're dependent on, you know, companies to make this,

fertilizer and transport it to the farms or the greenhouses. And the possibility could be that on the local farm, whether in the United States or in, you know, India or different countries all over the world, in Africa, South America, you can have a possibility of the local farmer taking the air that's all around and the electricity that's being delivered to the farm there and creating these plasmas to do a similar reaction, but at atmospheric pressure and create fertilizer. Are people actually studying this? Yes.

Give me an idea. So there are folks looking at and some startup companies coming up about trying to basically replace the Haber Bosch process. And instead of doing it at an extremely large scale, the current way we make fertilizers, think of, you know, huge refineries that you see in, you know, in different places like Texas and especially here in New Jersey. and bringing it down to literally a corner of a barn somewhere or a small setup where you can create fertilizer. Because we keep seeing more and more of what, you know, these indoor vertical gardening situations. Yeah.

Would that be treatable, usable? Yes, absolutely. I mean, I think when we talk about sustainability and especially in growing our food, I mean, we rely now very heavily on these huge fields of land. to grow tremendous amounts of food. And then, of course, that food has to be transported into the big cities, right? And what we're seeing globally is that there's a migration of people away from rural areas

and into these big cities. So, I mean, one possibility of sustainability is growing foods in the cities. I mean, there's, you know, when you walk around different parts of, you know, New York City or my hometown of Lake Newark, New Jersey, you see lots of, lots of land that, you know, are not being used for anything. So the possibilities you can do urban food growing, having farms in those locations. And this technology, this type of plasma technology, is something that is sustainable, totally doable there.

I mean, we have all the ingredients. We have air. We have electricity. It's perfect. It's a perfect technology for that movement you're talking about. In the lab, what does cold plasma applications on plants look like? Is it as easy as waving a magic wand? It kind of does look like a magic wand in a sense.

So there's many ways to kind of do it. You can have what we call a volume plasma, where you take a large amount of gas and you put it between a sandwich of two metal electrodes. And then you introduce an electric field. So in other words, you introduce this electricity. And it creates this glow-like formation, effectively what you see inside a fluorescent light bulb. And you can create that. The other approach is you can create what are called atmospheric plasma. jets. And these are basically, as you're saying, magic wands, the plasma shoots out in a jet-like,

almost like a needle-like pencil structure. And then you can treat locally one seed at a time or the body of the plant using this magic wand, as you labeled it. I like that. Wow. Well, I'm just thinking of those globes. You know, I talked about where you see the lightning sort of strikes out when you put your finger on the globe. Yes. That's plums. Plasma. Could I take my own seeds from home? It's the growing season now. Could I hold them up to that globe and just let it sit there for how long and get treated and try my own experiment? Well, in that case, Ira, the globe is, of course, encasing the plasma. And what you do when you touch the glass, that insulating material there, is the conductivity of the plasma, those tentacles are attracted to your fingers. And of course, you become a perfect conductor of that. So in a sense, yes, you can. The only thing there is you're not getting direct plasma treatment. you're getting indirect plasma treatment there. But once again, it comes down to those, you know, my favorite subatomic particles, those electrons.

Something is happening there, right? That you have that electric field that's induced in your body or induced in a seed. So interestingly enough, there have been some reports in the literature and colleagues of mine that have done that kind of research. They've taken seeds, put them on those plasma balls, and then they've planted them. And they report in the literature that they've seen better growth in their implants. So, yeah, you might be out to something. That's an easy way to do it at home. And I guess because it's electrical and seeds and plants, they're electrical,

there could be some electrical connection there somehow. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, everything's electrical, right? I mean, you and I are thinking right now and those neurons that are shooting your brain is because you have charged moving through our nervous system there. And it's the same thing when light comes into your eyes and it gets refracted by your eye lens there and hits the back of your retina that you have an electrical stimulation that's

happening there. I mean, if you look at stars, Carl Sagan used to say all the time, we are star stuff. And that's absolutely true. Everything that we're made out of, carbon and all of those elements on the periodic table were formed inside a plasma, inside a star that became unstable and blew up as a supernova and created all of this that eventually, of course, formed into the earth and eventually formed into living organisms like us. So it's all connected. I mean, we're just starting to scratch the surface of understanding it. Very exciting, Dr. Lopez. Thank you for taking time to talk with us today. My pleasure, Ira. Thank you. Jose Lopez, professor of physics at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey. He's also a program manager for plasma physics at the National Science

Foundation. We have to take a quick break, and when we come back, teenagers are sleeping less than they have ever been. And you know those negative stereotypes about teens that they're moody and rebellious? Well, that might actually be due to a profound lack of sleep. Stay with us. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. This is Science Friday. I'm Iro Plato. American teenagers are now getting the least amount of sleep that they ever have, and teens will tell you themselves how little sleep they are getting and how it affects them. Now I get up at like 5, 40 or 6 o'clock. It affects my ability to like focus in school

because, like, you know, I'm tired and I want to get to sleep and I don't really have a lot of energy. But normally I feel cranky coming to school and I try and sleep because these classes are boring so it'd be tempting to sleep. Because if I don't get enough sleep, I'll be cranky. And I would want to be mean the people.

I go to sleep really late. Like, the latest that I could stay up on the school day is probably around three, and it's really not helping when I have to wake up really. If I'm, like, really tired and I'm doing something I don't want to do, my attitude, like, you'll definitely be able to tell that I have an attitude more than if I was, like, already, like, feeling fine because when I'm tired, I'm already kind of moody. I could have a homework assignment that's supposed to be the next day, and I didn't do it, and I'll be on my laptop all night long working on it, which makes it annoyed,

because then I'll fall asleep, and then I wake up later in the night. Like, dang it, let me finish the assignment before my mom wakes me after go to school. I think I get enough sleep, but not at the right times. So I'll be able to get some sleep at night, and then when I go back to school, I might sleep in class one or two times throughout the week. I think it's normal, but I don't want that to happen. Hmm, it's not like any teens you know. Those folks are Aletheal, LeRan, Rochelle, Zariah, and Zion,

eighth graders at Manchester Academy Charter School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. An average night's sleep for teens, well, it has shrunk to just six and a half hours. And contrary to popular belief, when your teen sleeps until noon, It may not be there avoiding their chores. Teens need more sleep than adults to help support critical brain development. These are the conclusions of my next guest, authors of a new book about teenagers and sleep. And along with loads of other interesting ideas about why teens are sleepless not only in Seattle but just about everywhere, including the idea that the switch we are making to daylight savings time is a bad idea, sleep-wise.

for teenagers. The book is Generations Sleepless, Why Teens and Twins are not sleeping enough and what we can do to help them. The authors are Heather Turgeon and Julie Wright. They're psychotherapist and sleep specialists. Heather joins us from Los Angeles and Julie from New York City. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much for having us. Thank you. You're welcome. You're welcome. I want to tell our listeners that we're taking our calls, calls for you live, about adolescent sleep, you can give us a call. 1-844-8-255 or 1-8-4-4-Sight-2-5. Let me say that again.

844-8-255-8-4-Sy-talk. Do you care for a teenager? Are you struggling to help them get to bed at reasonable times? Do you think school start times should be pushed back to allow teens to get more sleep? Our number 844-8-255. Heather, we just heard from some teens who are quite cranky, it sounded like, from lack of sleep. And I know in your book you argue that some of the negative stereotypes we have about teens, meaning moody, rebellious, and risk-takers are actually because lack of sleep.

What's going on in teens' brains that might be causing this? Well, wow, were those such powerful illustrations of what we see all the time with teenagers? Those were amazing. So, I mean, the first thing to know about the teenage brain is that it's entering into a whole new period of remodeling. We used to think that brain changes were basically done in the early years in early childhood, but science has really shown us that the second decade of life is absolutely pivotal for brain development. So the frontal lobes of the brain are really rewiring and strengthening and pruning and integrating with the rest of the brain. And the very neat thing to know about that is that a lot of that brain construction happens during sleep.

So, you know, it explains a lot. It explains why teenagers need more. Sometimes they need more than their younger siblings because of this new phase of development. And it sure does explain why they feel so, so terrible when they're chronically sleep deprived. Yeah. Well, Julie, Julie, why isn't adolescent sleep more of a priority? Why is there this fundamental misunderstanding about the importance of getting enough sleep? Well, you know, like Heather said, teenagers have a, they're very good at looking like many adults.

And I think there's long been this idea that they're tough, they're resilient, they can tough it through, you know, their academics and they're, you know, piling on of activities to prepare for their college applications are more important. So sleep keeps falling to the bottom of the list, and we just don't understand how vulnerable they are during this time when they don't get enough sleep. Not only does this remodeling and restructuring not happen as well, but it makes them much more vulnerable to mental health issues. It's no coincidence that there's also a mental health crisis going on among today's teenagers. The brain works differently. we all know how terrible it feels to be sleep deprived.

We know that the prefrontal cortex of the brain, the part of our brain that makes us uniquely human and helps us make sense of things and be reasonable and have perspective and insight, that part of the brain, it's often called the executive function, is less active when we're sleep deprived. And our lower brain, the amygdala, where we have our stress responses and are more likely to be reactive and feel more negative emotions is more active.

So this explains why, you know, teenagers and any of us really are cranky, but teenagers are going to feel it more because of what's going on in their brain and also because of what we describe as a perfect storm of factors that is stealing their sleep. Heather, how much sleep should teens be getting every night? Yeah, that's a really good question. So when researchers give teens the opportunity to sleep as much as they'd like, teens will sometimes sleep 12 hours at a stretch. And that's because they've piled up so much sleep debt. So it's amazing to see their kind of their powers of sleep are so strong.

And I think most parents of teenagers have, or just if we remember what it felt like to be a teenager, we know we could sleep for, you know, 10 to 12 hours. But what happens after teens make up for their sleep debt is that they average out to about nine and a quarter hours of optimal sleep. So that's, and that's from age 10 to 18. So sleep needs do not change, really, between those, you know, in those years. And so nine and a quarter could be considered optimal sleep. And that's what we, in our book we describe as optimal sleep.

But eight hours a night is what we consider. that are adequate sleep. And that's because when teens sleep less than eight hours, fewer than eight hours a night on a regular basis, it's correlated with a lot of negative outcomes. So it's kind of a tipping point, I would say, eight hours. And that's what we aim for because, you know, I think we said earlier that teens are, you said six and a half hours is what most teens are getting. So if we can just get them up to eight hours, that would be enormous.

How do you tell a teenager to do anything? That's the million-dollar question. Yeah, I mean, if you say to a teenager, you should be sleeping more, put down that iPhone or whatever, your pet, or go to sleep. How do you get them to listen? That is the million-dollar question, isn't it? Yeah, it really is. And technology makes it all the more complicated. But Heather and I put on our therapist hats for this part of the book.

And we talk about how absolutely teenagers do not want to be just told what to do or judged or nagged. So what we want to do with them is really start by listening to them, by having empathy for them, by joining in with them on things in their life that they talk about. We can always find signs of things in their lives that they care about, that we can relate back to sleep. maybe they want to do better in school or at a sports or other activity. Maybe they talk about not feeling great, like those teenagers we heard earlier, and looking for ins and helping them sort of come up with solutions to how they're feeling that are relatable to sleep. It takes time and it takes patience and it's the opposite of just telling them what to do.

But when we listen with empathy, we can find a way in so that we're on their team and we're there to help them come up with their own solutions. Do they understand that there's more than just rest going on in their brains, that the brain is actually active like you were talking about before and needs to sleep? Does that work at all? Yeah, it does because I think, you know, teenagers like to learn about their brains. They are curious. They like, you know, all teens like to feel good and giving them that information.

And what you said is so important that we do have a misconception of sleep as being rest. when sleep is really active brain construction time. So I do think that, you know, telling them that missing two hours of sleep every night is not missing two hours of rest. It's missing two hours of brain construction. A lot of teens are really motivated by that. Yeah, let's go to the phones because there are a lot of folks who want to talk about it. Let's go to Ashley in Orlando. Hi, Ashley.

Welcome to Science Friday. Hey, I went to school across the major metropolis. It was a magnet school. And so I was often waking up and on the bus before the fun rose. And I think it's a nice theory that daylight savings time might help kids sleep more. But in practice, it throws such a wrench in the works having to reset your body clock. And I don't think kids are really capable of doing that as much as they're capable of conking out with the lights still on. Go ahead.

Yeah, I get absolutely nothing from that. It would just be one thing if you could wake up as the sun rises or something like that, but that's not the way the clock works, daylight savings time or without. Would it help, do you think, if it were permanent daylight savings time? Permanent, yes. Either way, I don't care which hour it is, but steady as it goes makes it a lot easier. Heather, thank you. Let me get a reaction to that because in the book, you folks come down heavily against permanent daylight savings time, don't you? Yeah, that's really, yeah, that's the scientific consensus that we'd be better off following standard time,

because standard time is not an arbitrary time. Standard time is actually set to be an approximation of the solar day. So sunrise and sunset are more closely mimicked with standard time. So following the natural path of the sun and being, most of us getting sunlight before we start our day, the problem for teenagers and like was just also in the, and early that they never get morning sun. So this is already a problem. They're already struggling to wake up in the dark and be in school and sometimes take a calculus exam

when they have never even seen the morning sun. And so permanent daylight saving time would make that worse. Let's go to David. David in Hartford, Connecticut. Hi, David. Hey there. Go ahead. Yeah, hi.

So, one, yeah, I agree. because I teach middle and high school, and then my youngest is a senior graduating this year. And I remember in high school, again, that would be like to get off my own lawn kind of thing, is if I have the one few nights I used to go to bed at 11 to be half up at, even getting up at 7, I was a train wreck. But my question is, why?

I mean, I was listening to the students, and I'm like, why are you up at 3 a.m.? Why? Why? And I get, you know, there are some times where the one should say that I forgot to do a homework assignment. I can't believe that's a regular thing. I hope not any. But why are they up?

I mean, with my own youngest, right? Especially early high school late, like eighth, ninth, tenth grade, he would be up to one in the morning sitting on his laptop watching YouTube or anime or something that I'm going, dude, go to bed. And I'm like, buddy, why are you awake? Okay, we feel your pain. We feel your pain, Dave. Thanks for calling. Let me get an answer, but first remind everybody that,

This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. And Julie Heather, what do you say? Yes. Distraught teacher there. Yeah, this is, we relate to this so much. And, you know, we describe a perfect storm of factors that cause modern teens to especially, you know, lose sleep. And those include, you know, what Heather described as the natural delay in the brain clock. So teenagers naturally go to feel.

sleepy later and want to sleep later. That's a normal, a normal developmental path. The melatonin rises later. And then you add to that homework overload. So today's teens have more homework than some of us did when we were teenagers. And when you add to that, you know, piling up of activities to show up on your college application, which can really steal time from the teenagers afternoon and evening. And then when you add to that, the advent of technology. And I think that is what this caller, what David referred to mostly, is how addicting technology is, how it pulls us in, how it engages us, and how it creates a state of flow that it's very hard to pull away from. It's very hard to even know how much time has gone by.

So there are multiple factors that are stealing sleep, and then at the other end of their night, of course, are the two early school start times. So it's really our book, the second half of the book, is all dedicated to, helping families, teenagers and their parents look at sleep in the home. So ways to communicate about sleep, ways to start to make changes in the home so that everybody can go to bed a little bit earlier and start to change their habits around sleep. It's not easy. It takes a lot of patience and it takes a lot of good communication and modeling by the parents as well. But it's absolutely possible. And we also want society to take its part. We want schools.

to look at all of these factors. We want technology companies to work on more responsible design. We really want this to be a call-out to society and not just a finger-pointed at parents. And what about peer pressure? Let's say you want to do this, your teen, you want to do this,

but all your friends are going to say, oh, what a nerd, you know? You're listening to your parents. You're not going to text me on, you know, share with me on your pad in the middle of the night? I don't get it. It's definitely true because teenagers have socially wired brains. So, you know, they're taken away by technology and it's really hard to turn off those that, you know, FaceTime and social media and all of that. But what if we also, you know, rebranded sleep as being cool? It's not, you know, I think that actually teenagers, you know,

like they like to feel good. They like to learn about their brains. And I think that, you know, modern teens are actually pretty interested in knowing all of this. You know, so I think that it's possible that we can use that to motivate them and to change our relationship with sleep. Okay. We'll have a lot more to talk about. We have to take a break. And we will come back and talk more with Heather Turgan and Julie Wright, psychotherapists and sleep consultants. And they have written a book about sleeping white teens. It's called Generation Sleepless. White Teens and Twins are not sleeping enough and what we can do to help them. We're trying to help you on our phones. Our number 844-8-255, 844-8-4-Sy-Tock, 8-4-724-8-255. As they say, we have lines open, so don't be afraid to call in. We'll be right back

after this short break. Stay with us. Hey there, folks. Just a reminder that Science Friday depends on donations from our audience, and that means you. You help fund the radio show each week, plain and simple. So if you find value in what we do, please go to ScienceFriday.com slash support and give what you can. Any amount makes a difference. And thanks. This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato. In case you're just joining us, we're continuing our conversation about why teens are not getting enough sleep. I'm talking with Heather Turgeon and Julie Wright, psychotherapists and sleep specialists. They co-author a new book, Generation Sleepless, Why Teens and Twins Are Not Sleeping Enough and What We Can Do to Help.

We're taking your calls at 1844-844-255, 1844-Sight-Tock. Another big part of this equation, as we have been talking about, is technology. Many teens are now falling asleep with their smartphones on. their pillows. Let's listen to what some eighth graders had to say about the role technology plays in their ability to get enough sleep. Here's how I think about it. I don't think about, like, my screen is like, like my eyes really want the screen. I'm thinking there's so many things that I can still look at on my phone, whether I'm playing a game, or whether I'm on social media, or whether I'm talking to a friend. There are so many things that I can miss out on if I go to sleep

early. So that definitely, like, that definitely makes it hard for me to sleep because I don't want to miss out on anything. I do think I get enough sleep because I usually get to sleep before my bedtime. My parents take my electronics at night, so I can't really watch anything. I do think that more parents should take away their children's electronics whenever they're sleeping because, like, you're not really sure what they're doing if they're even up or they're sleeping. So TikTok is a big thing right now. And it's, like, very addicting personal experience. But, so it really does affect, like, how late you stay up until

because you can just scroll and scroll and not, like, focus on the time. So that's what I used to do. Like, you know, just scroll and scroll until, like, midnight. And I'm like, oh, I need to get off the phone. Then I don't get off my phone. Then I ended up going to sleep late. I mean, of course I want more asleep, but I don't know. I need some, I try.

It doesn't end up working. Sleep is probably the best thing in the world, honestly. Yeah. Yeah, that was Tristan, London, Jaris, and six all eighth graders at Manchester Academic Charter School in Pittsburgh. We're talking more about sleep. Let's go to a teenager who's here on the phone with us. Hi, Lottie in Tacoma Park, Maryland.

You're a high school senior? Hey, my name is Lottie. I'm a high school senior at a magnet program in Maryland, and me, including me, I know a lot of other students who really struggle to get enough sleep, some of whom get only three hours of sleep a night on a regular basis. It's not because we're spurtering away time or anything like that, but because we truly are struggling to balance our schedules with the amount of work we have and finding time to do the things we actually love to do. and that finding the time to do that just eats into our sleep most of the time. So it's not the electronic devices or your phone on your pillow is what you're saying at night? No, honestly. Most of us, most of the, most of the, most of the, my fellow peers I know, would love to sleep more if they possibly could. But their time is just, if their time is spent on their computers doing their homework, writing their papers, doing their problems.

Heather, what do you think about that? Well, I think it's true that homework has been growing over the years and the academic, the competition for universities is really where that starts. So it's a real problem because, you know, research is pretty clear that over an hour of homework a night is not, you know, that beneficial. It kind of depends on what the homework is. But I think we've just grown to think it's normal that we take so much work home with us from high school.

And it has been growing, you know, over. over time. And so that's why we, in the book, we have steps for looking at college admissions, but also just steps for high schools to reevaluate this, because this is a really big part of the problem. Julie, you agree? I agree. And I think it's ironic that we care so much about our kids learning and their eventual happiness and success. But all of these factors going on, like she described are really compromising them. So it's it doesn't really make sense if you sort of think long term about your goals for your teenager and we really would like schools and colleges to to change and for for kids to not feel like they have to pile on so many activities. And like she said,

we want them to have time to do the things they love and to actually even maybe have some downtime. You know, it's their lives are just, they're so stacked up. And it's, it's, they're. It's impossible to get the sleep that they need. Lottie, you've got the experts on your side. That's nice to hear. Well, thanks for calling, and good luck to you and getting sleep. Thank you. 1-844-8255.

Heather, what about teens catching up on sleep on the weekend? Can you actually catch up on sleep? In a sense, you have what's called rebound sleep. So if you are sleep deprived and then you have the opportunity, to sleep, you will sleep more deeply, and that's called rebound sleep. So you'll sleep more and more deeply and you'll wake up feeling pretty good. But what happens when teens do that during the weekend is that they go into a state of what we call social jet lag. So their body clock, their brain clock is so confused between the weekday schedule and the weekend schedule. So ultimately, it doesn't

lead to more sleep over time because by the time Monday rolls around, now the brain is confused again, and you start the week in a more sleep deprived state. So it's like a short-term gain and a long-term loss. And I mean, I was amazed to hear her say that some of her friends are sleeping three hours a night. When you consider, you know, I think about one in five teenagers sleeps five hours a night. So considering that they need, you know, nine to ten for optimal brain development, that is. is, you know, it's just an astonishing amount of sleep loss. And this is, you know, the way I think about this is we're seeing an alarming rise in mental health issues among teens, and we're all kind of scratching our heads trying to figure this out. And one in three high school students

is saying that they have a persistent feeling of sadness or hopelessness, and they're also the most sleep deprived population we've ever had. So I really believe that we could go a long way towards alleviating that mental health crisis if we could help get these kids more sleep. Because it's harder to process their emotions if they're sleep deprived is what you're saying. It is. It is. There's a lot of things that happen in the brain when we're sleep deprived. The amygdala, which is our emotional reactive centered, becomes more active and our frontal cortex kind of isn't as online. So we tend towards, we tend to see the world from a more a negative filter. We skew towards sadness and anger when we're,

sleep deprived. So the brain really changes under sleep deprivation. We also know that there's a system in the brain that clears out waste that develops over the course of the day. So byproducts of the brain's activity are constantly building up these waste products during the day. And there's a really efficient system in the brain for flushing that waste out, but it does not turn on until we sleep. So it makes sense that you feel really cloudy and just underwerect. water when you're sleep deprived, when you consider all those toxins or waste products that build up in the brain and don't have the opportunity to flesh out. Interesting.

Let's go to the phones to another teacher, Allison in Pittsburgh. Hi, Allison. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi. So my question is about start times. My school doesn't do this, but I know of other schools that have pushed back start times for high schools to like 9 a.m. And I'm curious to know if there's studies on whether or not this is effective at solving the problem related to chronic sleeplessness.

Excellent question. You talk about it in the book. Yes, we have a whole chapter devoted to this issue. It's extremely pivotal. And the answer is yes. When schools move their start times to 8.30 or later, we do see an improvement in teen sleep and also in how they feel and how they perform at school. Some states, California, for one, has actually passed legislation, and it will start this fall. But it's, you know, it's not the only solution, but it's a huge step in the right direction.

Because that's when teenage brains still want to be asleep. They really are missing out on often hours of the last stages of sleep, which are usually heavier with dream sleep, which is important for emotional processing and kind of going over things that happen during the day. And it is very important for their emotional health. Alison, get him to read this book. Maybe they'll push it back an hour. Good luck. Thank you.

You're welcome. All right, let's go. Let's cycle on to Teresa in Florence, South Carolina. Hi, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, I am also a teacher and a parent of a student with, severe ADHD. And one of the things that I have noticed over the course of 20 years, my son turns 19 in a couple days, and him and 20 years of students, is that those students that have consistent bed times where they're more likely to get their eight or nine or 10 hours

of sleep a night do better when they're, you know, those that are, uh, diagnosed with ADHD. And so I was wondering if your research had touched anything about that, about how consistent sleep times can be actually a treatment for ADHD. Interesting question. Julie? Yeah, it makes, when you think about what happens in the brain, everything that we've described here between the, you know, the teenage brain's unique need for sleep because of all the remodeling,

when you think about what goes on during sleep as far as what Heather described about the toxins being cleared out. And then there's also research showing that when we're sleep deprived, our memories are not stored in our long-term memory as efficiently. We're likely to remember something in a short-term way, but not in a long-term way. So it makes perfect sense that it would be a treatment for ADHD because sleep is so pivotal to learning. to memory, to, you know, just our ability to take a pause and think before we act, which I think is really important. That's one of the functions of the prefrontal cortex. So all of those are really important to kids and people who have ADHD, just like they are to everyone. Thank you, Teresa.

Thank you. Drive safely. Let's talk about this. This is a real issue about getting the school times, pushed back perhaps an hour. And you talk about it in your book as being important. I mean, it's very hard to do, as you say, because there are after-school events, could be sports, could be theater, could be other kinds of things that the schools have to allow time for, right? How do we do that?

Well, I mean, you know, a lot of schools have done it and have really figured it out. In the book, we have examples of schedules that kind of line up two kids, one that goes an early start time school and one that goes to a healthy start time school and what their afternoons look like. And it kind of all works out for everybody in the end. It sounds, you know, change is hard. So I think that's part of it is just, you know, the status quo is kind of hard to move and there's a little inertia around it. But essentially, you know, just moving from, you know, our, my neighborhood high school had a 750 start time and this year it will move to 830. So that's just 40 minutes of time that, it will push the end time for school out a little bit, but it will line up okay for, you know,

everybody in California is going to have to do it. So track meets will be able, you know, sports teams will be able to align with each other and so forth because everyone has to do it. So the logistics work out, but the important part is that between 750 and 830, that 40 minutes of sleep, as Julie alluded to this with dream sleep, it's really important emotional processing time for the teenage brain. And just getting that extra 30 to 40 minutes of sleep in the morning will have a huge impact. Interesting. This is Science Friday from WNIC Studios.

Talking about the new book, Generation Sleepless, why teens and tweens are not sleeping enough and what we can do to help them. Let's see how many calls I can get in in a couple of minutes here. There's so many of them. Mike and Bin Lohman, California. Hi, Mike. Hi. Go ahead.

Please. I'm listening to you for the last half hour, but my comment is I'm in my 60s, and when I was in high school, I didn't have an issue with sleep. And I was a paper boy up at 4 o'clock in the morning, played sports, and went to bed at a reasonable time at night. That was most of my high school. But, you know, kids nowadays use computers all the time. And I've been an IT person all of my life and just retired. But one of the things that helped me when I was having issues sleeping when I was on the screen all day, not to mention coming home at night and being on the screen,

was that when I went to my automatrist and I got new glasses, and she gave me or prescribed the glasses that have the light filter thing on them. And I noticed I started sleeping a whole lot better once I switched my glasses. Those blue light glasses, yeah. Yeah, and it made a huge difference in my sleep. So I was just wondering, like, you know, with the people there, that if that really affects people's sleep, especially kids, if they're on their, they're even, yes, they're doing their homework,

but they're not doing it on a book and paper like probably you and I used to do it when we were in school. but it may make a difference in their sleep. If they had the blue light glasses or some way to turn that off like I have on my iPad. Interesting. Julie, Heather? Yeah, I think it's definitely something that can contribute to helping the blue light blocking glasses. We talk about the factors of technology that steal sleep or delay sleep being light,

so the blue light blocking glasses would help with that. But there's also activation. They're very activating. They wake us up and make us interested and ask us to continue to interact. And then the third one is flow. They engage us. They draw us in. We lose time.

We don't even know how much time has passed when we're going down a rabbit hole or watching YouTube videos. But I think that Mike really touched on something even more effective than blue light glasses, which are not a bad idea. he said that, you know, he didn't have the technology when he was a kid. He went to bed at a reasonable time. And one of the teenagers who spoke earlier on the show today, you know, said that her parents don't let her have any technology in the bedroom. And, you know, Heather and I are really big proponents of families changing habits around technology. You know, I think technology

has come into our lives unbidden and sort of just taken away a lot of our attention. in time without us realizing how insidious it is. And I think... It's up to families. I'm running out of time, so I'm trying to summarize the saying it's up to families to make sure that this is enforced. Thank you both for Heather Tergent and Julie Wright, authors of Generation Sleepless, why teens and tweens are not sleeping enough and what we can do to help.

Also, a special thanks to SLB Radio for helping bring us all those student voices from Manchester Academic Charter School. That's about all the time we have for this weekend, of course. You can also, you know, send us your comments on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, email us SciFri at ScienceFriday.com. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato in New York.