Do you sleep well? For $400, the Zeo alarm clock will tell you.

Wear the accompanying headband to bed, David Pogue wrote in a review for The Times, and the clock will chart the time you spend in the various sleep stages: light, deep or rapid eye movement - REM - sleep. Then you can upload the data to a Web site and get a numerical sleep quality score.

“It’s truly amazing, if not a little creepy, to see all of this data about a part of your existence that you’ve known nothing about until now,” Mr. Pogue wrote.

You may know little about what happens while you’re asleep, aside from a few bizarre dreams. But scientists have made several recent discoveries about the third of our lives we spend resting up, or at least trying to.

About 5 percent of the population can wake up fully rested, without an alarm clock, after limited sleep, wrote Tara Parker-Pope of The Times. Ying-Hui Fu, a professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco, and her colleagues found a mutation of a gene linked to circadian rhythms in two naturally short sleepers, a mother and daughter who slept six hours a night. The mutation, the first ever found relating to sleep duration, could be a key in understanding sleep disorders.

“We know sleep is necessary for life, but we know so little about sleep,” Dr. Fu told Ms. Parker-Pope. “As we understand the sleep mechanism more and more and all the pathways, we’ll be able to understand more about what causes sleep problems.”

If you are tossing and turning at night, online counseling can help. Studies in the United States and Canada have shown that Web-based cognitive behavioral therapy can ease insomnia, Amanda Schaffer wrote in The Times.

“I liked that it was over the Internet,” one study participant, Kelly Lawrence, 51, of Canada, told Ms. Schaffer, “because when you don’t get your sleep you don’t want to have to get up and go to appointments.”

If all else fails, do as Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill and Thomas Edison did: take a nap. A new study shows napping helps with problem solving, wrote Nicholas Bakalar of The Times.

Study participants took two word association tests. Those who took a nap between tests that included REM sleep - the kind that includes dreams - performed 40 percent better on the second test than on the first.

“Dreams are fanciful,” Sara Mednick, the associate professor of psychiatry who led the study, told Mr. Bakalar. “They incorporate strange ideas that you would never have put together in waking life. In REM sleep, it becomes more likely that ideas might come together in a solution.”

Some questions about sleep remain unanswered.

For example, why do giraffes sleep for 5 hours a day while bats sleep for 20? One theory, Benedict Carey wrote in The Times, is that, to optimize their time, animals sleep when finding food is the most risky. The bat, for example, feeds on insects that come out at night, and sleeping during the day keeps it hidden from predators with better vision.

A corollary to this theory is that we are the most awake when we are inclined to be the most productive, according to Mr. Carey. An inability to hit the pillow at 10 p.m., therefore, may not be a sign of a disorder.

“If sleep has evolved as the ultimate time manager,” he wrote, “then being wired at 2 a.m. may mean there is valuable work to be done.”


The Zeo monitor can measure the quality of a night’s sleep.