Larks and Owls: How Sleep Habits Affect Grades

There are at least a few in every college dorm: students who seem to exist in their own time zone, in bed hours before everyone else and awake again at daybreak, rested and prepared for the morning’s first lecture. Sleep researchers refer to these early risers as larks , and new data presented this week at the annual Associated Professional Sleep Societies suggest that a student’s preferred sleeping schedule has a lot to do with his or her grade-point average in school. In one study, psychologists at Hendrix College in Arkansas found that college freshmen who kept night-owl hours had lower GPAs than early birds.

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English gets millionth word on Wednesday, site says

English contains more words than any other language on the planet and added its millionth word early Wednesday, according to the Global Language Monitor, a Web site that uses a math formula to estimate how often words are created. The site estimates the millionth English word, “Web 2.0” was added to the language Wednesday at 5:22 a.m. ET

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Pakistani military, villagers battle Taliban militants

Hundreds of Pakistani villagers who have formed an anti-Taliban militia battled for the fourth day Tuesday to remove the Islamic militants from a region of northwest Pakistan. The Pakistani military is supporting the militia, or “lashkar,” in Upper Dir district on the request of local officials and tribal elders, military spokesman Maj

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New hope for development of H1N1 vaccine

Researchers at a South Korean university say they have discovered a candidate strain for an H1N1 vaccine, though it has not yet been approved by health authorities in the United States or the World Health Organization. The strain is a genetically modified version of a live virus, and could lead to a vaccine against H1N1 — commonly known as swine flu, said Seo Sang-heui, a professor at Chungnam National University’s College of Veterinary Medicine in South Korea

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