Science in your sleep?

Have you ever fallen asleep in bed with a journal article on your face? We have.

It often goes like this:
It’s 3am, and in 6 hours you’re supposed to be in class or meet with your adviser to summarize the results of a paper (you know, the one on your face). You’re tired and you’ve been working all day, but your grade (and possibly your reputation) depends on reading that 25-page review article and trying to catch a few winks. The problem is, you read one paragraph, decide it makes no sense, give it a second pass, and the next thing you know, it’s morning and there’s crumpled paper covering your eyes.

One possible solution is to use ReadCube as your study partner, and get your work done faster. But, we don’t want you to fall asleep with a laptop on your face, so here’s a possible alternative:

In collaboration with The Great Eastern Hotel, a group of students led by Professor Ron Arad from the Royal College of Art designed the blanket for their SLEEPLESS project. The blanket has several pages just like a real book, and contains some bedtime stories to help you sleep. With this project as inspiration, all you need to do now is print your reading assignments on your own blanket! The students behind the SLEEPLESS project probably didn’t have sleepy grad students in mind when they created their blanket, but that doesn’t mean that their innovation can’t be used to enhance your academic studies.

The fatal flaw, of course, is that comfy blankets tend to exacerbate sleepiness in graduate students, so maybe this isn’t such a great idea after all…