Daily briefing: Around seven hours of sleep slows biological ageing

You have full access to this article via your institution. Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here . Getting roughly 6–8 hours of sleep each day has been linked with a longer life — at least in humans. Credit: Justin Paget/Getty Getting about six to eight hours of sleep each day is linked to a lower risk of death and disease — any more or less is associated with accelerated biological ageing. Researchers analysed health data from more than 500,000 people and found that the ticks of 12 biological ‘clocks’ were generally slowest in people who got about seven hours of sleep , though the optimum amount of sleep time varied slightly between clocks that indicate age in different organs, and between men and women. Nature | 5 min read Reference: Nature paper Ancient proteins extracted from the teeth of Homo erectus individuals that lived in China suggest that the group might have interbred with Denisovans, another archaic human species. Researchers used enamel proteins from six H. erectus individuals and identified an amino-acid variant that’s previously been seen in Denisovans . The group also identified two amino-acid sequence variants shared by all six individuals that set H. erectus apart from humans and other human relatives — something that has proved hard to find in the past. …