This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science.

I'm Steve Mursky.

Got a minute?

It's particularly concerning that 56 million Americans a month

admit that they drive when they haven't gotten enough sleep and they are exhausted.

Charles Zeisler, he's the director of the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Eight million of them lose the struggle to stay awake and actually admit to falling

asleep at the wheel every month, causing more than a million crashes every year, 50,000

debilitating injuries, and 6,400 deaths.

He spoke at a recent Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health Forum called

A Sleep at the Wheel, Drowsy driving and public health.

And we just finally got a consensus group, the first consensus panel of experts

to agree that if an individual has had less than two hours of sleep in the previous 24 hours,

that that's the equivalent of being negligent and should be added to the statutes,

just like drunk driving.

So, but there are three groups that are particularly vulnerable.

You know, young people think that because they're young,

they're fit, they can do anything, that they're young they're fit they can do anything that they would be

the most resilient in the face of sleep deprivation but actually young people are

the most vulnerable there's actually a biological reason. So as we get older, we lose cells in the

sleep switch in the brain and the hypotheramus that help us make the transition from wakefulness

to sleep. When we keep an 18-year-old awake all night

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