It's Friday, April 20th, 2018, and you're listening to Inquiring Minds, our special up-to-date

episode. I'm Indrae Viscontas. Up-to-date is our weekly recap of the major science news stories

of the week. Indrae, what did you find this week? So I found two stories that caught my eye.

Let me tell you about the first one, and then maybe we have time for the second one later. I don't know if you've seen a lot of people have been sharing the story. The idea that if you actually stay up too late, if you're a night owl, you're at a greater risk of dying early. So apparently being a night owl as opposed to a morning lark makes you 10% or increases your

death risk by about 10%.

Okay.

What if you're like an ultra night owl like me?

Like does that rise to 15%?

Well, let's dive into it.

What does that mean 10% risk of early death?

Yeah.

So in order to understand this, we kind of really need to understand the mechanics of the

study.

So this is a study that was published on April 12th in a chronobiology international journal.

And it is part of the UK Biobank study, which is something that I like to keep track

of.

It's a massive, massive set of studies because essentially when you have government-funded healthcare,

you can store people's data and do all kinds of amazing, interesting work on it.

So, for example, a lot of brain imaging studies that include, you know, like hundreds of thousands of participants.

And this study is no different.

So this study included about 433,000 participants in the UK, aged 38 to 73. They followed them for

about six and a half years. And initially they asked them, hey, are you like definitely a

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