Absolutely, loss of deep sleep is associated with a ton of aging related cognitive decline. There's a number of startups experimenting with techniques to enhance deep sleep in the elderly atm (timed audio clicks, electrical stimulation etc).
There's not a lot of evidence that most common sleep medications are associated with long term improvements in health outcomes. Most have substantial detrimental effects on sleep architecture, can exacerbate underlying issues like apnea etc. Interesting the gabapentanoids (chronic pain) and Xyrem (narcolepsy) are associated with increased slow wave sleep. More research is needed (eg the DORA drugs [1]).
Thankfully circadian issues (in the absence of sleep loss) aren't associated with negative health outcomes. Just a case of finding a way to modify ones life to accommodate them.
Melatonin has a short half life (~1h), that's why melatonin receptor agonists [1] are a thing. So just mechanistically it's unlikely to help with sleep maintenance.
Do you wake up after 5.5h at a consistent time of the day and the first half of the night is peaceful? If you fall back asleep do you then wake again shortly after?
I mean waking in the night can be many things (apnea, etc), but you could very well have a rather advanced sleep phase.
I'm pretty sure at this point I have familial advanced sleep phase syndrome of an unknown genetic etiology [1].
Wake up stupid early in the morning, get drowsy very early in the evenings etc. For a long time due to social pressure/habit I'd just power through the evening drowsiness. That lead to me only being able to sleep six hours or so (due to waking up stupid early), which over time lead to a substantial sleep debt.
Going to bed early helps a lot, but over time it seems like I easily start drifting earlier and earlier. I've recently had some success stabilizing my rhythm using sublingual melatonin when I first waken at 2-3am. Let's me get a couple extra hours of additional quality sleep which is a lifesaver. Wears off quick enough that by 9am or so it's basically out of my system.
I've actually been tinkering/hacking the last year or so on sleep tracking wearables. Initially focused on EEG/HRV monitoring but I'm taking a very modular approach and ultimately want to build a full set of sensors/effectors/etc.
I've recently been experimenting a lot with skin temperature gradients, turns out in the lead up to sleep it's not just blood flow in the brain that is altered [2].
FWIW QUIC enforces TLS 1.3 and modern crypto. A lot smaller surface area and far fewer foot-guns. Combined with memory safe TLS implementations in Go and Rust I think it's fair to say things have changed since the heartbleed days.
I don't believe you could implement RFC 9484 directly in the browser (missing capsule apis would make upgrading the connection not possible). Though WebTransport does support datagrams so you could very well implement something custom.
I've recently spent a bunch of time working on a mesh networking project that employs CONNECT-IP over QUIC [1].
There's a lot of benefits for sure, mTLS being a huge one (particularly when combined with ACME). For general purpose, spoke and hub VPN's tunneling over QUIC is a no-brainer. Trivial to combine with JWT bearer tokens etc. It's a neat solution that should be used more widely.
However there are downsides, and those downsides are primarily performance related. For a bunch of reasons, some just including poorly optimized library code, others involving relatively high message parsing/framing/coalescing/fragmenting costs, and userspace UDP overheads. On fat pipes today you'll struggle to get more than a few gbits of throughput @ 1500 MTU (which is plenty for internet browsing for sure).
For fat pipes and hardware/FPGA acceleration use cases, google probably has the most mature approach here with their datacenter transport PSP [2]. Basically a stripped down per flow IPsec. In-kernel IPsec has gotten a lot faster and more scalable in recent years with multicore/multiqueue support [3]. Internal benchmarking still shows IPsec on linux absolutely dominating performance benchmarks (throughput and latency).
For the mesh project we ended up pivoting to a custom offload friendly, kernel bypass (AF_XDP) dataplane inspired by IPsec/PSP/Geneve.
I'm available for hire btw, if you've got an interesting networking project and need a remote Go/Rust developer (contract/freelance) feel free to reach out!
Fascinating stuff, it's interesting to read that the main ligands of the AhR (Aryl hydrocarbon receptor) are PAHs (Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) and that activation of the AhR receptor improves the markers of Lupus.
Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are nasty, carcinogenic, molecules that are commonly found in smoke, tar, and char. Basically burnt organic matter. On the other side of the coin AhR is also activated by a bunch of Polyphenols, which are found in a variety of plant derived foods.
Does this mean, it is possible that Lupus (and Psoriasis) are diseases of affluence caused by processed food (low in Polyphenols), and a reduced exposure to smoke byproducts in the environment?
There's not a lot of evidence that most common sleep medications are associated with long term improvements in health outcomes. Most have substantial detrimental effects on sleep architecture, can exacerbate underlying issues like apnea etc. Interesting the gabapentanoids (chronic pain) and Xyrem (narcolepsy) are associated with increased slow wave sleep. More research is needed (eg the DORA drugs [1]).
Thankfully circadian issues (in the absence of sleep loss) aren't associated with negative health outcomes. Just a case of finding a way to modify ones life to accommodate them.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orexin_antagonist