短睡一族是什么？

What would you do if you had 60 days of extra free time a year? Ask Abby Ross, a retired psychologist from Miami, Florida, a “short-sleeper”. She needs only four hours sleep a night, so has a lot of spare time to fill while the rest of the world is in the land of nod.

如果一年可以多出60天的空闲时间，你会做些什么呢?让我们来问问艾比•罗丝好了。她来自弗洛里达州迈阿密市，是一名退休的心理学家，同时也是一位“短睡眠者”。她每晚只睡4个小时就足够了，因此，世界上的其他人都在酣睡的时候，她却多出了许多可以利用的时光。

Short-sleepers like Ross never feel lethargic, nor do they ever sleep in. They wake early – normally around four or five o’clock – raring to get on with their day. Margaret Thatcher may have been one – she famously said she needed just four hours a night, whereas Mariah Carey claims she needs 15.

像罗丝这样的短睡眠者从来不会感到昏昏欲睡，也从来都没有睡过头的时候。他们醒的很早(一般情况下，四、五点就会醒)，迫不及待的开始新一天的生活。玛格丽特•撒切尔就是其中一位。她表示每天只需四个小时的睡眠，而玛利亚•凯利则宣称自己需要睡15个小时。

In 2009, a woman came into Ying-Hui Fu’s lab at the University of California, San Francisco, complaining that she always woke up too early. At first, Fu thought the woman was an extreme morning lark – a person who goes to bed early and wakes early. However, the woman explained that she actually went to bed around midnight and woke at 4am feeling completely alert. It was the same for several members of her family, she said.

2009年，一个女人来到了傅映晖的实验室(位于旧金山的加利福尼亚大学)，抱怨自己总是醒太早。起初，傅教授认为她只是“极度早起的百灵鸟”，也就是早睡早起的典型。然而，这位女士解释说，实际上她总是午夜才去睡觉，早上4点就全然没了睡意。她表示，自己的家族中也有几位成员是同样的情况。

Fu and her colleagues compared the genome of different family members. They discovered a tiny mutation in a gene called DEC2 that was present in those who were short-sleepers, but not in members of the family who had normal length sleep, nor in 250 unrelated volunteers.

傅教授与同事们比对了不同家庭成员的基因之后发现，短睡眠者身上所携带的DEC2基因上都会一个细小的突变，但是其他睡眠长度正常的家庭成员则没有这种突变，其他的250名无关自愿者亦然。