If you’ve ever been to Paris, you know how beautiful the cobblestone streets are, how decadent the food is, and also what it’s like to ride to the top of the Eiffel Tower with a pounding headache and the overwhelming desire to ignore all the magic and romance, go back to the hotel room, and just sleep.
At its worst, jet lag will ruin vacations, sabotage business meetings, and generally make life miserable until your body finally adjusts. You can chug NyQuil by the thimbleful and pull down your sleep mask, but there’s really nothing more you can do about it. A team of researchers at the University of Michigan and Yale are trying to change that—or at least make it better. Daniel Forger, a professor of mathematics and computational medicine at Michigan, along with grad student Olivia Walch and Yale Ph.D. candidate Kirill Serkh, have developed Entrain, an app that uses your body’s natural circadian rhythms to help you figure out when to wake up and when to go sleep in your new time zone so that you get back on schedule as quickly as possible.
