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Scientists in Argentina have found that hamsters recover more quickly from jet lag when they’re given a drug before the flight: Viagra. Ok, there may be a lot of things you’re wondering right now, like: is jet lag a big problem for hamsters? Or: where are these hamsters going, with their exercise wheels and erectile dysfunction prescriptions
Here’s what we know: jet lag happens when your body clock doesn’t agree with the clock on the wall because you’ve crossed a couple time zones. The mismatch can leave you groggy and disoriented and even disrupt your sleep cycles until you’re able to reset your internal timepiece. Well the same thing happens to hamsters when scientists book them on the redeye from Buenos Aires to Bucharest. Or the laboratory equivalent: turning on the lights six hours early. It then takes the jet-lagged little furballs awhile to figure out when to start running in their exercise wheels… which they usually do after dark. What the Argentinian researchers found is that hamsters that are given Viagra the night before the time change recover faster than hamsters that do it without the drug. Whether similar treatment would provide relief to weary world travelers is an experiment that has probably been inadvertently already done but not reported.
