The 28-Hour Day
Time and its Measurements Week:

“Did you ever feel like there just weren’t enough hours in the day?” ask the proponents of the 28-hour day. “Now that our society has been transformed by mass production, division of labor, and artificial lighting, there is no longer any great advantage to being diurnal.” However there are apparently plenty of advantages to switching to a 28-hour day, including four-day work weeks, fewer daily chores, longer weekends.
From the diary of someone on the 28-hour cycle:
Another advantage of this arrangement is that I get to enjoy the world around me and the various benefits of all possible times of the day during each week. Often, I find that I now have even more of a feeling of being a spectator watching the rest of the world go by, which I find personally enjoyable rather than alienating. Soon into the experiment, I found that there appeared to be no residual 24 hour rhythms left to my body (I carefully black out my bedroom and use lots of light when I am awake when it is dark outside). After 1 1/2 years on this routine, I am still feeling very good about it, and both my dog and my new wife (as of August 2000) seem also to have adapted well to the routine.
Several years ago, a team of Harvard scientists conducted an experiment on 28-hour days which found that even though subjects could break free of a 24-hour sleep cycle, their bodies could not: “The result was clear. No matter when the subjects went to bed or got up, and whatever they did while awake, body temperature and hormones rose and fell on an average cycle of 24 hours and 11 minutes.”
Scientists managing the Mars Exploration Rover project at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory live 25-hour days to keep pace with Martian time. Does anyone know if these experiments are still going on at JPL?
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