DRIVERS beware: cruising down the highway for longer than 80 minutes without a break could seriously dull your reactions.
Fatigue is a well-known cause of traffic accidents, says Jiun-Ren Hwang at the National Central University in Jhongli, Taiwan, but no one had looked at how long someone can drive before their reaction times are seriously affected. Hwang put 30 male drivers aged 20 to 26 into a driving simulator and sent each of them on a 90-minute “journey”. Every 2 kilometres, they performed a reaction-time test by flicking the indicator as soon as they noticed a red symbol on the…
