JUST over a century ago, Rudyard Kipling wrote that the advent of the aeroplane would herald a time “when the most extreme distances will be brought within the compass of one week’s—one hundred and sixty-eight hours’—travel”. Technology has brought us quite a bit further than that. Designers are now suggesting planes that could fly business passengers from New York to London in 11 minutes or to Shanghai in 24. That saves tiresome time inside the cabin. But speed solves only part of the problem. Our bodies are wired to a 24-hour day, with regular cycles of daylight and darkness. Crossing time zones ever faster only serves to throw our internal clocks further out of whack when we arrive.

Fortunately, researchers at Stanford University believe they have found a cure for jet lag—or at least a way to make it much less of a nuisance. The solution, not surprisingly, involves light, which dictates our circadian rhythms. In an experiment, the researchers subjected participants to brief, frequent flashes of light while they slept to see if they could alter the body’s natural rhythms and trick it into thinking it was on a different schedule.

It seems to have worked. Typically, sleep researchers say it takes about one day to adjust to a one-hour time change. So a person flying from London to Moscow, over three time zones, would need three days to adjust to the local time—making a two- or three-day business trip a very sleepy affair. But if, the night before the flight, travellers were exposed to an hour of intermittent light flashes while sleeping in the early morning, their body would be fooled into thinking the sun had risen three hours earlier. In other words, before flying to Moscow, they would already be on Moscow time.

Scientists have previously experimented with exposure to continuous light in order to alter the body’s circadian rhythms. But according to the Stanford researchers, continuous light shifted a person’s internal clock by just 36 minutes. A two-millisecond flash of light every 10 seconds, by contrast, advanced the clock by an average of nearly two hours, and sometimes more. Of course, most travellers can’t spend a night in a lab before every flight. So the Stanford team is working to develop a sleep mask with LED lights that can be programmed with a smartphone.

The researchers published their findings in a report this week. It is surely not the final word in the long battle to combat jet lag. But given that other so-called cures have not been terribly inspiring—”wear sunglasses”, “keep calm”—we may at last be getting closer to a future in which travel isn’t only fast, but also leaves us feeling rested and able to get to work once we arrive.