It is said that smoking is one of the biggest causes of death and illness in modern time, but according to the results of a new study, not exercising is still worse for your health.

Researchers from Cleveland Clinic in the States examined data from over 100,000 patients who took a treadmill test to examine their fitness level, over a 22-year period.

The results published, showed that people who performed worst on the workout test were at greater risk of dying than those with any other health conditions, including smokers and diabetics.

Regarding the results cardiologist Dr. Wael Jaber tells CNN. "We've never seen something as pronounced as this and as objective as this," and added "We all know that a sedentary lifestyle or being unfit has some risk. But I'm surprised they overwhelm even the risk factors as strong as smoking, diabetes or even end-stage disease. "

According to the research data, those with a sedentary lifestyle were 500% more likely to die than people in the top band of exercise performance; a risk that is around three times higher than that of smoking.

All of this is not to negate the dangers of smoking, of course.

Rather, it shows clearly how deadly a lack of exercise can be, too. As Dr. Jaber notes, “It should be treated almost as a disease that has a prescription, which is called exercise.”

So let's start our exercise routine from now on.

"Exercise should be a prescription which could save your life, say researchers."

Astronomers peering billions of light years into space have detected the largest, most extensive collection of galaxies ever registered in the early days of the universe, a “proto-supercluster” they nicknamed Hyperion after a titan from Greek mythology.

Hyperion has a mass 1 million billion times greater than the sun and is so distant that it is viewed from earth as it looked billions of years ago.

Astronomer Steffen Miefke, the chief of operations for the ESO, told Reuters “Hyperion is like 5,000 galaxies of the Milky Way”, and add “These are galaxies very far from us, almost at the beginning of the universe. Hyperion is a sixth of the age of the universe. It’s as though we were able to look at the adolescence of an 80-year-old human being.”

The ESO (European Southern Observatory) operates the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, which detected Hyperion. Hyperion was detected using the Visible Multi-Object Spectrograph.

The telescope sits in the Chilean desert 760 miles north of the capital Santiago. And the discovery was made by a team led by Olga Cucciati of the National Institute of Astrophysics in Bologna, Italy.

Hyperion is an adolescent in astronomy terms. Its distance from earth means astronomers are viewing it as it was created just over 2 billion years. Taking into account that The Milky Way galaxy, which hosts our Solar System, is about 13.6 billion years old.

Brian Lemaux, an astronomer from University of California, Davis, who co-authored the report, said galaxies become denser as gravity had acted on them over billions of years.

“Superclusters closer to Earth tend to (appear as) a much more concentrated distribution of mass with clear structural features,” said Lemaux. “But in Hyperion, the mass is distributed much more uniformly in a series of connected blobs, populated by loose associations of galaxies.”

The research, entitled “The progeny of a Cosmic Titan” will feature in the latest issue of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics

"A "proto-supercluster" of galaxies nicknamed Hyperion, after a titan from Greek mythology, as seen using the VIMOS instrument of ESO’s Very Large Telescope. REUTERS/ESO/L. Calcada & Olga Cucciati et al/Handout."

Do you ever go to bed ridiculously early because you need to wake up on time for work - then feel even more tired in the morning?

Well, you might be doing it wrong.

Don't just think by getting more hours of sleep, you'll be more refreshed in the office the next day. Apparently it's a bit more complicated than that.

But, luckily for us, someone has created a 'sleep calculator', being used on blinds company site web blinds, so we can work out when we need to hit the sack in the click of a button.

Apparently it's all to do with sleep cycles rather than getting more hours of sleep. If you wake up at the wrong time during a sleep cycle, you'll find yourself more tired - even if you were asleep for longer.

If you need to get up at 7am
Need to make sure you're awake and getting out of bed at 7am? Then you need to go to bed at either 9.46pm or 11.16pm.

If you're having a late night and you don't fancy either of these, then 12.46am and 2.16am will also work.

The sleep calculator factors in the average of 14 minutes it takes people to naturally fall asleep, so you don't necessarily need to be in bed by this time.

If you need to get up at 6am
To get up at 6am, you're looking at a bedtime of 8.46pm, 10.16pm or even 11.46pm or - if you're feeling like a real night owl - 1.16am.

How about 8am?
Don't need to get up super early to get to work on time? Have no fear. Here's what time you need to go to bed for an 8am rise: 10.46pm, 12.16am, 1.46am or 3.16am.

What are sleep cycles?
A sleep cycle lasts about 90 minutes, during which time we move through five stages of sleep - four stages of non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep and one stage of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep.

We move from light sleep in Stage 1 to a very deep sleep in Stage 4. It is difficult to wake someone in Stage 4 of a sleep cycle, which is why you might feel more groggy if you wake up during this stage.

The fifth stage, REM sleep, is when most dreaming occurs.

You can even be really precise
For example, if you know getting out of bed at 6:35 is the optimum time so you can not miss the train and be punctual for work, enter it into the sleep calculator and you'll get a result.

For a 6.35am rise time, go to bed at 9.21pm, 10.51pm, 12.21am or 1.51am.

The Sleep Calculator website reads: "Getting a good night's sleep is about more than simply going to bed early – it's about waking up at the right time too.

"Using a formula based on the body's natural rhythms, the Sleep Calculator will work out the best time for you to rise or go to sleep."

The calculator works on the principle that everyone sleeps in about five or six cycles which last roughly 90 minutes.

Waking up midway through a cycle can leave you unable to sleep and feeling grumpy the next day. The idea is to wake up in between cycles and feel refreshed in the morning.