How do tired animals stay awake?

New research provides clues to falling fast asleep – or lying wide awake. Studying fruit flies, the researchers found that brain neurons adapt to help the flies stay awake despite tiredness in dangerous situations and help them fall asleep after an intense day. The findings, from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and […]

Shaw to study sleep and Alzheimer’s disease

Paul J. Shaw, PhD, professor of neuroscience at the School of Medicine, received a one-year $2.3 million grant from the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for research titled “Bidirectional interactions between sleep and Alzheimer’s disease: Functional dissection of the brain transcriptome in humans and drosophila.” Originally published on The Source.

Flies sleep when need arises to adapt to new situations

Flies that cannot take to the air respond by sleeping more as they learn to adapt to their flightlessness, according to a study from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The findings, published May 8 in Science Advances, suggest that sleep may be an evolutionary tool that helps animals adapt to challenging new […]