Sleep

Somewhere between waking and deep sleep, the brain runs a relay race it repeats every night. A slow wave of electrical silence rolls across the cortex about once a second. Close behind it, a burst of faster activity, a spindle, rises from deep inside the brain. When the two rhythms lock together in exactly the […]

Stress and poor sleep were the strongest independent predictors of emotional eating in a nationwide study of 1,297 Greek university students, outranking sex, smoking, physical activity, and weight status. The findings treat emotional eating as a measurable health pattern with identifiable drivers, and the drivers are not what diet campaigns usually target. The behavior in […]

One Midbrain Hub, Two Jobs: The Neurons That Run REM Sleep and Wakefulness REM sleep has always been the odd one out. The dreaming brain hums almost as loudly as a waking one, the eyes sweep beneath closed lids, and the body switches off its own muscles so completely that researchers once called it paradoxical. […]

A bad evening is supposed to feel less bad by morning. The details should survive; the sting should fade. A new preprint from the University of Hong Kong offers a fine-grained account of how the sleeping brain manages that trick. It does not happen through one uniform process, but through two distinct microscopic events, each […]

Somewhere in the genome of every fruit fly sits the fossil of an ancient virus, and a new preprint argues that this fossil is doing some of the fly’s most important night work. The Arc genes descended from retrotransposons, mobile bits of DNA that once copied themselves through animal genomes like parasites. Evolution domesticated them: […]

Few substances have slipped into the American household as quietly as melatonin. Parents who would never dream of giving a child a prescription sedative will dissolve a berry-flavored gummy into warm milk without a second thought. The jar sits in the vitamin aisle rather than behind the pharmacy counter, and that placement is the whole […]

For decades, bright light therapy has had a furniture problem. The classic way to treat a sleep disorder with light is to sit in front of a desktop-sized light box for half an hour or more, often at breakfast, while the glare washes over the eyes. For a person with Parkinson’s disease, whose tremor, stiffness, […]

Ask a 70-year-old what one creak in the hallway does to their night, then ask a teenager the same question. The older sleeper may lie awake until dawn after a single disturbance; the teenager will not even stir. Narcolepsy is the mirror image of that fragility: a person who cannot hold either state for long, […]

Every tool that reaches a deep brain structure has come with a trade. Implanted electrodes reach the subthalamic nucleus and other subcortical targets, but only after surgeons drill through the skull and leave hardware in the brain. Non-invasive stimulators spare the patient surgery, but their fields scatter within a few centimeters (an inch or two), […]

A hibernating bear is a paradox of physiology. It cuts its metabolism by as much as 75 percent, stops eating for months, and waits out the Alaskan winter in a den, yet its body temperature never plunges as it does in small hibernators. Core temperature falls only moderately, from about 38°C into the 30 to […]