Sleep

For people with narcolepsy type 1, treatment has long been a patchwork: stimulants to hold off daytime sleepiness, sodium oxybate to soften cataplexy, antidepressants for hallucinations and sleep paralysis. None of them touched the root of the problem. On Aug. 5, 2026, that changed. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Orzeyful (oveporexton), an oral […]

Quizzing Melds Similar Memories, a Nap Holds the Line: EEG Dissects Two Kinds of Consolidation For years, memory scientists have leaned on a tidy equivalence: actively testing yourself on learned material and sleeping are two routes to the same destination, both consolidating memories faster and more durably than passive review. A new study that watched […]

Dreams are the strangest cognitive product of a healthy brain: they feel intensely real, yet they make almost no sense. A person can spend an hour of dream time fleeing a childhood home that has merged with a shopping mall, feeling terror, delight, and confusion in rapid succession, and then forget nearly all of it […]

During sleep, the brain replays the events of the day and moves them into long-term storage. Sleep scientists long assumed this replay was choreographed entirely from within the brain: slow oscillations sweep across the cortex, sleep spindles nestle into their up-states, and together they create brief windows in which memories can be reactivated and strengthened. […]

Nearly half of older adults struggle to fall asleep or stay asleep, and the usual suspects are well known: stress, pain, medication, an aging brain. A new analysis from southern China points to a less obvious contributor, one that arrives through the lungs rather than the mind. In more than 2,300 middle-aged and older adults, […]

Two drugs can fix the same broken mood and leave completely different nights behind. In mice carrying a depression model braided with insomnia, the insomnia medication lemborexant and the classic antidepressant fluoxetine both lifted depressive and anxious behavior and both quieted the hyperactive stress axis. But under the EEG, the two could hardly have acted […]

REM sleep looks like a single, uniform state on a sleep report. Behind that label, though, the brain alternates between two very different modes of operation: one punctuated by bursts of rapid eye movements, the other quiet and steady. A new multicohort study, published in the journal Sleep, shows that this inner structure of REM […]

For tens of millions of people whose jobs begin when most of the world sleeps, the body’s internal clock is a persistent adversary. Shift work is linked to a long catalog of harms, from insomnia to depression and serious long-term illness, yet treatment options that fit around rotating schedules are scarce. A new randomized trial […]

In the brain of a fruit fly, sleep control hinges on a connection that should not work. Two groups of clock neurons demonstrably communicate: the small ventrolateral neurons (s-LNv) release the neuropeptide sNPF, and their larger neighbors, the l-LNv neurons, carry the receptors that translate that signal into consolidated nighttime sleep. Yet the most detailed […]

A night of broken sleep usually leaves people foggy and short-tempered, yet the body still holds its core temperature steady, keeps metabolism on schedule, and keeps the immune system ready. That quiet stability is not automatic. New research from the University of Colorado Boulder points to an unlikely crew doing much of the work: microglia, […]