Sleep

Before sleep can begin, the body must shed heat. Core temperature drifts downward through the evening, and that slow cooling signals the brain that the day is over and sleep can begin. Unless the night is hot. Then the room holds the heat the body is trying to release, the cooling never happens, and sleep […]

A single blood draw may soon reveal what time your body thinks it is, not just what the clock on the wall says. In the largest study of its kind, researchers mapped the daily rhythms of more than 3,200 blood biomarkers across nearly half a million people and built a protein-based clock that can estimate […]

In quantum mechanics, the act of observing a system changes its state. A new study published in Nature and Science of Sleep suggests something eerily similar happens in the brains of anesthetized rats: the routine behavioral tests doctors and researchers use to check whether a subject is truly unconscious can themselves nudge the brain toward […]

Sleep is supposed to be restorative. But the signal that tells an animal to sleep may start inside the cell’s power plants, in a burst of what looks like cellular damage. That is the finding from a new study on the microscopic roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans published July 29 on bioRxiv. After bombarding worms with ultraviolet […]

Every night, roughly one in three adults sleeps poorly enough to warrant clinical concern. Yet diagnosing sleep disorders remains stubbornly difficult, because the causes span so many domains: bedtime habits, stress levels, caffeine intake, physical activity patterns, heart rate variability, occupational demands. Standard statistical tools struggle to untangle which factors matter and how they interact. […]

Source: Tatemoto et al. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 2026, Vol. 20. DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2026.1828432 New mothers know the crushing fatigue of round-the-clock infant care. Sleep comes in fragments, measured not in hours but in the brief gaps between feedings, diaper changes, and soothing. Chronic sleep deprivation during lactation is so universal it is often dismissed as an […]

For decades, sleep research has been held hostage by a single stubborn bottleneck: the sleep scorer. Whether studying mice, zebrafish, or humans, every hour of electrophysiological data must be manually staged into wake, NREM, and REM by a trained human technician staring at squiggly lines of EEG and EMG traces. Two experts scoring the same […]

Every hour of lost sleep leaves a molecular trace in the brain. For years, scientists have tried to catalog those traces by measuring which genes turn on or off when animals are kept awake. But individual studies, limited by small sample sizes and biological noise, have produced conflicting lists. The result is a field rich […]

A neuron that signals wakefulness tonight might signal NREM sleep tomorrow night. A cell that responds to REM sleep today could be entirely silent next week. This is not a glitch. It is the normal operating principle of the hypothalamus, according to a study published July 28 in Nature Communications that challenges a foundational assumption […]

Two fundamental things happen to cortical synapses during sleep. One has been suspected for decades: the brain prunes back dendritic spines, paring down the connections strengthened during waking hours. The other, revealed in a study published July 29 in iScience, is the opposite of what most sleep researchers would have predicted. At the same time […]