Word: sleepings
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...first study, Paul Shaw at Washington University in St. Louis monitored the relationship between brain activity and sleep patterns in a group of fruit flies and isolated three key genes responsible for dictating how much sleep flies got in certain situations and when. Under normal conditions, flies doze off, even during the day, after engaging in intense social activities, including courtship, acclimating to a new environment and fighting over mates and territory. But Shaw found that when flies were genetically bred to be missing the three genes - colorfully named rutabaga, period and blistered - that, among other functions, help regulate sleep...
...Such alertness may not seem like a bad thing, except that in a second paper in the same issue of Science, Giulio Tononi at the University of Wisconsin found that sleep appears to function as a critical shutoff valve for the fruit-fly brain. After a period of sleep, the volume of connections between nerve cells in the brain decreased, a condition that Tononi theorizes offsets the wakeful brain's activity. During waking hours, the brain keeps adding new information about its environment, forming new circuits and new connections in an ever thickening neural network. But even the fruit...
...Tononi and a growing number of other scientists believe that sleep - not just in flies but also in higher-order mammals - may perform such a pressure-releasing role. During sleep, researchers theorize, the brain actively prunes the neural network laid out during waking hours, trimming away weaker connections that haven't been used in a while or weren't strong enough to begin with. The stronger connections are believed to be filed during sleep into long-term memory, where they can be accessed again and again as needed. All this nocturnal tidying creates room for new connections to be formed...
Where nothing else works, there's always political pressure. In India, airline Jet Airways reversed a decision to lay off 1,900 staff after the government made its displeasure known - and weeping victims melted Chairman Naresh Goyal's heart. "I could not sleep at night," Goyal confessed at a press conference. "I was mentally disturbed when I saw tears in their eyes." Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel said he told Goyal that "the ministry would certainly not be very happy with the approach of Jet Airways." Something similar happened in France last month when the French oil company Total announced...
...British Airways that flies 64-seat, single-aisle 757s to Amsterdam and Paris from Newark and J.F.K. It has two cabin classes: in the back is a 40-seat premium economy section called Prem+ that is basically discounted business class. The seats recline 140 degrees--more than enough to sleep comfortably--and the service matches that of any business class out there. The front section is called Biz, with 24 lie-flat seats, high-quality food and amenities. Round-trip pricing to Amsterdam starts at $1,100 in Prem+ and about $2,400 in Biz. (See pictures of the history...