Word: sleeps
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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What had you been told when you were pregnant that turned out not to be true? There's once piece of advice that people love to give and I'd seriously love for it to be outlawed. Parents go, "Oh, you'll be fine, you'll just sleep when the baby sleeps." I remember Leta being about two months old and someone said that to me. I almost punched her in the face. It's not possible. She'd take a cat nap and wake up in 15 minutes later, how am I supposed to sleep for exactly those...
...lately there has been a lot of activity in the fruit-fly world. Along with information about social behaviors like aggression and fighting, fruit-fly research is beginning to yield insights into other complex behaviors, such as sleep. In two papers published today in Science, researchers find clues to the long-standing mystery of why humans need sleep, by studying the way Drosophila catches...
...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...
...sign of the owners or the pit vipers. One night, we try to keep a sentry fire burning all night in the rain to scare off wild elephants. The fire gutters out, but luckily the elephants have better things to do than crush us like bugs as we sleep...