Dormivigilia

This week, our lab published a paper that we’ve been working on for some time (and one that I’m continuing). It’s also kind of hilarious that Montegraphia made it onto a paper from my postdoctoral lab (see acknowledgments section) before me! He only beat me by a few weeks though…. Our lab is interested in [...]

We’ve known in the sleep community for quite some time that REM sleep is important for the consolidation and recall of memories, albeit declarative (facts), procedural (motor skills), and emotional. We also know, or at least can postulate that the hippocampus plays an important role wherein there are actually changes in neurons at global and [...]

I apologize for discontinuing Neury Thursday (plus or minus a few days) for some time. Quite frankly, there was a drop in sleep, circadian, and drug-related publications in the Journal of Neuroscience. But I have a new line-up of J of N publications to keep me busy for the next month. The first article that [...]

For the past two weeks, I’ve come home from a day of grueling benchwork  to decompress with Reno 911! In college, I used to think the show was idiotic, but now I find it to be hilarious. In a recent episode, the officers do a PSA about the dangers of drowsy driving. While drowsy driving is [...]

Every week, I receive email updates of the latest sleep-circadian rhythms studies from PubMed (public database for biomedical research). This week, there were two unusual studies of interest. The first, entitled “Association between Facebook Dependence and Poor Sleep Quality: A Study in a Sample of Undergraduate Students in Peru” examined the relationship between time spent [...]

It’s no surprise that the New Year and society’s obsession with food and dieting has prompted interest in studies investigating sleep and circadian regulation of food intake and vice versa. I’ve highlighted a few in my most recent posts. Today, I read an early press release from a sleep researcher who I met at my [...]

Over the years, I meet many cool, brilliant researchers at the annual sleep meeting. Bryce Mander, a postdoc in the laboratory of Matt Walker at UC-Berkeley is one of them. He has undertaken many studies throughout his research career that have examined the effects of aging on sleep. In this study, Bryce and his collaborators [...]

There’s been an abundance of studies focusing on adenosinergic regulation of sleep. I highlighted one less than two weeks ago, but you can find many others through the search engine of my blog. In this particular study, British researchers used adenosine biosensors and an in vitro model of study unlike most preceding experiments which relied [...]

I just finished reading this article that predicted adaptation to (night) shift using computational biology. I thought that this figure presented in the paper nicely captures the consequences of night shift work (shaded green) following some time off (shaded red) and a “day” of sleep (shaded blue). The second, third, and fourth rows are of [...]

Since starting my blog in 2008, I have highlighted many investigations of adenosine, sleep, and wakefulness. Well, the saga continues. In the recent issue of Sleep, Dutch researchers compared spontaneous and pharmacologically-induced episodes of sleep and wakefulness in transgenic mice with subsensitive calcium channels. As you may recall, adenosine accumulates across waking and dissipates during [...]