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 [...]

This paper represents my official graduation from the (Dave) Glass lab (note: thanks to my labmates, DG and his money, and the pursuit of some cool projects, grad school was an awesome ride that will never be forgotten). In this last hoorah, I examined how mice that cannot express the clock protein Per2 responded to [...]

I spent the latter part of last week in basketball country; Bloomington, Indiana. Aside from cursing over the loss of Indiana to Syracuse (only to preserve my first place ranking in the fantasy college basketball), I attended an animal behavior conference that was very multidisciplinary. Most of the presenters were graduate students and postdocs but [...]

A few years ago, I met Dr. David Raizen at a small sleep and circadian rhythm retreat hosted by my undergraduate advisor (even though I’ve summarized talks given at these retreats in the past, David’s year as a young investigator was before the inception of my blog). David is a neuroscientist at UPENN who studies [...]

Last week was Sleep Awareness Week. This week, we celebrate brain health. This annual week (actually month) devoted to neuroscience outreach at all levels of education is one of the largest, collective efforts undertaken by universities around the world to teach kids about the brain and the importance of keeping it healthy. This year, I’ll [...]

In grad school, I often felt guilty whenever I gave some hamsters a “last meal” prior to sacrifice; usually some rodent-friendly yogurt-coated treat from PetSmart. Well, last week I learned about specific brain sites that are activated following snacking on potato chips…..in rats!!! I’m still scratching my head as to how this protocol passed the [...]

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 [...]

A few months ago, one of the greatest linebackers of the NFL, shot himself. Because his brain was preserved from the (immediate) trauma, the family decided to donate his brain to Boston University to undergo study and a possible diagnosis of chronic traumatic encephalitis. Research determined that he did and further, that a majority of [...]