COURTESY OF SCOTT LOEBL, ASA WINTHER, AND CASSANDRA VAN DUNK
It is one of life's greatest unsolved puzzles: why do we sleep? Now, researchers have designed a tool to help answer that question – one that allows scientists to induce sleep in fruit flies, and thus study the positive effects of snoozing, rather than simply depriving a subject of sleep to study the negative effects, as most sleep studies do.
Using the method, scientists at Washington University in St. Louis found that sleep facilitates the formation of long-term memories in flies. The results, reported this week in Science, unite two seemingly disparate theories in sleep research experimentally for the first time.
"This is the future," said Jan Born, a leading sleep researcher at the University of Lubeck in Germany who was not involved in the ...
