Sleep is essential – researchers are trying to work out why

A typical person spends more than 20 years in a state of dreamy semi-consciousness. But surprisingly little is known about why we need this down time. Reactive oxygen species in the guts of flies glow depending on the concentration of the molecules.Credit: Alexandra Vaccaro and Yosef Kaplan Dor When neurobiologist Dragana Rogulja began studying sleep in her laboratory at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, in 2013, she had no idea what her experiments would tell her about how sleep affects the body. She wasn’t assuming — as many people do — that it’s a function mainly of the brain. She was just starting her lab and decided to throw the net wide, asking the question: if animals are sleep deprived, how long will it take until they die — and when they die, what is the specific cause? She expected it would take years to answer these questions. But in six months, Rogulja’s postdoctoral assistant, Alexandra Vaccaro, found a tantalizing clue. “We started looking at lifespan a ... Read full article.