Brain wave changes in adolescence are related to age, but not sexual maturation, occur earlier in girls than boys and may be associated with one of the brain’s major reorganization projects: synaptic pruning, a new study finds. During adolescence, the brain reorganizes and eliminates many synaptic connections, making the brain’s information processing more efficient and powerful while consuming less energy.
Max Planck researchers in Heidelberg are investigating communication between memory areas during sleep.
Children with a form of bedwetting that does not respond to a common medication have more sodium and urea in their nighttime urine, possibly because of an imbalance of prostaglandin, a hormone-like substance, a new study has found.
A biologist at Washington University in St. Louis and his collaborators have identified the factor in mammalian brain cells that keeps cells in synchrony so that functions like the wake-sleep cycle, hormone secretion and loco motor behaviors are coordinated daily over a 24-hour period.
Alcohol can help people initially fall asleep, but leads to poor-quality sleep later in the night. Escalated consumption of alcohol to aid sleep can lead to alcoholism. Inaccurate sleep perceptions among alcoholics in early recovery may predict relapse to drinking.
A new study has shown that exercise can reduce sleep-disordered breathing in children, which appeared in the November issue of Obesity. Exercise can reduce snoring among overweight children, even if it doesn’t result in weight loss.
New research, in “Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think,” shows that most holiday overeating, is due to the cues around us — family and friends, packages and plates, shapes and smells, distractions and distances, cupboards and containers. Dubbed the “Freakonomics of food,” the studies in “Mindless Eating” also show how we can reverse these cues to eat less and enjoy it more.
Fighting like a girl or fighting like a boy is hardwired into fruit fly neurons, according to a study in the November 19 Nature Neuroscience advance online publication by a research team from Harvard Medical School and the Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna. The results confirm that a gene known as “fruitless” is a key factor underlying sexual differences in behavior.
A new study showed that it can be safe and cost-efficient to discharge pediatric tonsillectomy patients after a short post-operative recovery period at an outpatient surgery center.
Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) affects up to 20 percent of men in western cultures, five percent of whom experience significant physical symptoms. A study published in Journal of Forensic Sciences finds that sex offenders who suffer from OSA experience more harmful psychological symptoms than do sex offenders with normal sleep patterns.