Keeping a mouse awake is not as easy as it sounds. “You have to be very gentle,” said Nick Franks, professor of biophysics at Imperial College London. “You don’t want to get it stressed.” His preferred approach is to make them excited. That keeps them sufficiently interested and buzzing around.” Then, like a human with an iPad and a box set, they stay up long past bedtime. The reason Professor Franks wants to keep mice awake is that doing so could answer two of the most fundamental questions in human medicine: why do we sleep, and how do we beat dementia?

Source: The Times December 06, 2017 00:00 UTC