Sound recordings can help detect obstructive sleep apnoea

October 12th, 2009 LONDON - Researchers have developed a computer programme, which can analyse the snoring pattern of people to help diagnose a specific sleep disorder. Doctors at University of Queensland and the Princess Alexandra Hospital assessed the snoring of 20 patients with sleep apnoea by first recording it.

October 1st, 2009 WASHINGTON - Long-term alcoholism can have detrimental effects on a person's sleep despite long periods of abstinence, according to a study. And the above pattern is similar in both men and women.

September 17th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Snoring often leads to embarrassment and wrecks a good night sleep of your partner. Now, experts from Mayo Clinic have offered some simple ways to silence the disturbing nasal sound.

September 16th, 2009 LONDON - A team of scientists have for the first time uncovered the mechanism that causes learning and memory formation during sleep. Researchers led by Gyorgy Buzsaki, professor at the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience at Rutgers University, Newark, have determined that short transient brain events, called "sharp wave ripples," are responsible for consolidating memory and transferring the learned information from the hippocampus to the neocortex, where long-term memories are stored.

September 9th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A drug initially used to treat seizures improves sleep quality in menopausal women with hot flashes, claims a new study. University of Rochester Medical Center researchers have reported the finding online and in the September issue of the Journal of Women's Health.

August 31st, 2009 LONDON - A five-strong group of scientists have developed a new technique that can monitor movements beneath the earth's surface to help understand how earthquakes behave. The scientists, led by Andrew Curtis, Professor of Mathematical Geoscience at Edinburgh University, used computers to simulate the motion of one earthquake at the location of another to discover more in-depth information about underground movements.

August 26th, 2009 WASHINGTON - It's not just humans who sing love ballads to woo their partners, for bats too sing when they indulge in sex, according to a new study. Researchers at Texas A and M University and the University of Texas at Austin are believed to be the first to decode the mysterious love sounds made by the winged creatures.

July 21st, 2009 WASHINGTON - Babies are not as naïve as we think they are - at least as far as canines are concerned. A new study has claimed that infants just 6 months old can understand the different tones of dog barks, even if they've limited previous exposure.

June 17th, 2009 LONDON - A team of physicists have created an artificial black hole in their lab that traps sound instead of light, in an attempt to detect the theoretical Hawking radiation. The radiation, proposed by physicist Stephen Hawking more than 30 years ago, causes black holes to evaporate over time.

June 12th, 2009 WASHINGTON - According to a new study, Body Mass Index (BMI) varies as a function of habitual sleep duration. The study has been presented at SLEEP 2009, the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies.

June 11th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A new study has revealed that sleep selectively preserves memories that are emotionally salient and relevant to future goals when sleep follows soon after learning. Lead author Dr Jessica Payne, of Harvard Medical School in Boston MA has revealed that sleeping brain seems to calculate what is most important about an experience and selects only what is adaptive for consolidation and long term storage.

June 8th, 2009 WASHINGTON - No matter how much a person works out during the day, their exertion fails to translate into increased total sleep time at night, according to a study. The researchers observed that days with increased activity were followed by nights with lower total sleep time (TST), while nights with lower TST were followed by increased activities during the next day.

June 8th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A new study has shown that sleep extension helps improve athletic performance. In the study, researchers found that sleep extension in athletes was associated with a faster sprinting drill, increased hitting accuracy including valid serves, and hitting depth drill.

June 8th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Television watching may be an important determinant of bedtime and may contribute to sleep debt, according to the latest research. The study included 21,475 people aged 15 or older.

June 8th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Gamers who are hooked on to their computers or consoles for more than seven hours a week, and who identified themselves as addicts, tend to sleep less during the weekdays and experience greater sleepiness than casual or non-gamers, according to a study. The new findings suggest that excessive gamers have significantly poorer sleep hygiene, and sleep less on weekdays than other gamers.