Life Science log

(Ivanhoe Newswire) - It happens to the best of us, we eat a delicious home-cooked meal -- and minutes later we hit the sack. There?s no denying the eating can cause drowsiness, but what if not eating had the opposite effect? If we skipped that delicious turkey dinner, could we finally stay awake for the football game?A new study suggests that being hungry may be a way to keep oneself awake without feeling dazed or mentally challenged. A team of scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis found that when depriving fruit flies of food, the need for nourishment significantly outweighs the need for sleep. Fruit flies, like humans, cannot survive without rest, so the scientists engineered these fruit flies to be particularly sensitive to sleep deprivation. When the flies were starving they stayed awake nearly three times longer than they typically could.The researchers showed that the ability to resist sleep was linked to a protein that aids the fruit fly?s brain in storage and lipid usage.