One of 8 fields we read

Life Sciences & Medicine

121 discoveries published so far

October 6, 2026 A pond alga's light sensor wins the Nobel The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Karl Deisseroth (55, Stanford), Peter Hegemann (72, Humboldt University) and Georg Nagel (73, University of Würzburg) for optogenetics.
October 4, 2026 Teens who walk more report fewer mental health symptoms a year later Researchers at King's College London and UMass Amherst followed more than 5,500 American adolescents in the ABCD Study and compared their daily step counts with mental health one year later.
October 3, 2026 A few hundred neurons that a pregnancy depends on Nirao Shah's team at Stanford tracked gene expression across the female mouse brain during pregnancy and found a small set of neurons that rebuilt themselves.
October 3, 2026 Why a good high can flip into panic Northwestern neuroscientists have pinpointed a group of cells that decides whether cannabinoids soothe or alarm.
October 3, 2026 A baby's first week may set the course for allergy Petter Brodin of Imperial College London followed nearly 600 infants in Sweden through their first year, collecting blood and stool samples.
October 1, 2026 Your voice carries a clock for how fast your brain is aging Researchers at Trinity College Dublin's Global Brain Health Institute recorded 2,928 Spanish-speaking adults across five Latin American countries and fed hundreds of acoustic and linguistic measures into a machine-learning model: pitch, pause length, speech rate, semantic precision, syntax.
September 30, 2026 Keeping T cells out of the brain spared memory in mice with tau disease David Holtzman's group at Washington University in St.
September 29, 2026 A schizophrenia drug built on a betel nut chemical, and what comes after it Xanomeline-trospium (Cobenfy) was approved for schizophrenia in 2024 as the first new antipsychotic mechanism in roughly 70 years.
September 24, 2026 An old HIV drug reversed paralysis and blindness in mice with MS Researchers at the University of Virginia took an HIV drug, stripped out everything that made it work against HIV, and kept only the part that blocks the inflammasome, the cell-killing alarm system that runs amok in multiple sclerosis.
September 23, 2026 Scientists found a direct channel between your brain and your skull, and poor sleep slows it down For decades, biology treated the brain as sealed off from the rest of the body by the blood-brain barrier.
September 22, 2026 A battery you swallow, built to power a medical device and then disappear A team including MIT's Giovanni Traverso built a battery thin and flexible enough to swallow, made from a magnesium alloy anode and a molybdenum-trioxide-and-carbon cathode layered with cellulose nanofibrils, the material that gives it a paper-like structure.
September 21, 2026 Deep dreaming sleep may protect against 83 diseases Researchers led by a team at Capital Medical University tracked 95,559 people in a UK health project, using wrist trackers to map a week of sleep against more than a thousand health conditions over a median follow-up of nearly nine years.
September 21, 2026 Menopause hits pause on the brain's normal aging Cognitive neuroscientist Sophie van 't Hof and colleagues at Amsterdam University Medical Center scanned the brains of more than 1,000 people repeatedly across major life transitions, including puberty, pregnancy, and menopause.
September 17, 2026 A drug that turns cancer's own armor into a weapon against it Mesothelioma is a brutal, asbestos-linked cancer, diagnosed in about 30,000 people worldwide each year, with a median survival of roughly 12 months and a five-year survival rate near 10 percent.
September 17, 2026 A weight-loss drug's target may also protect the mind GLP-1 receptor agonists like semaglutide have reshaped how doctors treat diabetes and obesity, but they've also drawn concern over reports of suicidal ideation in some patients, set against clinical trials showing they reduce depressive symptoms in others.
September 16, 2026 Ten women with fragile bones got their own cells back, reprogrammed Osteoporosis affects an estimated 500 million people worldwide and causes a fracture, somewhere, about once every second.
September 15, 2026 A brain implant lets paralyzed people speak and gesture at the same time For years, brain-computer interfaces have given paralyzed people back either words or gestures, never both at once, because researchers assumed the brain signals for talking and waving would simply pile on top of each other and overwhelm the system.
September 12, 2026 The First Muscle-Targeting Drug for a Disease That Steals Movement The FDA approved Isembyld this week, the first therapy built specifically to target muscle loss in spinal muscular atrophy, for patients 2 and older who are already on standard SMA treatment.
September 11, 2026 A single dose that targets narcolepsy's actual cause, not just its symptoms Two phase 3 trials, FirstLight and RadiantLight, tested a twice-daily pill called oveporexton in 273 people with narcolepsy type 1, the form marked by sudden muscle collapse called cataplexy along with crushing daytime sleepiness.
September 8, 2026 The rabbit relative that turns out to help, not hurt, the herd On the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, ranchers have spent years treating the plateau pika, a small burrowing relative of rabbits, as a pest that steals grass from their yaks.
September 8, 2026 The aging brain that still remembers how to balance Researchers put 50 young adults, 80 older adults in their late fifties and sixties, and 30 people over 80 through seven motor tasks and one cognitive task, all tied to the cerebellum, the part of the brain that governs balance and coordination.
September 5, 2026 Two kidney patients traded a pig organ for a human one, and it worked Two of eGenesis's first recipients of genetically engineered pig kidneys have now successfully received kidneys from human donors, the company announced.
September 4, 2026 The FDA finally trusts doctors with one of psychiatry's most powerful drugs In February 2025, the FDA retired the 30-year-old monitoring registry that had governed clozapine, the only drug approved for treatment-resistant schizophrenia and the only one shown to reduce suicide in the illness.
September 3, 2026 A Weight-Loss Drug Turns Out to Slow Aging Itself Researchers at UC Berkeley, led by Danica Chen, gave semaglutide, the drug behind Ozempic and Wegovy, to mice that were already 20 months old, roughly the mouse equivalent of late middle age.
September 3, 2026 Overdose Deaths Are Falling, and Fast From 2021 to 2023, more than 105,000 Americans died of drug overdoses every single year.
September 2, 2026 A hunt for malaria antibodies turned up a shield against a tick allergy NIH scientists were trying to stop malaria.
September 1, 2026 Migraine treatment finally gets its first update since 2012 The American Headache Society and the American Academy of Neurology released new migraine prevention guidelines this week, the first update in fourteen years, reflecting a wave of new treatments that simply didn't exist in 2012.
August 31, 2026 A knee muscle turns out to double as a second heart Every time a calf muscle contracts, it squeezes the veins running through the lower leg and pushes blood back up toward the heart against gravity, a mechanism doctors call the calf muscle pump.
August 30, 2026 Scientists caught the brain quietly rebuilding itself after injury Using two-photon microscopy to watch living mouse brains in real time, University of Zurich researchers found astrocytes, the star-shaped cells that feed and steady neurons, doing something nobody had documented before.
August 30, 2026 A "youth protein" woke up aging brains' immune cells Mount Sinai researchers zeroed in on TIMP2, a protein already tied to youthfulness in earlier aging studies, and found it keeps microglia, the brain's resident cleanup crew, doing their job.
August 30, 2026 Growing older doesn't dim your vocabulary, and now we know why MIT and Boston University researchers scanned the brains of adults aged 17 to 80 during language tasks and separate memory tasks, chasing a pattern doctors have long noticed: people lose working memory and problem-solving speed with age but often keep, or even sharpen, their vocabulary.
August 29, 2026 Why taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's A 2024 study of nearly 9 million US death certificates found that out of 443 occupations, taxi and ambulance drivers had the lowest risk of dying from Alzheimer's disease: about 1 in 100, compared with 1 in 60 overall.
August 28, 2026 Your brain tags which memories are worth keeping while you're still awake For years, the idea that your brain "tags" certain memories at the moment you learn them, marking them for filing away during sleep, was mostly theory.
August 27, 2026 The color missing from your ceiling light Sunlight contains a short wavelength called indigo light.
August 27, 2026 The cancer everyone called undruggable On August 26, the FDA approved daraxonrasib, sold as Rasonque, for advanced pancreatic cancer.
August 26, 2026 A woman recognizes her son again after a transplant never done before Elena, 67, lost the sight in her left eye when a road accident severed the optic nerve; the same crash destroyed the retina, cornea, and stem-cell-bearing tissue in her right eye, but left that eye's optic nerve intact.
August 23, 2026 Brain tissue that grows old the slow, real way A Harvard team led by Paola Arlotta kept lab-grown clusters of human brain tissue, called organoids, alive and developing for nearly six years, tracking their gene activity, biological age, and structure cell by cell the whole time.
August 23, 2026 A cricket that can smell a bat coming Bats and crickets have been locked in an arms race for millions of years, one built almost entirely around sound: bats echolocate, crickets evolved ears to hear them coming.
August 20, 2026 A cancer vaccine built from a patient's own tumor actually works Merck and Moderna announced Wednesday that a personalized mRNA vaccine, intismeran, slowed melanoma's return in the first randomized Phase 3 trial ever to test whether a "neoantigen" cancer vaccine actually works.
August 18, 2026 A first-of-its-kind drug finally treats narcolepsy at its cause Tyler Chapman, a 19-year-old at the University of Tennessee, used to sleep 16 hours a day and collapse mid-laugh from cataplexy, fully conscious the whole time.
August 15, 2026 The aging brain's immune system turns out to have an off switch, and an on switch For decades, textbooks treated the brain as sealed off from the body's immune system, guarded by the blood-brain barrier like a moat.
August 13, 2026 The brain grows new repair cells and drives them to the damage Using two-photon microscopy and long-term gene mapping in mice, researchers at the University of Zurich found a specialized population of astrocytes sitting at the edge of a brain lesion that don't just divide where they stand.
August 13, 2026 Dogs have a brain region that lights up just for human smiles Researchers at the University of Vienna ran pet dogs through fMRI while showing them photos of human faces, happy, angry, fearful, sad, and mapped what activated.
August 9, 2026 Aging brains get reinforcements, and they come from the bloodstream The brain's immune cells, microglia, were long thought to be sealed off at birth and to renew only from within the brain itself.
August 8, 2026 A math model that decides exactly where mosquito nets save the most lives Malaria killed more than 600,000 people in 2024, three-quarters of them children under five, almost all in sub-Saharan Africa.
August 7, 2026 The first mRNA flu shot just cleared the FDA, a year after the government tried to kill the technology On August 5, the FDA approved mFlusiva, the first influenza vaccine ever built on mRNA, for adults 50 and older.
August 6, 2026 A swallowed capsule that helped a peanut allergy fade Fifteen adults with peanut allergies, average age 21, each swallowed 36 capsules over a single day containing stool from a healthy donor with no food allergies, an attempt to seed their guts with a different mix of microbes.
August 4, 2026 The organ doctors thought was pointless after childhood The thymus sits behind your breastbone, trains your immune cells as a kid, then shrinks so much by adulthood that doctors have spent decades calling it an "immune cell graveyard," basically finished doing anything useful.
August 3, 2026 A massive review says most of us are eating more protein than we need, and it may be aging us faster While protein-fortified everything, cereal, coffee, even water, keeps filling grocery shelves, a review of more than 350 studies on protein restriction and aging arrived at an inconvenient conclusion: many sedentary adults may be better off eating less of it, not more.
August 3, 2026 A psychedelic therapy puts veterans' PTSD into remission, and a brain scan shows why it lasts In the first U.S.
August 3, 2026 Showing up for a weekly community group cut older adults' risk of cognitive decline in half Osaka Metropolitan University researchers followed 2,578 older adults in Habikino City, Japan for four years, none of them certified as needing long-term care at the start, to see whether Japan's widespread community gathering places actually protect the brain.
August 2, 2026 A dementia prevention trial that actually worked At the Alzheimer's Association International Conference in London this July, a room full of researchers watched a video of a nonscientist named Isabel Beltre thanking, in Spanish, both her faith and a clinical trial for changing her life.
August 1, 2026 A child's way of talking about hard memories can flag depression risk years in advance Researchers at Stanford, led by Ian Gotlib and first author Chase Antonacci, recorded 30-minute structured interviews with 204 children ages 9 to 13 about stressful events in their lives, then ran the audio through four different natural-language processing tools looking for patterns in sentence structure, grammar, and word choice.
July 28, 2026 A blood test can now tell people at genetic risk for ALS roughly when symptoms will start For nearly 20 years, the NIH-funded Pre-fALS study has followed people who carry genes that put them at high risk for ALS but haven't developed it yet, and that patience just paid off.
July 25, 2026 A once-a-month HIV prevention pill just got a lot more reachable Merck's experimental prevention pill, alimatravir, is still in two late-stage clinical trials, hasn't been approved anywhere yet.
July 23, 2026 A "cochlear implant for vision" just cleared Europe Science Corporation announced this week that European regulators approved commercial sale of its retinal implant, a device for people who've lost their central vision to age-related macular degeneration.
July 22, 2026 A one-hour mouth swab can now catch oral cancer as accurately as a biopsy Researchers at Queen Mary University of London, working with partners in India, tested a brush swab called qMIDS on 545 patients with suspicious mouth lesions.
July 18, 2026 A brain implant let a paralyzed man feel his dog again In 2020, Keith Thomas broke his neck in a diving accident in a pool in Montauk, New York, and lost all feeling and movement below his neck.
July 17, 2026 Scientists reversed aging across a mouse's whole body by fixing its immune cleanup crew The body produces roughly 100 billion neutrophils a day, and normally, long-lived cleanup cells called macrophages engulf the spent ones within a day or so.
July 10, 2026 A blood test may be able to flag Alzheimer's years before the first symptom Researchers led by Carlos Cruchaga at Washington University in St.
July 9, 2026 A single human brain cell computes like an entire neural network The standard explanation for human intelligence has always been a counting argument: roughly 100 billion neurons, each a relatively simple on-off switch, connected into a network of staggering complexity.
July 9, 2026 A ketogenic diet reduced schizophrenia and bipolar symptoms in a controlled trial A randomized controlled trial from UCSF, published in Schizophrenia Bulletin, tested a ketogenic diet in patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder against a diet-as-usual control.
July 9, 2026 Humanoid robots completed their first surgeries
July 9, 2026 Ovaries don't retire; they transform After menopause, the conventional wisdom has been that the ovaries go silent: follicles depleted, reproductive purpose complete, the organ fades.
July 8, 2026 The brain cells that decide which memories survive About half your brain by cell count is astrocytes: star-shaped cells that were long dismissed as passive structural support for neurons.
July 8, 2026 Eighty minutes of missed sleep is enough to start changing your body Researchers at Columbia University ran a pooled analysis tracking 95 adults who delayed their bedtimes by 90 minutes every night for six weeks, mirroring the common pattern of millions of working adults.
July 7, 2026 Speaking More Languages Keeps Your Brain Biologically Younger Researchers built an AI brain-aging clock from MEG imaging data on 728 people spanning a wide age range, then applied it to 144 individuals from the Basque country of Spain who naturally speak between one and four languages.
July 7, 2026 A Century-Old Vaccine May Be Flushing Alzheimer's Protein From the Brain Mass General Brigham researchers have spent two decades studying BCG, the tuberculosis vaccine delivered through the skin, as a kind of immune educator with effects far beyond its original purpose.
July 6, 2026 The mechanism killing neurons in Alzheimer's, finally named A decade ago, researchers at King's College London found an unusual cell death process in a rare disease, and spent the next ten years chasing it.
July 6, 2026 Knee pain halved, no surgery required At the start of the study, 194 patients at Charité, the large university hospital in Berlin, rated their osteoarthritis knee pain at an average of 7 out of 10.
July 6, 2026 Millions of Americans may be getting the wrong cholesterol test The standard cholesterol test measures LDL: the amount of "bad" cholesterol by mass.
July 4, 2026 Mice and Humans Smell the World Through the Same Ancient Brain Wiring Two complementary research teams at Northwestern University, one studying mice, one studying humans, came at olfaction from opposite ends and found themselves describing the same machine.
July 4, 2026 A Vagus Nerve Implant Is Helping 70% of Depression's Hardest Cases The participants in the RECOVER trial were not ordinary depression patients.
July 3, 2026 Rats will free a friend before they eat the chocolate A now-classic 2011 experiment put a free rat in a cage with a bar of chocolate and another rat trapped in a small clear cylinder.
July 2, 2026 Life Built From Scratch A team at the University of Minnesota has built something that does not have a name yet, because nothing quite like it has existed before.
July 2, 2026 Two Ways to Catch Alzheimer's Years Early Two studies landed this week from different directions and arrived at the same place: the brain is sending signals about Alzheimer's long before memory fades, and we are finally learning to read them.
July 2, 2026 What the First Year Sets in Motion Two studies published this week put numbers on something parents have been told for years without much evidence behind it: the first year of an infant's life matters in ways that echo forward for decades.
July 2, 2026 Glioblastoma's Hidden Shield Glioblastoma kills around 95% of patients within five years.
July 1, 2026 Three Things the Brain Already Knows Three separate studies published this week addressed the same underlying question from three different angles: what does the human brain arrive with, and what does it only acquire through experience?
July 1, 2026 Melatonin Works on Chronic Pain A meta-analysis from the University of Sydney pooled data from more than 2,000 adults across 23 randomized controlled trials and found that melatonin reduces chronic musculoskeletal pain by an average of 9 to 10 points on a 100-point scale.
July 1, 2026 The World's Largest Portrait of Human Genetics The NIH All of Us Research Program released its largest-ever data update this week, making genetic and health information available from more than 747,000 participants.
June 30, 2026 Alzheimer's Has Been Using the Brain's Own Postal System All Along Toxic Tau protein, the material that tangles inside neurons and kills them in Alzheimer's disease, doesn't just accumulate in one place and slowly overwhelm a cell.
June 28, 2026 The brain rebuilds itself, three ways Three studies landed in the same week, each showing the brain's physical architecture changing in response to something we do to it.
June 27, 2026 Psilocybin Temporarily Restored Speech and Mobility in Advanced Alzheimer's A psychiatrist in São Paulo named Marcos Lago was treating an 80-year-old woman with advanced Alzheimer's disease, a stage where significant functional recovery is considered essentially impossible, when he made a decision to try psilocybin.
June 27, 2026 Brains Synchronize When People Connect, and It Could Fight Loneliness A ten-year body of research by neuroscientists at NYU has confirmed something that sounds poetic but turns out to be literal: when people are genuinely engaged with each other face to face, their brainwaves physically synchronize.
June 27, 2026 Epigenetic Editing Enters Human Trials for Muscular Dystrophy A company called Epicrispr Biotechnologies just shared the first clinical data from a human trial of epigenetic editing, a technique that does not alter the DNA sequence itself but changes the chemical tags attached to DNA, those tags that act like a mixing board controlling which genes are turned up or down.
June 27, 2026 A Bionic Hand That Lets the Brain Feel Again Two research teams working on completely different brain-machine interface systems, one from Sant'Anna in Pisa using micro-magnets implanted inside residual forearm muscles, and one from the Cleveland Clinic using surgical nerve-redirection, compared their data and found something unexpected: both systems produced identical perceptual maps in patients.
June 26, 2026 Three new clues about how Alzheimer's kills neurons Three separate Alzheimer's studies landed this week, each naming a different piece of a puzzle that has resisted scientists for decades.
June 26, 2026 Human embryo base editing rewrites what we knew about early development Scientists at Cambridge used base editing, a more precise cousin of CRISPR that changes a single DNA letter rather than cutting both strands, to disable the NANOG gene in donated human embryos, then watched what happened.
June 26, 2026 When you eat matters more than you thought A Mass General study used a tightly controlled "constant routine" protocol, stripping out sleep, light exposure, activity, and every other behavioral variable, to isolate what the body's own clock does to how you burn food.
June 25, 2026 AI identified the hidden heart defect that kills apparently healthy people Sudden cardiac arrest kills more than 350,000 people a year in the United States, and the particular cruelty of it is that an implantable defibrillator could prevent it in many of those cases.
June 24, 2026 The parenting brain is an upgrade, not a loss For years, the jokes wrote themselves.
June 24, 2026 Five minutes on your feet, every half-hour, beats the morning gym Columbia physiologist Keith Diaz had a result so good it sounded made up.
June 24, 2026 How the brain survives a stroke, and a drug that might help it do so better Stroke is one of the most common causes of disability on Earth.
June 24, 2026 Scars are evolution's shortcut. Two growth factors unlock the detour. Salamanders can regrow a lost limb.
June 23, 2026 The Ancient Brainstem Switch for Attention For decades, neuroscience held that selective attention — the ability to focus on one thing and filter out everything else — was primarily a function of the prefrontal cortex, the most recently evolved part of the primate brain.
June 23, 2026 Trauma Therapy Works for People With Psychosis. It Took 50 Years to Test. People with psychosis were, for decades, systematically excluded from PTSD clinical trials.
June 20, 2026 Gut transplants from young mice give old brains back their plasticity Researchers in Italy gave old mice the gut microbiomes of young mice, via fecal transplant, and then tested whether those older mice could be treated for lazy eye.
June 20, 2026 A molecule reprograms the brain's own immune cells to fight Alzheimer's Researchers in Spain and Switzerland identified a molecule called OLE, derived from a gene called PM20D1, that can restore the brain's microglia to their protective function in Alzheimer's disease models.
June 20, 2026 Exosomes healed a young woman's third-degree burns without skin grafts Kaitlin Jeffrey's hair and skin caught fire at a party in Toronto.
June 19, 2026 The brain learns in two steps, and you can get the benefits of sleep without sleeping Two studies published this week revealed something about learning that had not been visible before.
June 19, 2026 Gene therapy's landmark week: old cells made young, and a Huntington's cure moves closer Two gene therapy milestones arrived in the same week.
June 18, 2026 The Protein Most Blamed for Alzheimer's Turns Out to Protect Neurons The protein at the center of Alzheimer's disease turns out to have a second job: it is a cellular janitor.
June 18, 2026 Individual Neurons Encode Language, Opening a Path to Speech Restoration By recording from microelectrode arrays implanted in the brains of eight epilepsy patients at Massachusetts General Hospital, an NIH-funded team mapped how individual neurons encode language during real conversation.
June 17, 2026 What Loneliness Actually Does to Your Brain A team of 24 scientists led by UC Davis tracked 175,000 older adults across 18 countries, mapping how they moved through stages of cognitive health over their lifespans.
June 17, 2026 Psilocybin Finds Its Clinical Moment Three separate psilocybin threads converged this week, each from a different angle.
June 17, 2026 GLP-1 Drugs Are Changing the Mind, Not Just the Body Starting next month, GLP-1 weight loss medications, including Ozempic and Wegovy, become available to adults 65 and older through Medicare for the first time.
June 16, 2026 How Your Muscles Talk to Your Brain to Fight Depression When mice exercise, their muscles release a protein called apelin into the bloodstream.
June 16, 2026 Two Brain Implants Doing Things Once Thought Impossible Casey Harrell has ALS and is fully paralyzed.
June 16, 2026 COVID Vaccines Still Protect the Heart A team at Washington University in St.
June 16, 2026 Dementia Is More Preventable Than We Think In a 27-site U.S.
June 16, 2026 Science and Food Both Start Moving Away From Animals The NIH announced a new office, ORIVA, to coordinate the development and adoption of 3D human tissue models, computational tools, and other animal-free research methods across its 27 institutes.
June 15, 2026 The first complete wiring diagram of any nervous system A large international team led by Harvard Medical School and Princeton University published the first complete connectome of a fruit fly's brain and its equivalent of a spinal cord, every neuron, every synapse, charted.
June 15, 2026 Scientists trigger the brain's restorative sleep effect while the animal is still awake An NIH-funded study found that researchers could trigger the restorative cellular processes normally reserved for sleep in specific regions of an awake brain.
June 14, 2026 GLP-1 Weight Loss Drugs Are Changing Bodies in Ways Nobody Fully Predicted GLP-1 receptor agonists — semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy), tirzepatide, and others — have reshaped obesity medicine faster than almost any drug class in recent history.
June 14, 2026 Cancers That Defeated Every Drug for Forty Years Are Starting to Give Way In 1982, several research teams independently discovered that a single mutated DNA letter could turn a gene called RAS into a cancer driver.
June 11, 2026 The biology of aging is moving faster than we expected Three separate threads landed this week, each pulling at a different piece of aging biology.
June 11, 2026 The world a child is born into shapes the brain she carries for life A Washington University team analyzed brain scans from 11,878 children, age 9 and 10, weighing 649 features of their lives to see which left the deepest mark.
June 11, 2026 What is actually driving the teen mental health crisis Two neuroscience findings and two psychology pieces converged this week on the same ground: young people's mental health is measurably slipping, and the mechanisms are more specific, and more hopeful, than the general alarm lets on.
June 6, 2026 The Brain Can Learn to Actually Multitask, Through Neurological Migration Georgetown University researchers tracked participants through more than 30,000 image-sorting trials over five to ten weeks and watched what happened to their brains before and after they became experts at the task.
June 6, 2026 Sleep Protects the Physical Structure of the Brain, and That Structure Can Be Shaped A University of Arizona team analyzed brain MRI scans from more than 23,000 adults who had answered sleep questionnaires up to nine years earlier, and found that three specific sleep habits predicted significantly more white matter lesions: sleeping fewer than seven hours per night, frequent daytime napping, and persistent difficulty falling or staying asleep.