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Sleep. Parents crave it, but children and especially teenagers, need it. When educators and policymakers debate the relationship between sleep schedules and school performance and — given the constraints of buses, sports and everything else that seem so much more important — what they should do about it, they miss an intimate biological fact: Sleep is learning, of a very specific kind. Scientists now argue that a primary purpose of sleep is learning consolidation, separating the signal from the noise and flagging what is most valuable. School schedules change slowly, if at all, and the burden of helping teenagers get the sleep they need is squarely on parents. Can we help our children learn to exploit sleep as a learning tool (while getting enough of it)? Absolutely. There is research suggesting that different kinds of sleep can aid different kinds of learning, and by teaching “sleep study skills,” we can let our teenagers enjoy the sense that they’re gaming the system.

The mechanism by which a good night's sleep improves learning and memory has been discovered by scientists. The team in China and the US used advanced microscopy to witness new connections between brain cells - synapses - forming during sleep. Their study, published in the journal Science, showed even intense training could not make up for lost sleep. Experts said it was an elegant and significant study, which uncovered the mechanisms of memory. It is well known that sleep plays an important role in memory and learning. But what actually happens inside the brain has been a source of considerable debate.

In the nineteen-eighties, Allan Rechtschaffen and Bernard Bergmann, both, like Kleitman, sleep researchers at the University of Chicago, performed what is now considered to be one of the classic experiments in the field. It showed that rats, when totally deprived of sleep, would, after two or three weeks, drop dead. But Rechtschaffen and Bergmann could never figure out the precise cause of the rats’ deaths, and so, they wrote in a follow-up paper in 2002, even “that dramatic symptom did not tell us much about why sleep was necessary.” Rechtschaffen has observed that “if sleep doesn’t serve an absolutely vital function, it is the greatest mistake evolution ever made.”

For decades, scientists have embarked on the long journey toward a medical breakthrough by first experimenting on laboratory animals. Mice or rats, pigs or dogs, they were usually male: Researchers avoided using female animals for fear that their reproductive cycles and hormone fluctuations would confound the results of delicately calibrated experiments.That laboratory tradition has had enormous consequences for women. Name a new drug or treatment, and odds are researchers know far more about its effect on men than on women. From sleeping pills to statins, women have been blindsided by side effects and dosage miscalculations that were not discovered until after the product hit the market.

The drone operator who said 'No' 21 January 2015 Last updated at 00:57 GMT For almost five years, Brandon Bryant worked in America's secret drone programme bombing targets in Afghanistan and elsewhere.He was told that he helped to kill more than 1,600 people, but as time went by he felt uneasy with what he was doing. He found it hard to sleep and started dreaming in infra-red. Brandon Bryant told Witness about his doubts and the mission that convinced him it was time to stop. Witness is a World Service programme of the stories of our times told by the people who were there.