Hi there, it's Matt here and welcome back to the second of this two-pot series, which focuses on sleep, free radicals, and antioxidants.

As you may remember, in the last episode,

we learned about what free radicals are

and what oxidative stresses.

And we also learned about an exciting series of new studies

that have causally demonstrated that one function of sleep

is to mop up those dangerous free radicals.

And those findings suggested that perhaps the original elemental reason that sleep evolved in the first place

was to deal with the harmful free radical burden

that we know all different organisms face universally.

Now separate from that work we've also known for many decades that total

sleep deprivation in numerous different species results in death.

But we could never understand precisely why. It's so interesting, it's been such an

unsolved mystery in sleep signs. You'd think it would be obvious to the point of death

There would be something so materially clear in the autopsy that would say, oh my goodness, this is the reason why a

lack of sleep is so deathly. Now it wasn't as though there weren't lots of

clues at that homicide crime scene as it were, but we could never

find the true smoking gun.

And what I mean by that is scientists would look at the big picture system such as the immune

system or the metabolic system or the central nervous system including the brain

and never could we find a true determinant cause of why those animals had died.

But now we were starting to realize that we'd miss something. Perhaps we were looking at too much of the

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