This is scientific Americans 60 second science.

I'm Karen Hopkins.

Every new parent knows, or learns pretty quickly,

that rocking can calm a fussy baby when it's time to take a nap.

But the benefits of gentle motion may extend past the swaddling stage.

Because two new studies show that rocking also helps grown-ups, both human and mouse, get a good night

sleep. The two research efforts are in the journal Current Biology. It should be no surprise that

movement can be soothing. Think of how many times you've fallen asleep on a train.

But can motion really induce a doze and make for a deeper sleep? To find out

researchers invited 18 healthy volunteers for a sleepover.

So they came to the lab and they slept one time on a stationary position, normal bed,

and one night where they get rock.

A Ror Perot, a sleep researcher at the University of Geneva in Switzerland.

And what we find is actually compared to a stationary night,

a whole night of rocking sleep has a beneficial impact, not only on

sleep is in initiation, which means they fall asleep faster, but also on sleep

maintenance as we saw that they have less micro awakening during the night.

Subjects who rocked also did better on a memory test the next morning than did the stiller sleepers.

In the second study,

Constantinos Campotus, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Lausanne,

rocked a rack of rodents.

Whether rocking effects sleeping species other than human was never before discussed.

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