For decades, the armed forces around the globe have tried all sorts of ways to keep its soldiers and pilots awake. During World War II, American, German, Japanese, and British troops were all issued rations of amphetamines. In the early days of the Afghanistan war, these "go pills" were blamed for a particularly ugly "friendly fire" incident. A newer drug, modafinil, is now being pushed in the U.S. military as a safer alternative.
DARPA, the Pentagon's way-out research arm, is funding scientific studies into more exotic answers to combat the effects of sleeplessness. Columbia University psychologists, working under a DARPA grant, are keeping people awake for 48 hours straight -- and then zapping their brains with focused magnetic waves, to keep their cognitive capacities intact. The researchers recently published a study showing that the transcranial magnetic stimulation was able to "improve the working memory performance" of the sleep-deprived. Lexicon Genetics has found genetic targets in mice that seem to make sleep itself more restorative, enhancing learning and memory. And Wisconsin professor Giulio Tononi is breeding a strain of fruit flies that gets by on just a third the normal amount of sleep.
