Many students burn the midnight oil the night before a test to put extra effort for late-night studying with a few hours of sleep. A group of researchers at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore suggested in a recent study that napping before an exam is as good for your memory as cramming.

Recruiting more than 70 volunteers, the team asked volunteers to learn about an unfamiliar topic for 80 minutes. The group was later divided into three and asked to do whatever they want for the next hour - watch a movie, revise or take a nap. Then, they took another 80-minute lesson on the same topic on which they were tested. As a result, nappers achieved higher scores compared to the others. "The napping group got the best scores," said lead researcher James Cousins of the Duke-NUS Medical School to New Scientist. After a week, the team called the volunteers for another test and again the nappers scored better. "It could indicate that cramming information might be good in the short term, but in the long run, the benefits might not be that great," he remarked. The findings were presented at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting last week.

Getting a good night's sleep is crucial as lack of sleep can contribute toward many health problems. In a study by the Harvard Medical School Nurses Study involving 78,000 nurses, it was found that those nurses who worked night shift for 30 years or more had a 36 percent increased risk of breast cancer than their colleagues who work the day shift. The risks for heart disease and type 2 diabetes are also high among people getting insufficient sleep.