Clearly the daily and yearly solar cycles influence life in many obvious ways. Life evolved in the presence of lunar cycles as well, so wouldn't surprise me that they have some (perhaps less obvious) level of influence.
This is interesting. I used to work in schools and the teachers swore the swelling of the full moon was a harbinger of bad behavior. It was a predominately female cohort. I wonder if it was the onset of menses sensitizing them to aggravations or if it was students misbehaving, or a combination of the two.<p>Anyways, astrology has been kicking around for a while. Of course I wouldn't say it's the whole truth, but I expect there's something to it. Radioactive hotspots being occluded. No doubt we have a biological equivalent of bit flips. Sprinkle in some butterfly effect, viola.<p>I do believe there were studies indicating disparate behaviors from winter-born people and their summer counterparts. Seasonality and the way that people interact with their environment in one vs another, the sensitivity to initial conditions, epigenetics...<p>There may be more to it than meets the eye, and our ancestors just came up with an overfit model that combines an elaborate multivariate system which has been perverted.
The insane leaps of theorericals this researcher is jumping too smells like desperation for funding.<p>My own speculative leap is that this is overly biased towards finding data to fit a result.
My girlfriend is a general practitioner and used to work as out-of-hours service doctor . She swore (and her collegues agreed) that full-moon nights and new-moon nights were the worst: much more cases, much more serious and with strange/deranged/dangerous people.<p>So we did a pseudo-statistic research, taking notes on number of patients and severity of the illness. On full-moon nights and new-moon nights there were:<p>- 40% more calls<p>- 20% more requests for urgent care<p>- 35% more requests from drunks, drugs addicts and mentally ill people<p>Also, the vast majority of situations in which occurred some form of verbal abuse, violence or sexual assault (always verbal thankfully, but other colleagues were not so lucky) happened on those nights or the day before or after.<p>This was a "research" lasted for a year, 3 nights per week. We asked to work on it for her PhD, but no other doctor was willing to take part in it, and my girlfriend was too horrified from her experience as a out-of-hours service doctor to keep going, so it kind of died here and there.
> was a similar reduction in sleep on those nights in many of the undergraduates in Seattle, a large city where artificial light drowns out moonlight and students often have no idea when the full moon even is.<p>Can someone who actually lives in Seattle weigh in on whether the article was right to so quickly dismiss moonlight as the explanation?<p>I live in a suburban neighborhood near a sports stadium where the lights are on either all night or at least as late as I ever stay up. Between street lights, the stadium, and bright LEDs from my neighbors, light pollution is high enough that I can't see most constellations, just a scattering of a few dozen stars at most on a good night.<p>And yet I can always tell when the full moon is out because it shines like a beacon around the edges of my blackout curtains in a way that none of the artificial light in the neighborhood does.<p>I've never lived in downtown Seattle (or any large downtown), but I'm having a hard time imagining light pollution so bad that a full moon would be completely imperceptible at even an unconscious level. It seems to me that even subtle changes in light levels are a much more likely explanation than humans having gravitational senses.