Archive | Clocks in the Spotlight

I often find it insufferable to encounter a chipper cheery morning person. If you’re anything like me, and the slight majority of the population, then the morning may not be your favourite time of day. The ring of the alarm clock that has invaded sleep in the...

Light enables sight. The retina in the back of our eyes contains a fine layer of light-sensitive photoreceptors. There are two types of photoreceptors. The cones allow us to see the color, movement, and fine details of the world around us. The rods, on the other hand,...

Feedback is everywhere. One can hardly escape a request for feedback nowadays -- “Would you like to rate this app, our service, your teacher or the restroom you just used?”. In fact, a similar kind of feedback mechanism also makes our inner biological clocks tick....

Scientists not only spend time in their laboratories; sometimes they climb the famous TED(x) stage to tell the world about their discoveries. Fortunately, researchers in the field of biological rhythms are no exception! Watching them talk about the latest research in...

  Humans evolved in an environment with only very bright (sun) or very dim (moon or fire) sources of light. Today, artificial lighting enables us to spend hours per day at intermediate light levels. Our recent study shows that the response of the circadian system...

Have you ever ditched a gym class or a workout session due to the lack of time and felt guilty about it? We all know that exercise is healthy as it lowers the risk for cardiometabolic as well as neurodegenerative diseases – yet it is hard to make time for it. Could we...

In 1729, Jean-Jacques d'Ortus de Mairan (1678-1771) laid the foundations of modern chronobiology. A French interdisciplinary researcher, he designed an experiment that demonstrated the existence of a circadian rhythm in plants, potentially deriving from an endogenous...

Rhythm is something you either have or don't have, but when you have it, you have it all over. Elvis Presley "The mathematics of rhythm are universal. They don't belong to any particular culture." John McLaughlin Try this experiment: listen to Ravel’s Boléro from the...

Works of literature describe in the guise of fiction the dense specificity of personal experience David Lodge, Consciousness and the novel Sleep, those little slices of death — how I loathe them. Edgar Allan Poe What hath night to do with sleep? John Milton, Paradise...

An artist must possess Nature. He must identify himself with her rhythm, by efforts that will prepare the mastery which will later enable him to express himself in his own language. Henri Matisse The rhythm of relations of color and size makes the absolute appear in...