It’s just about cicada time here on the East Coast, when millions (billions?) of these strange, noisy creatures will make their way up through the dirt, looking for love. They’ve been waiting down there in wingless nymph form, feeding on the dilute sap of plant roots while they undergo the longest juvenile developmental period of any insect. When the ground reaches 64 degrees and they emerge, outnumbering humans hundreds-to-one and nearly deafening us for our troubles, well, it’s gonna get a bit freaky. Not for nothing did the colonists at Plymouth in 1634 dub them locusts, despite little resemblance to the Biblical grasshoppers.
As entomologist May Berenbaum assures, though, there’s nothing to worry about. “It’s not like these hordes of cicadas suck blood or zombify people,” she says. It’s just such mistaken attribution of outlandish abilities that inspired Berenbaum’s “modern bestiary,” The Earwig’s Tail. She’d come to realize, she writes in the book’s Preface, that “the majority of the most bandied-about insect facts familiar to the general public aren’t facts at all.” In The Earwig’s Tail she takes on twenty-six of “the most firmly entrenched modern mythical insects,” and, in many cases, leaves us with an even more fantastic truth.
When she gets to cicadas, Berenbaum turns to politics and Washington D.C., where the emergence of “Brood X” (the various populations of cicadas run on different schedules and are given roman numeral names) coincides with a presidential election every sixty-eight years, most recently in 2004.
Here’s Berenbaum:
First to take metaphorical advantage of the infestation was the Republican National Committee. On May 14, 2004, at the height of the emergence, 700,000 registered Republicans received an email attachment from the Republican National Committee. A narrator intoned, “Every 17 years, cicadas emerge, morph out of their shell, and change their appearance. The shells they leave behind are the only evidence they were here. Like a cicada,
Senator Kerry would like to shed his Senate career and morph into a fiscal conservative, a centrist Democrat opposed to taxes, strong on defense . . . But, he leaves his record behind . . . when the cicadas emerge, they make a lot of noise. But they always revert to form, before disappearing again.” The voiceover accompanies a time-lapse film of a cicada eclosing and expanding its wings and ends with an animated cicada morphing into John Kerry.
The Kerry campaign’s retort? “Maybe, if given another 17 years, President Bush could create a job in Ohio.” Cicada burn.
Cicadas also had a cameo in presidential politics in 1902, Berenbaum reports, when President Theodore Roosevelt “was practically drowned out while trying to give a Memorial Day speech defending national policy to impose ‘orderly freedom’ in the Philippines.” The experience of inundation seems not to have adversely affected his feelings on colonialism.
We’ll wait to see what metaphors are made of this coming return.
In the following excerpt from Concealing Coloration in Animals, new this month, Judy Diamond and Alan B. Bond describe the amazingly adaptive camouflage of the cuttlefish.
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Concealment is often at least as much an effect of pattern as of color. Animal coloration usually appears as distinctive markings like the narrow stripes on grassland birds and insects, the spots on jungle cats, the leaf-sized patches of muted color on animals of the forest floor, or the fine mottled speckles on sandpipers and bottom-dwelling fishes. Such patterns echo the texture of the environment, matching the animal’s surroundings in the size and shape of color patches, as well as in the particular hues and intensities of coloration. To envision how pattern contributes to concealment, think of a digital image of an animal against its background. The image is composed of pixels of specified colors, and adjacent pixels that are similar in color will appear to the eye as patches of varying size. How well the animal blends into its surroundings is a function of the match between the color of the patches in the background and those on the animal, but blending in is also affected by the relative sizes of the patches, regardless of their color. Animals process these two kinds of visual information, color and patch size, in separate parts of their nervous system, and the information is subsequently integrated to assess the degree of resemblance to the background.
How animals integrate the information about color and patch size is most impressively illustrated by cuttlefish. Cuttlefish, which are free-swimming relatives of octopus and squid, are masters at generating patterns to match their environment. They have large, complex, sensitive eyes and a sophisticated control system that allows them to rapidly modify the patterns they display. When they detect changes in their surroundings, they can change the arrangement of light and dark patches on their body accordingly. At the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole in Massachusetts, Roger Hanlon studied how cuttlefish create their remarkable patterns. In one experiment, Hanlon and his colleagues placed cuttlefish in transparent aquaria on top of complex backgrounds, such as checkerboards, stripes, or spots. They photographed the cuttlefish to determine how well they matched the background patterns, and they timed how rapidly the animals could change from one pattern to another.
The change was immediate. Hanlon and his team found that cuttlefish use three major body pattern types for camouflage: uniform patterns on backgrounds with little or no contrast; mottled patterns on substrates with small, highly contrasting patches like small checkerboards; and disruptive patterns that break up their outline on substrates with high contrast and long, defined edges, like large checkerboards. In the lab, cuttlefish will camouflage on any substrate, natural or artificial, regardless of whether or not there is a predator in the tank.
Environmental Humanities, an open-access journal launched in November 2012, aims to “invigorate current interdisciplinary research on the environment” by bringing together scholarship in the humanities and the natural and social sciences.
Last fall, in preparation for the launch, the journal’s Editorial Board was invited to respond to the following “short provocation”:
We now often hear a lot about post-environmentalism and post-humanism as two parts of a broader critique of notions of “the environment,” “the human,” and indeed the humanities themselves. In this context, is there something a bit perverse about embracing the environmental humanities? What value is there in this trans-paradigm scholarship? What are the perils?
HUP author Timothy Morton (The Ecological Thought and Ecology Without Nature) and his Rice University colleague Cary Wolfe produced the following video response. Morton’s is the British voice, Wolfe’s is the other, and Allan Whiskersworth is The Cat.
In Legally Poisoned: How the Law Puts Us at Risk from Toxicants, Carl F. Cranor documents the health threats posed by toxic hazards in commercial products such as cosmetics and cookware. Cranor argues that these chemical compounds should be subject to pre-market testing, as is the case with pharmaceuticals and pesticides, rather than presumed safe until harm is done. Below, Cranor presents the case for legal reform and outlines some of the additional channels of toxic contamination that have been documented since the initial publication of Legally Poisoned, which is new in paperback this month.
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Recent scientific findings on the developmental origins of disease pose major problems for laws that currently seek to protect the public from toxic substances. Existing laws permit our children and us to be legally contaminated with untested substances that may be toxic. We are “legally poisoned.”
Since the hardcover publication of Legally Poisoned in 2011, a number of studies have reinforced its concerns. New York University researchers found that the chemical bisphenol-A (BPA)—previously known to cause hormone abnormalities, asthma, behavioral problems and obesity—is linked to heart disease in children. BPA is used to line food and beverage cans to prevent corrosion and because of its pervasiveness contaminates our food supply. More than ninety percent of the public is contaminated by BPA.
Brazilian scientists found that infants whose mothers were exposed to the commonly used pesticide permethrin during pregnancy were up to seven times more likely to have leukemia. Even children whose mothers were exposed three months before conception were twice as likely to develop infant leukemia as those whose mothers reported no exposure.
Scientists at UC Berkeley have found that children’s exposures to brominated flame-retardants (PBDEs) in the womb or early childhood can lead to cognitive declines: poorer attention and motor skills and lower IQ scores. Other researchers have found that brominated flame-retardants reduce the male hormone testosterone in men. Children have higher concentrations of these substances than adults, but virtually all citizens are contaminated. Brominated flame-retardants are in carpets, upholstery, curtains, plastics, furniture and house dust, but once released into the environment return to contaminate various foods.
These studies and others on the developmental origins of disease are revealing how diseases and dysfunctions can be predisposed or triggered by toxicants, diet, or even infections in utero or in early life. Children are especially susceptible to diseases and dysfunctions during development and much more sensitive to toxic exposures than adults at the same concentrations. Major catastrophes resulting from in utero exposures to Thalidomide, methylmercury, and diethylstilbestrol (DES) in the 1960s and 1970s shattered the view of the womb as a protective shelter in which children could develop safely before they began facing some of the risks and hazards of the external world into which they would soon be born. Subsequently, researchers have found that early life exposure to PCBs, lead, radiation, DDT, phthalates, brominated flame retardants, synthetic estrogens, some pesticides, some pharmaceuticals and other substances can cause less dramatic diseases or dysfunctions, many affecting a person for a lifetime.
Tudor Parfitt, once described as “a sort of British Indiana Jones,” writes in Black Jews in Africa and the Americas that he first encountered black Jews “in any form” in late 1984, when he’d traveled to the Sudanese border with Ethiopia. He’d been sent to the border’s refugee camps to investigate reports that the Ethiopian Jews (Beta Israel) there were being mistreated by the Christian Ethiopians, all of whom were fleeing the year’s famine. Though their status as Jews was being contested, Parfitt was present for what he describes as “the first stages of the Israeli attempt to save thousands of these impoverished and desperate people from famine and persecution.”
Not long after, while speaking in South Africa about the Ethiopian Jews, Parfitt met another group of black Jews, this time from the Lemba tribe. The Lembas explained to Parfitt that they were blood relatives of the Ethiopian Jews, and that the Israeli acceptance of the Ethiopians should also legitimize their own Judaism, hitherto difficult to claim. Despite being intrigued by the notion that the people he’d met in the Sudan were now acting as a “proof community” for others, Parfitt found the idea of any connection between the Beta Israel and the Lemba of Soweto doubtful.
Out of curiosity he spent time with the Lemba, and while he came to consider it quite possible that their customs and traditions had something to do with the Semitic world he was unable to uncover any record of Jews having settled in southeastern or central Africa as far back as the Lemba’s oral tradition extended. Another year or two passed before, while researching a history of the Jews of the Yemen, Parfitt uncovered some evidence that could actually corroborate the Lemba’s story of their own heritage. “And it was at this point and rather out of frustration,” he writes in Black Jews in Africa and the Americas, “that I turned to genetics.”
In 1999 the findings of the Lemba’s genetic tests were front page news around the world, the subject of television documentaries such as NOVA’s The Lost Tribes of Israel, and even featured in a segment on 60 Minutes. As reported by the New York Times:
Several groups around the world practice Judaic rites or claim to be descended from biblical tribes without having any ancestral Jewish connection… But the remarkable thing about the Lemba tradition is that it may be exactly right. A team of geneticists has found that many Lemba men carry in their male chromosome a set of DNA sequences that is distinctive of the cohanim, the Jewish priests believed to be the descendants of Aaron. The genetic signature of priests—a hereditary caste, different from rabbis but with certain ritual roles—is particularly common among Lemba men who belong to the senior of their 12 groups, known as the Buba clan.
The discovery of the Lemba's Jewish ancestry has come about through the intertwining of two unusual strands of inquiry. One was developed by geneticists in the United States, Israel and England who wondered what truth there might be to the Jewish tradition that priests are the descendants of Aaron, the elder brother of Moses.
The other strand was provided by Dr. Tudor Parfitt, director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Dr. Parfitt, who has done research among the Lemba for 10 years, says that he has discovered Senna—Lemba tradition maintains they came from that mysterious northern city—and that he can retrace their steps from Senna to Africa, maybe a thousand years ago.
Since that burst of coverage over a dozen years ago interest in the Lemba has been steady, and, coupled with the worldwide interest in the exodus of the Ethiopian Jews, there was evidence of an enduring fascination with the very idea of black Jews. For Parfitt, the intensity and duration of that fascination sparked a new series of questions:
Why did these stories generate such media interest? Was it because the stories were about Jews? Or because they were about blacks? Or both? Was it because, at some deep level in Western consciousness, Jews are actually assumed to be black and that therefore these stories about black Jews could be taken as a final vindication of an age-old presumption? Or was it that people believe that Jews are not black at all and cannot be black and therefore that the idea of black Jews appeared more than usually quixotic—and therefore good copy? Whatever the reason, this topic achieved worldwide coverage, and articles on the Lemba and Beta Israel have appeared in the world’s major newspapers with some regularity. The topic touched a nerve in a way that none of the work with which I had hitherto been engaged had done. Somewhere at the nexus of these issues of history, prejudice, and convention there seemed to me to nestle aspects of Jewish and black history that had not been fully studied before.
Black Jews in Africa and the Americas, our most thorough tracing of the ties that bind blacks and Jews in history and myth, is the result of Parfitt’s work to understand those histories.
Craig Stanford is Professor of Biological Sciences and Anthropology and Director of the Jane Goodall Research Center at the University of Southern California. In Planet Without Apes, which we’ll publish next month, he details the very real threat of extinction facing the great apes, and urges us to consider the consequences of failing to reverse this course. In the post below, Stanford explains the complex role that ecotourism can play in protecting the great apes.
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Recently, the latest of a decades-long series of incursions by rebel militias into the Virunga Volcanoes of eastern Africa–the last stronghold of the mountain gorilla–led to a bizarre scenario. The rebels invaded a large forest tract in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, driving out the park rangers and conservationists who toil to protect the gorillas and run a thriving ecotourism program. This sort of chaos has happened many times before. But this time the rebels proceeded to set up their own version of ecotourism, and began offering gorilla treks to unsuspecting (or uncaring) foreign tourists. They offered a discounted rate over the actual ecotourism program, charging $350 to hike out to a gorilla group and spend a thrilling hour sitting with the giant apes. The guerillas were now exploiting the gorillas.
Such bizarre ironies are not new to the mountain gorilla conservation effort, which has been beset with challenges over the past forty years that are often stranger than fiction. The gorillas’ range straddles the border of Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The border is poorly marked but well-known to local people and park rangers, who know exactly where one can walk safely without fear of being attacked, blown up by a land mine, or murdered by rebels who live in relative safety on the other side. The gorillas, of course, know no such borders, and they cross and recross at will. Their wanderings through mountain meadows in search of the foliage and bamboo that make up their diet take them out of protected areas and into no-man’s land. This is an enormous challenge for ecotourism, as guides must navigate not only the apes’ world of steep mountain slopes and rainy weather to take their tour group to the animals; they must also navigate the human milieu of rebels and bandits who enter the forest in search of affluent and vulnerable western tourists.
Mountain gorillas were made famous by the late Dian Fossey, who pioneered the study of this largest of the world’s primates. Her zeal in protecting her study site at Karisoke, which sits on the Rwandan side of the border, eventually led her down a path of counter-productive tactics that included threatening the local populace who were threatening her gorillas. After her death in 1985 (at the hands of either an angry poacher or an ex-employee, depending on one’s theory of the murder), her former graduate students approached the government of Rwanda about a new strategy for protecting the gorillas that would rely more on carrots than sticks. A plan was developed to initiate visits to the gorilla groups by tourists, who would pay a hefty fee for such an intimate wildlife encounter. Most of the fee would go to the government, but a small portion of each tourist permit fee would build clinics and schools, improving the quality of life for villagers who otherwise relied on small-scale farming, and who illegally cut firewood and poached wildlife from the forest. The forest and its inhabitants were suddenly worth more alive than dead. Gorilla ecotourism was born.
The mountain gorilla, Earth's largest primate. (photo by Craig Stanford)
Today, tourists can trek to gorilla groups in all three countries that straddle the border. The favored site varies from decade to decade depending on instability in the region, since infrastructure disappears and the place can become downright dangerous during times of political turmoil. During the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, only one gorilla was killed even as nearly a million people were brutally murdered. But parts of the forest at Karisoke were left scattered with land mines, and ecotourism understandably fell to a trickle for several years. Meanwhile, Uganda became a major player in the gorilla tourism business, with more and more of the gorilla groups in nearby Bwindi Impenetrable National Park habituated to tourists. Ecotourism was developing rapidly in Bwindi when, in early 1999, a rebel attack on the tourism camp at Buhoma was carried out by Rwandan rebels who launched their incursion from neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo. Western tourists were kidnapped and marched back toward the Congo border. Some were released; others were murdered. Ecotourism in Bwindi ended abruptly, only to resume when the Ugandan military established a major presence in the camp.
Gorilla ecotourism is and will always be fragile. Years of careful planning can be ruined by a single criminal act, or by the outbreak of another civil war. For local people, the disruption of tourism means a halt in essential income. But despite all the setbacks and challenges, it has been the savior for at least this one very endangered cousin of our species.
Satyendra Nath Bose and Enrico Fermi possess the distinction of having classes of particles named after them [see Question 49: “How did bosons and fermions get their names?”]. But only Peter Higgs, an emeritus professor of physics at Edinburgh University, shares his name with an individual fundamental particle*— a particle that, as of this writing, has yet to be observed. In the early 1960s, particle theorists were united in predicting that if their theories were correct, there should exist in nature a boson of zero charge, zero spin, and zero mass. No such particle was known. If it existed and interacted with other matter as it was expected to do, it could hardly have escaped detection. In 1964 Higgs saw a way out of the conundrum of the expected but unobserved fundamental particle. He discovered within the mathematics of relativistic particle theory (field theory) a loophole, so to speak. This loophole, which has come to be called the Higgs mechanism, permits, or even demands, that this particle have nonzero mass—possibly even a quite large mass (by particle standards). Thus was born the Higgs particle, or, as it is affectionately called, just the Higgs. Like the originally envisioned particle, the Higgs is a boson with no charge and no spin, but its mass could be as much as hundreds of GeV.
Soon new duties were assigned to the Higgs. By the early 1970s, theorists had concluded that the field underlying the Higgs particle might account not only for the mass of the Higgs particle itself, but for the masses of many particles. The Higgs field, filling all of space, is expected to provide a kind of viscosity that impedes particles and gives them mass. This is obviously a highly oversimplified statement, since for all the fundamental particles that do have mass, no two have the same mass, and certainly there is no theory that predicts what their masses should be. Yet at least one oddity in particular might find its explanation in the Higgs. That is the enormous disparity in the masses of the force carriers for the electromagnetic and weak interactions. As discussed at Question 16 [“How far can one particle ‘reach out’ to influence another one?”], theory has united these two interactions of very different strength into a single electroweak interaction, but with one force carrier, the photon, having no mass, and two force carriers, the W and Z particles, having enormous mass. Theorists hold out the hope that the Higgs field may provide not only the “viscosity” that gives the W and Z particles their masses, but also the “cement” that unites these particles and the massless photon.
Scientists have been searching for the Higgs particle for years and are beginning to feel optimistic about finding it with the aid of the Large Hadron Collider, or perhaps even with Fermilab’s Tevatron. Few doubt its existence. It is called the only missing brick in the edifice known as the standard model [see Question 14: “What is the standard model?]. It would be the only fundamental particle with no spin. Almost the only thing we don’t know about it is its mass. The best estimates put its mass at around twice the mass of the W and Z particles, or some 100 to 150 times the mass of a proton. This puts it tantalizingly within range of the Large Hadron Collider.
* Higgs has written and spoken good-humoredly of his “life as a boson.” I don’t know how he feels about having his namesake particle referred to as the “God particle.” This label comes from a book of that name by Leon Lederman (The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? with Dick Teresi [New York: Dell, 1993]). It is rumored that Lederman, himself a distinguished particle physicist, wanted to call the Higgs particle the “goddamned particle” because it had eluded all attempts to find it, but that his publisher, concerned about public taste, changed it to “God particle.”
Upon learning of the death of Lonesome George, the last Pinta Island tortoise, we invited comment from Craig Stanford, Professor of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at USC and author of The Last Tortoise. His post is below.
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If Lonesome George had been human, his obituary would have read:
George passed away peacefully on June 24, 2012, at the age of approximately 100. He was born on Pinta Island around 1912 and lived there until 1971, when he moved to the Charles Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz Island, Ecuador. He served his country for decades as the greatest tourist attraction in the Galapagos Islands, and was visited by tens of thousands of tourists each year. He dies leaving no surviving descendants.
That last sentence is the one that matters. Jorge Solitario, or Lonesome George, was the last surviving member of his race, the subspecies of giant Galapagos tortoise known as Chelonoidis nigra abingdoni, the Pinta Island tortoise. The main islands of the Galapagos archipelago each have or had their own distinctive giant tortoise, molded by natural selection to be adapted to the terrain and the foods of its island. George’s subspecies inhabited a small northerly island that is fairly barren, rocky, and forbidding, but which once had a large tortoise population. The whaling ships of the 18th century made short work of the islands, collecting hundreds of thousands of the animals to be stored alive in the cargo hold and butchered as needed for fresh meat during their long voyages. We estimate the pre-whaling tortoise population of the entire Galapagos chain to have been 250,000-300,000 tortoises. Perhaps 15,000 live on the islands today; at least three islands have now lost their tortoises altogether.
In 1971, seventy years after the last tortoise on Pinta was thought to have died, a biologist visiting the island spotted Lonesome George ambling across the dry landscape. Not realizing the significance of the sighting, a year passed before another biologist learned that the Pinta race was not quite extinct. Expeditions were mounted to Pinta to search for George. A large tortoise on a small island might not seem a difficult target, but only through much luck was George found. He was transported to the Darwin Station by boat, and remained there for more than forty years. All subsequent attempts to find more Pinta Island tortoises failed. For years he shared his pen with two females from the slopes of Wolf Volcano in the northernmost part of Isabela Island. But George showed no interest in having sex with them. Later, he was paired with females of other, similar subspecies from the islands, and in recent years three clutches of eggs were produced that he had fathered. But none of the clutches hatched. George was likely infertile, either through age, or just very bad luck.
The story of the Pinta Island tortoise does not quite end there. Recent genotyping of tortoises from around the Galapagos has turned up at least one tortoise, from Wolf Volcano on Isabela Island, that is fifty percent Pinta. It is likely the progeny of a Wolf tortoise and a Pinta tortoise that ended up on Isabela. Perhaps ocean currents carried it there, or more likely, he or his mother was dropped overboard by an inept crew of whalers. Only a tiny fraction of the tortoises of the islands have been genotyped, and there lies some faint hope that another male and female of the Pinta Island tortoises live still.
It is always sad and disturbing when humans drive a species into extinction. But extinction is rarely so clear-cut as with the tortoises of Pinta. One last surviving member lived on and on, reminding us of our past sins to his race and beckoning us to try one more time to save them. In the case of Lonesome George, it was too little, too late.
Rebecca Jordan-Young’s Brain Storm is the first comprehensive critical analysis of studies that purport to show a link between testosterone exposure in the womb and the so-called “sexual brain” (meaning everything from the idea that there is a male versus female brain, to the idea that sexual orientation is caused by early hormone exposures). As Jordan-Young puts it on her website, to say she found this theory to be unsupported by evidence is “a bit of an understatement.”
Jordan-Young’s most recent work takes aim at the methods of “gender verification” employed in the governance of elite female athletic competition. Various athletic associations have been scrambling to set guidelines (both legal and scientific) for determining exactly who should be qualified to compete as a woman. The International Olympic Committee, arguably the sporting world’s most influential rule-setter, has a new policy that is expected to ban women with naturally high testosterone levels, on the grounds that elevated levels of the hormone give them an unfair advantage.
(W)hen it comes to sex, sports authorities should acknowledge that while science can offer evidence, it cannot dictate what evidence we should use. Scientifically, there is no clear or objective way to draw a bright line between male and female.
Testosterone is one of the most slippery markers that sports authorities have come up with yet. Yes, average testosterone levels are markedly different for men and women. But levels vary widely depending on time of day, time of life, social status and—crucially—one’s history of athletic training. Moreover, cellular responses range so widely that testosterone level alone is meaningless.
Jordan-Young and Karkazis argue that if what we’re actually seeking is clarity then “it’s time to stop pawning this fundamentally social question off onto scientists.” And they go on to note that sex testing of female athletes will always be discriminatory, in that men will most likely never be subjected to similar verification. With competitive fairness underwriting these regulations, there’s little concern that a scientifically unqualified male (whatever that means) would have an advantage over scientifically verifiable ones (again, whatever that means).
And so these policies are ostensibly rooted in the notion that female athletes must be “protected” from competition against men. “Protection has been the cloak that covers all manner of sex discrimination,” write Jordan-Young and Karkazis, “and it is seldom, if ever, the best way to advance equality.”
In perhaps the most damning point against policies based on testosterone levels, Jordan-Young and Karkazis explain that there’s no valid reason to equate higher testosterone with enhanced performance. Not only is testosterone not “the master molecule of athleticism,” but the performances of women who have been found in violation of policies such as that being considered by the IOC have not been out of line with those of other elite female athletes.
Tired? Probably. You can’t help but be yawny, especially during the workweek. That’s because the dictates of modern society rarely allow you to live in synchronicity with your individual body clock, which is just one of three that we’re constantly trying to balance. The others are the sun clock (daylight and darkness send us signals) and the social clock (that thing hanging on the wall or on your wrist).
For most of us, the social clock is boss. But when it requires us to live out of sync with our body clocks, we suffer from what chronobiologist Till Roenneberg calls “social jet lag.” Social jet lag can be just as powerful as the more familiar jet lag caused by traversing time zones, and because it’s a function of our daily lives it can be a chronic condition. And, as Roenneberg explains in the excellent video posted below, social jet lag has consequences:
Most people with social jet lag are more likely to be smokers. They are more likely to drink alcohol. And people with social jet lag drink a lot of caffeine during the day. And now we’ve discovered another consequence of living against the body clock, and that is if you are already a little chubby and not very thin, it is very likely that living against the body clock makes you even become obese. In view of all these consequences, it is really high time we do something against social jet lag.
Roenneberg and his colleagues have built an online body clock calculator to aid them in their research and to help you understand your own internal time, so head over to the Munich Chronotype Questionnaire to receive an evaluation of your chronotype. And then check out Roennenberg’s Internal Time for 24 short case stories meant to help you understand why you’re so tired.
The Harvard University Press Blog brings you books, ideas, and news from Harvard University Press. Founded in 1913, Harvard University Press has published such iconic works as Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s The Woman That Never Evolved.
