Modern life and inadequate exposure to natural light during the day combined with overexposure to artificial light at night is believed by some to be harmful to the body's natural sleep/wake cycle.

One of those who contends so is University of Connecticut cancer epidemiologist Richard Stevens. "It's become clear that typical lighting is affecting our physiology. But lighting can be improved. We're learning that better lighting can reduce these physiological effects. By that we mean dimmer and longer wavelengths in the evening, and avoiding the bright blue of e-readers, tablets and smart phones."

Whither The Celts?

In the 1980s there was a terrific British documentary called simply "The Celts", made because of ongoing fascination by entitled western elites with indigenous people and perhaps the lingering hope/fear that maybe they were somehow better than the winners.

The Celts were a blanket name for a lot of people who were just The Other to Romans, any number of tribes that the Romans ascribed names to based on region.  They were basically a kind of "dark matter" for ancient authors, who didn't know what they were or how to figure them out, but knew they have to have existed because Caesar fought someone in France and Germany and he took really good notes.

In 1996, the Nobel Prize for Chemistry went to the discoverers of Buckminsterfullerene; soccer-ball-shaped spheres of 60 joined carbon atoms that exhibit special physical properties colloquially called Buckyballs.

It was only a time before someone found a way to weaponize those, but in this case for the public good: Buckybombs. But these nanoscale explosives will target and eliminate cancer at the cellular level, triggering tiny explosions that kill cancer cells without affecting surrounding tissue.

Men and women who change their diet to meet current dietary guidelines could reduce their risk of a heart attack or a stroke by up to a third, according to a new study.

Scholars at King's College London recruited healthy middle-aged and older men and women to compare the effects on risk factors for cardiovascular disease (CVD) of following a diet based on UK health guidelines compared with a traditional British diet. The predicted risk of CVD over the next 10 years for the participants was estimated to be about 8% in the men and 4% in the women.

A few years ago, bees suddenly had a sharp decline in numbers. This "Colony Collapse Disorder" as it is called, is a disorder in the sense that it is a recurring phenomenon, detailed for the last 1,000 years even when record-keeping just consisted of sporadic anecdotes. It was noted more frequently as record-keeping became more thorough. so it appeared far more often by the 1800s. By the 1900s, record-keeping had improved enough that there were seven recorded instances of this CCD phenomenon just in the United States.

Cichlid fish in Lake Malawi know how to court and their courtship evolves - fast. 

In the shallows where the light is good, males build sand castles to attract females, while deep-dwelling species dig less elaborate pits and compensate with longer swimming displays, according to a new study. 

A new map of the Moon's strangest volcano show that its explosive eruption spread debris over an area in the Compton-Belkovich Volcanic Complex much greater than previously thought.

By mapping the radioactive element thorium which spewed out during the eruption, they discovered that, with the help of the Moon's low gravity, debris from the unnamed volcano was able to cover an area the size of Scotland, or around 70,000 km2. The eruption, which happened 3.5 billion years ago, threw rock five times further than the pyroclastic flow of molten rock and hot gases that buried the Roman city of Pompeii, the researchers added.

A tiny parasite named Pleistophora mulleri not only significantly increases cannibalism among the indigenous shrimp Gammarus duebeni celticus but made infected shrimp more voracious, taking much less time to consume their victims. 

Cannibalism is fairly common in nature but the belief was always that it is practical - meat is meat. Consumption of juveniles by adults is a normal feature of the shrimp's feeding patterns, but this is the first paper to show parasites cause it and even alter the feeding patterns -  shrimp infected with the parasite ate twice as much of their own kind as uninfected animals. They attacked juvenile shrimp more often and consumed them more quickly than did uninfected shrimp.

When we think of cosmology, we often imagine the largest telescopes peering into the deepest space, collecting the feeble light from exploding stars or the first galaxies.

But for some cosmologists – like the Galactic Archaeologists – the focus is the local universe, asking if we can learn about the evolution of our own Milky Way from what we see around us.

In the morning of March 20th Europeans will be treated with the amazing show of a total solar eclipse. The path of totality is unfortunately confined to the northern Atlantic ocean, and will miss Iceland and England, passing only over the Faroer islands - no wonder there's no hotel room available there since last September! Curiously, the totality will end on the north pole, which on March 20th has the sun exactly at the horizon. Hence the conditions for a great shot like the one below are perfect - I only hope somebody will be at the north pole with a camera...

(Image credit: Fred Bruenjes; apod.nasa.gov)