As today is the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere (and the longest in the Southern Hemisphere), it seems appropriate to talk about how the seasons change our bodies’ rhythms. Many things change with the seasons, but the main seasonal variation that I will consider here is the variation in day length.  […]

Here’s a fun fact: You probably get way less light exposure during a normal work day than you would if you were out camping. “Sure,” you say. “That’s no surprise. At home, I have walls around me to block the sun. If I’m camping, I presumably have fewer walls.” “You don’t understand,” I say, leaning […]

Rods, cones, and…ipRGCs? For almost a century and a half, it was thought that the mammalian retina had just two types of photoreceptors: rods and cones. That assumption was not proven to be false until studies in the late 1990s proved the existence of a third kind of mammalian photoreceptor that differed greatly from rods […]

Lately, I’ve been watching clips from the Olympics… …getting misty-eyed when the athletes hug at the end, and then stalking the winners on social media: a normal Saturday night in 2021. I have a shirt that looks like that, I think as I scroll through photos of them lifting approximately three times my body weight. […]

I recently went on a trip to California. Coming from the East Coast, this was a three-hour shift west. To adjust to California time, I needed to delay my circadian clock. One catch, though: my flight out was extremely early in the morning. That meant, like it or not, I was going to advance myself […]