With the moon gaining ever-increasing power this week and beaming on those ice-lacquered layers and pompadours of the remnant snowpack, the nightscapes in parts of the region have evoked the lunar surface itself.
But with the so-called Snow Moon approaching fullness, that “lustre of midday” — to quote the world’s most famous Christmas poem — might have been keeping you awake, according to a recently published study led by a team of University of Washington researchers.
They found that on the nights preceding the full moon, the study subjects slept from 46 to 58 minutes less than they did during the earlier and later lunar cycles.
They acknowledged that the findings ran counter to previous sleep analyses involving Earth’s pockmarked satellite, which through the years has been the subject of innumerable studies on how it might affect human behavior, not to mention werewolves.
But the sleep impacts the UW-led team identified and reported last month in the journal Science Advances were evident “even on clouded nights,” Leandro Casiraghi, the study’s lead author, said Thursday.
And he said these sleep issues likely have something do with our deep, dark pasts, which perhaps weren’t as dark when the moon was dominating the night sky.
www.inquirer.com/science/snow-moon-2021-february-full-sleep-research-20210226.html