Lovely!
My college roommate had some sort of hormone dysregulatory disorder where his natural day clock was like 25 or 26 hours. He kept very strange hours.
It is good!
I couldn't open it on a machine not logged in to Instagram. Oddly the top bar of the browser had the title.
https://www.npr.org/2022/07/22/1112484935/nasa-engineer-nagin-cox-mars-rover
1.2: How did they find out? I've known lots of people that kept strange hours. Actually, a lot of them were in college -- that is to say they didn't have 9-5 jobs.
I keep regular hours, but that's because I have a job that requires that I be there at a certain time. I don't believe that I'm so cosmically in tune with the 24-hour cycle.
i thought all those studies that locked college students in the basement in the 70s showed that the normal clock for humans is about 24 1/2 to 25 hours or so. (more to 1 than to the cartoon - obviously it's different to reset each day than to just drift).
5: I remember reading that too! Again college students!
Is this because they can explore best during daylight hours on Mars? Does the Rover have headlights? Is the Rover solar-powered?
Is the Rover solar-powered?
Spirit and Opportunity were, but the current one is apparently nuclear-powered.
8: Thanks, teo!
From that link -- It provides engineers with a lot of flexibility in operating the rover (e.g., day and night, and through the winter season)
So, Rover could work at night.
5: due to budget cuts, we'll be combining the replication studies of the marshmallow, prison, and various sleep experiments.
The Stanford martianmallow experiment
The link in the OP doesn't work for me, but is it anything to do with this? My uncle is involved with that. If so, cool.
I am pretty sure my natural day has gotten shorter over the past few decades. In my teens and twenties, 24 hours was too short for me to be tired enough to sleep and then sleep enough to feel refreshed. Now it seems just right, but I feel like I'm edging towards it being slightly too long. Like wanting to go to bed increasingly early, and feeling off all day if I sleep an hour or two extra.
13: It's not enough we're expected to read the OP, now we have to follow links in comments too? Ugh. Seriously though, thanks.
Lovely, and very .... restful (which is what the author was aiming at, I guess). I was able to read it in Chrome by using incognito mode.
This brought to my mind this Seu Jorge cover of David Bowie's Life on Mars:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M05dpNBFTE0
The whole album is great btw - IIRC it was the soundtrack to The Life Aquatic.
This brought to my mind this Seu Jorge cover of David Bowie's Life on Mars:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M05dpNBFTE0
The whole album is great btw - IIRC it was the soundtrack to The Life Aquatic.
Somewhat humorless response to 5: I think those studies about the "natural clock" are pretty junky, or at least easy to misinterpret. The human system's clock is evolved to be reset by daylight, and thus on a regular schedule. What such a clock does when it is unexpectedly free-running, instead of being reset daily, doesn't tell you very much about what is normal.
19: At least with mice, I believe they experimented with different regular cycles and found major impacts on longevity.
It wouldn't be that hard to run a basement experiment with alternate faux-sun and -night settings.
19. If the human clock evolved to be reset by daylight, I can see how that would work in tropical Africa where we evolved it. But what happens to your natural clock if you live in Greenland or Tierra del Fuego? You still have to acquire food and eat it, even in midwinter. A light dependent cycle would put a hell of a crimp in your hunting and gathering routines.
I remember going above the Arctic circle in Norway during the summer and seeing a sign at a ski area that said something like "night skiing [i.e. with lights on specific routes] lasts from November to February."
Whatever natural clock humans have can clearly be overridden in practice, as evidenced by thousands of years of human occupation in the Arctic as well as stuff like the Mars scientists in the OP.
5. I thought that was the basis for some fringe belief that humans colonized Earth from some other planet with a longer synodic day? (Upon googling it looks like it's less an established fringe than just one self-published kook named Ellis Silver.)
Why I'm skeptical of those studies that suggest teenagers would learn more effectively if school started at ten or whatnot.
Why I'm skeptical of those studies that suggest teenagers would learn more effectively if school started at ten or whatnot.
Couldn't there be a biological difference between how you're affected by length of day vs. by length of the total day-night cycle?
I know people and animals can adjust to the sun rising much earlier or later, but day and night still add up to 24 hours as long as you're outside the Arctic or Antarctic Circle*. It seems a different proposition to adjust to, say, day and night being 6 hours each, or 18. The planet has only slowed down marginally over the aeons (23.5-hour day in the Cretaceous).
Of course the sol being 24.6 hours is not a huge difference, but different daylight cues every day would be weird in a third way.
*And even there there's a day-night cycle much of the year, depending how close to the pole you are.
Just get yourself a dog to enforce an early bedtime and a cat for an early wake up call and you'll adapt.
Turn 45 and let your bladder wake you at 6:30.
The person I know who worked (works?) on that rover had a baby somewhere in the whole process, presumably in order to go all-in on disrupted sleep schedule.
The person I know who worked (works?) on that rover had a baby somewhere in the whole process, presumably in order to go all-in on disrupted sleep schedule.
Mostly I feel bad for the poor shmucks who study Jupiter.
Sounds like Earth time isn't so stable after all.
31. Turn 65 and you'll be taking a cocktail of meds to stop it waking you every hour through the night. Sleeping till 6.30 will be a happy memory.