評論
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Science and technology
科學技術
Sleep and the phases of the Moon
睡眠與月相
Lunacy?
精神失常？
People do not sleep easy on nights when there is a full Moon
月圓之夜，不能安眠
IT SOUNDS like an idea dreamed up over a few beers in the pub one evening.
這聽起來就像某晚在酒吧喝了幾杯啤酒后的胡說八道。
And that, those involved freely admit, is exactly what it was.
提出這個觀點的人也坦誠的這電子的確就是這么來的。
As Christian Cajochen and his colleagues put it in their paper on the matter in Current Biology, We just thought of it after a drink in a local bar one evening at full Moon.
他的同事和Christian Cajochen將有關睡眠與月相研究的論文放到了《當代生物學》上，我們就是月圓的那晚在附近一個酒吧喝了幾杯才想到的。
It was a way of testing the persistent but unproven idea that the full Moon affects human behaviour, generally for the worse.
這是個未經證實的測試持久性的方法，滿月會影響人的行為，總的來說，它將惡化你的行為。
In prescientific days this was expressed in terms like moonstruck and lunatic.
現代科學出現以前，這種情況被稱作月色撩人或者癡狂。
And it found even more sinister manifestation in the form of the lycanthrope, who did not sleep when the Moon was full,
研究發現，甚至還有更多像狼人一樣的兇神惡煞，他們在月圓之夜化成狼的樣子，
but turned into a wolf instead.
而不是像往常一般睡去。
Though few now believe in werewolves some modern thinkers still suspect the Moon's phase affects sleep patterns,
盡管如今已經很少人相信狼人的存在，但一些當代思想家仍懷疑月相會影響睡眠模式,
and on that particular moonlit night Dr Cajochen and his buddies realised they already had the data needed to find out.
而且就在這個不同尋常的月夜Cajochen博士和同僚們才意識到，他們早已掌握了本想挖掘的數據。
Those data came from a study on body clocks and sleep patterns they had conducted a decade earlier at the Centre for Chronobiology at the University of Basel,where they work.
這些數據來自10年前他們所在的瑞士巴塞爾大學時間生物學中心，一個關于生物鐘與睡眠研究。
Between 2000 and 2003 they had looked at the effect of the daily body clock on the sleep patterns of 33 volunteers.
那次試驗在2000至2003年間曾觀察過33名志愿者在日常生物鐘下的睡眠模式。
The protocol they had used was perfect.
研究所使用的方法無懈可擊。
Volunteers were shut away from daylight for days at a time, so their sleep patterns could not be affected by the illumination a full Moon brings.
研究期間，志愿者都與日光隔絕，所以觀察對象就不會對滿月的月光產生反映。
And it was also the ultimate in double-blind experiments.
這也是一個終極雙盲試驗。
Neither the participants nor the organisers could possibly have been biased by knowing the experiment was intended to look at the effect of the full Moon, since at the time it was conducted it wasn't.
志愿者和組織者都不可能因知道此次研究是針對滿月帶來的效應而出現偏差，當時實驗結果沒有說明兩者之間有關聯。
A few days' number-crunching gave Dr Cajochen and his team what they were looking for.
經過幾天的計算后，Cajochen博士小組得到了他們想要的數據。
And the answer was yes, the phase of the Moon does affect human sleep patterns, even when the human involved cannot possibly see the Moon.
并得到了肯定的答案，月相的確影響著人們的睡眠，即使參加研究的志愿者不能看到月亮。
Electroencephalography showed that the volunteers slept, on average, 20 minutes less around the time of the full Moon.
腦電波圖顯示了他們的睡眠腦電圖，平均來說，將近月圓或者剛過滿月那幾天，人們睡得比平常少20分鐘。
It also took them five minutes longer to get to sleep, their delta activity was 30% lower than at other times, their level of melatonin, a sleep-related hormone, was reduced, and they reported, subjectively, that they had not slept as well as usual.
而且入睡時間也比平時多需要5分鐘，他們的是平日幅度的30%。他們體內的一種與睡眠相關的黑色素荷爾蒙減少，而且研究對象也主觀地反映他們不像平常那樣睡得香腦波幅度。
Nor was any of this connected, in female volunteers, with their menstrual cycles.
而女性志愿者的試驗數據顯示,她們的生理周期與這些睡眠時間和激素水平中的任何一個都沒有關系。
Lest any astrologer reading this result get cocky, Dr Cajochen does not believe that what he has found is directly influenced by the Moon through, say, some tidal effect.
以免有些占星師洋洋得意，Cajochen博士認為，他所得出的規律并不是由月亮通過某種潮汐導致的。
What he thinks he has discovered is an additional hand on the body's clock-face.
他認為這些研究結果只是往生物鐘表盤上多加了一個指針。
Besides the well-known endogenous daily cycle which the experiment originally studied, there is also an endogenous monthly cycle entrained to the Moon by unconscious observation over a long period of the light from the heavenly bodies concerned.
除眾所周知的自身的日循環外，這也是研究最初的目的，身體還有一個受到月亮調控的內在月循環，這是長期以來在對天體不經意的觀察中得到的啟示。
Lunar cycles exist in other species so this is not, as it were, a lunatic idea.
月亮運轉周期對其他物種也影響，這并不是異想天開。
But those species that have been studied are animals like marine iguanas, for whom knowing the tides is important.
被研究的動物對象包括海蜥蜴，潮汐對它來說非常重要。
What use an ingrained lunar calendar is to a human being remains to be determined.
什么使陰歷扎根于人類社會當中仍是一個迷。
Perhaps sleeping lightly on moonlit nights was a defence mechanism against predators. Wolves, for example.
也許在月光明亮的夜晚淺睡是對狼人等肉食動物的防御機制。
