Let’s start with a digression or “The nucleus must be conserved!”

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When I was a kid I loved to watch Dr. Who (For that matter, I still love it, but I’m not terrified of it anymore) and follow The Doctor on his travels through the universe, encountering robots, aliens, time travellers and an endless sucession of alien planets that look like the same disused gravel quarry.

In one of these, The Ark in Space we meet a particularly nasty insectoid hive-mind which is gobbling up the sleeping crew of a long haul spaceship, one by one. As each crew member is posessed by the aliens, they say “Contact has been made”, to which the already-posessed crewmember who has awoken them replies “The nucleus must be conserved”.

Now, the suprachiasmatic nucleus is a little blob around the size of a pea, hidden somewehere deep in our brains. Among its task is the regulation of our bodily clocks. When we’re exposed to light, the suprachiasmatic nucleus acts to suppress the production of melatonin. When there’s not enough light, melatonin production is not controlled properly, and gloomy sluggish slothful winter blues result. Or that’s one theory of many, anyway. More on that later, but for the moment I just wanted to meditate on how every time I hear the phrase “suprachiasmatic nucleus” I see a giant alien insect saying “The nucleus must be conserved!”.

As indeed it must.

Comment now » Read more July 27th, 2009



Keeping track of the sunlight

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It used to be that around midwinter I’d start obsessively checking day length calculators on the net, seeing how many seconds longer that today tomorrow would be, and trying to work out when my most important day of the year, “Minute Day” would be. (Minute day - or so I’ve defined it - is the first day that’s a minute longer than the day before, thus indicating that spring will come again, and the world isn’t ending.)

In the end, I did the sensible thing, and wrote myself a little gadget which would show the length of the days for an entire year, from six months in the past to six months in the future in one glance. Now it’s your turn to play with it.

You can get to it by going here or by clicking on the “Sunrise Calculator” link at the top of the page. (You’ll need Adobe Flash installed.)

The first time you use it, it will be set for Melbourne, Australia, where I live. You can change this to where you live by clicking on the “My Location” tab on the program, and providing you’ve got cookies turned on, the program should remember this.

Comment now » Read more July 24th, 2009



Welcome

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This site aims to serve as a reference for information about Seasonal Affective Depression, aka SAD or Winter Blues. I’ll be discussing what it is, how it’s treated, and how well those treatments work, and trying to keep up with articles in the scientific literature.

Topics I’ll be discussing include:

  • light therapy
  • melatonin
  • omega-3s
  • vitamin D
  • meditation
  • exercise

Welcome, and I hope this site proves useful to you.

Comment now » Read more July 21st, 2009