科学技术

　　Sleep and the phases of the Moon

　　睡眠与月相

　　Lunacy?

　　精神失常？

　　People do not sleep easy on nights when there is a full Moon

　　月圆之夜，不能安眠

　　IT SOUNDS like an idea dreamed up over a few beers in the pub one evening.

　　这听起来就像某晚在酒吧喝了几杯啤酒后的胡说八道。

　　And that, those involved freely admit, is exactly what it was.

　　提出这个观点的人也坦诚的这电子的确就是这么来的。

　　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将有关睡眠与月相研究的论文放到了《当代生物学》上，我们就是月圆的那晚在附近一个酒吧喝了几杯才想到的。

　　It was a way of testing the persistent but unproven idea that the full Moon affects human behaviour, generally for the worse.

　　这是个未经证实的测试持久性的方法，满月会影响人的行为，总的来说，它将恶化你的行为。

　　In prescientific days this was expressed in terms like moonstruck and lunatic.

　　现代科学出现以前，这种情况被称作月色撩人或者痴狂。

　　And it found even more sinister manifestation in the form of the lycanthrope, who did not sleep when the Moon was full,

　　研究发现，甚至还有更多像狼人一样的凶神恶煞，他们在月圆之夜化成狼的样子，

　　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,

　　尽管如今已经很少人相信狼人的存在，但一些当代思想家仍怀疑月相会影响睡眠模式,

　　and on that particular moonlit night Dr Cajochen and his buddies realised they already had the data needed to find out.

　　而且就在这个不同寻常的月夜Cajochen博士和同僚们才意识到，他们早已掌握了本想挖掘的数据。

　　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.

　　这些数据来自10年前他们所在的瑞士巴塞尔大学时间生物学中心，一个关于生物钟与睡眠研究。

　　Between 2000 and 2003 they had looked at the effect of the daily body clock on the sleep patterns of 33 volunteers.

　　那次试验在2000至2003年间曾观察过33名志愿者在日常生物钟下的睡眠模式。

　　The protocol they had used was perfect.

　　研究所使用的方法无懈可击。

　　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.

　　研究期间，志愿者都与日光隔绝，所以观察对象就不会对满月的月光产生反映。

　　And it was also the ultimate in double-blind experiments.

　　这也是一个终极双盲试验。

　　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.

　　志愿者和组织者都不可能因知道此次研究是针对满月带来的效应而出现偏差，当时实验结果没有说明两者之间有关联。

　　A few days' number-crunching gave Dr Cajochen and his team what they were looking for.

　　经过几天的计算后，Cajochen博士小组得到了他们想要的数据。

　　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，月相的确影响着人们的睡眠，即使参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.

　　脑电波图显示了他们的睡眠脑电图，平均来说，将近月圆或者刚过满月那几天，人们睡得比平常少20分钟。

　　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.

　　而且入睡时间也比平时多需要5分钟，他们的是平日幅度的30%。他们体内的一种与睡眠相关的黑色素荷尔蒙减少，而且研究对象也主观地反映他们不像平常那样睡得香脑波幅度。

　　Nor was any of this connected, in female volunteers, with their menstrual cycles.

　　而女性志愿者的试验数据显示,她们的生理周期与这些睡眠时间和激素水平中的任何一个都没有关系。

　　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.

　　以免有些占星师洋洋得意，Cajochen博士认为，他所得出的规律并不是由月亮通过某种潮汐导致的。

　　What he thinks he has discovered is an additional hand on the body's clock-face.

　　他认为这些研究结果只是往生物钟表盘上多加了一个指针。

　　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.

　　除众所周知的自身的日循环外，这也是研究最初的目的，身体还有一个受到月亮调控的内在月循环，这是长期以来在对天体不经意的观察中得到的启示。

　　Lunar cycles exist in other species so this is not, as it were, a lunatic idea.

　　月亮运转周期对其他物种也影响，这并不是异想天开。

　　But those species that have been studied are animals like marine iguanas, for whom knowing the tides is important.

　　被研究的动物对象包括海蜥蜴，潮汐对它来说非常重要。

　　What use an ingrained lunar calendar is to a human being remains to be determined.

　　什么使阴历扎根于人类社会当中仍是一个迷。

　　Perhaps sleeping lightly on moonlit nights was a defence mechanism against predators. Wolves, for example.

　　也许在月光明亮的夜晚浅睡是对狼人等肉食动物的防御机制。