Science

Moon of my life

Another one of Mr. Aran Shaunak’s Little Bites of Science

Moon of my life

Fact: Your body has ‘tides’ because of the moon.

They are just really, really, really small.

The moon causes tides in the ocean by exerting a gravitational pull on the water, which changes over the course of a day as the relative positions of the earth and the moon change. The gravitational pull of the moon will, in theory, exert those same forces on the water inside your body, meaning you have high tide and low tide twice a day.

‘Human tides’ have been proposed to affect the brain and be drivers of suicide and murder, aggressive behaviour in animals and even to influence the timing of menstruation. However, simply due to us being much, much smaller than the oceans and the moon being really, really far away, the effect of lunar gravity on an individual human is in practice so small as to be immeasurable, and so it’s unlikely that it could possibly drive any sort of change in behaviour (although this hasn’t stopped some questionable studies claiming to have found a link!)

In fact, the gravitational field of a mosquito on your arm would exert a greater gravitational force on you than the moon simply by virtue of being closer, which puts into perspective just how little impact this particular science fact will have on your life.

From Issue 1660

10th Mar 2017

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

Explore the edition

Read more

An interview with the Imperial student hunger striking for Palestine

News

An interview with the Imperial student hunger striking for Palestine

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.  On Tuesday 10th June, Imperial Action for Palestine, and Imperial Friends of Palestine, two of the groups protesting the actions of Israel in Gaza, posted an announcement that a student had begun a hunger strike following a meeting with Imperial’s

By Mohammad Majlisi
New data on Imperial professors’ salaries reveals gender and faculty differences

News

New data on Imperial professors’ salaries reveals gender and faculty differences

A recent Freedom of Information request has revealed the highest professorial salaries endowed by Imperial are mostly attributed to males and Business School professors. Beyond the outsized numbers of male professors, gender discrepancies in earnings stood out. While the salary distribution for professors of both genders is comparable for pay

By Guillaume Felix