(Roughly) Daily

After World War II, scientists began studying the internal clocks of animals in earnest. They discovered that mammals and other creatures are ruled by their own, internal body clock, what is commonly referred to today as a biological clock. The German physician and biologist Jürgen Aschoff wondered if this might also be true of humans. In the early 1960s, as head of a new department for biological timing at the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology, Aschoff and his research partner Rütger Wever designed an experiment to find out.

To study the inner workings of human biological clocks, Aschoff built a soundproof underground bunker in the foothills of a mountain deep in the Bavarian countryside, just up the road from the well-known beer-brewing monastery Kloster Andechs. Through a series of investigations that included 200 subjects and spanned two decades, Aschoff’s bunker experiments would become a pioneering study in the field of chronobiology, changing the way we think about time today…

What Is Chronobiology? Does it explain why we’re having so much trouble sleeping? Find out here.

* Moby

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As we hit the hay, we might spare a thought for Urbain Le Verrier; he died on this date in 1877. An astronomer and mathematician who specialized in celestial mechanics, he’s best remembered for predicting the existence and position of the planet Neptune using only mathematics. Le Verrier sent the coordinates to Johann Gottfried Galle at the New Berlin Observatory, asking him to verify. Galle found Neptune in the same night he received Le Verrier’s letter– this date in 1846. The planet was within 1° of the predicted position.

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