Like the Moon Rising

Rising like the phoenix?

Bad Moon Rising: the persistent belief in lunar connections to madness.

S ix patients walk into the emergency department asking for opiates while 3 code blues are announced on the PA. Someone mutters , " Damn! It must be a full moon! " The belief that the moon exerts an influence on human affairs has survived rather obstinately through history. Hippocrates wrote that " no physician should be entrusted with the treatment of disease who was ignorant of the science of...

Geochemical arguments for an Earth-like Moon-forming impactor.

Geochemical evidence suggests that the material accreted by the Earth did not change in nature during Earth's accretion, presumably because the inner protoplanetary disc had uniform isotopic composition similar to enstatite chondrites, aubrites and ungrouped achondrite NWA 5363/5400. Enstatite meteorites and the Earth were derived from the same nebular reservoir but diverged in their chemical e...

Howling for the moon.

Rennard and Vestbo have sounded a ringing call to arms. Instead of trying to make minor improvements in the rate of decline of spirometry in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), they call for an all out effort to find a cure. Their arguments have attractions, but we believe that the evidence shows it would be easier to hatch out chickens from a plate of scrambled eggs tha...

Explaining the moon illusion.

An old explanation of the moon illusion holds that various cues place the horizon moon at an effectively greater distance than the elevated moon. Although both moons have the same angular size, the horizon moon must be perceived as larger. More recent explanations hold that differences in accommodation or other factors cause the elevated moon to appear smaller. As a result of this illusory diff...