Here's where evolutionary biology meets modern medicine. Our ancestors lived with natural light-dark cycles for millions of years. Industrial lighting, shift work, and digital screens represent a 150-year-old experiment—an evolutionary eyeblink. Our Paleolithic circadian systems now face unprecedented challenges.

Remember nights when you tossed and turned, desperately trying to get some sleep? I think we can all relate. Circadian rhythm disorders, known as chronodisruption, arise when the body’s internal clock—governed by the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) in the hypothalamus—falls out of sync with environmental light-dark cycles.

What happens when a light switch disrupts billions of years of evolution?

Circadian rhythm—our endogenous biological clock—has synchronized life with Earth’s rotation for billions of years, from bacteria to humans. How does this specifically affect humans?

In 2025, Jamie Perce with the Western Slope Dark Sky Coalition presented an excellent series on circadian rhythm. The importance of this topic is prompting a deeper dive in 2026 with a five part series.

If you have attended a night sky outreach event, conducted, for example, by the Black Canyon Astronomical Society or the Western Colorado Astronomy Club, then you have heard mention of the distance to a star or galaxy measured in light years, i.e. how long the light has been travelling to reach Earth. You might wonder “Do the photons get tired or slow down as time passes?”

In astronomy, we rely heavily on visual information. Images from telescopes, graphs of light curves, plotted orbits, spectra and diagrams. Most of the ways we understand astronomy today are shown through these two-dimensional formats. It's almost always something we look at. But vision is only one way of interpreting information. From quantum physics to the largest structures in the universe, the underlying reality is governed by motion, frequency and structure.

We all know how weird black holes are, but did you know there is another type of star that is just as strange? Welcome to the universe of neutron stars.

When we gaze at the Moon in the future, we’ll contemplate that we humans have extended our reach to Earth’s nearest celestial neighbor. Perhaps this will be our first step toward making human life interplanetary.

Let’s hope for clear skies on the morning of March 3, when the Western Slope will be treated to a total lunar eclipse. During the early hours of March 3, the Moon will move through Earth’s shadow, creating one of the more eerie sights in nature.