Moon may influence sleep, study finds

Even if moonlight isn't streaming through your curtains, the phase of the moon may affect how well you sleep

Science and myth rarely agree, but new research suggests that the lunar cycle could have an effect on the quality of sleep.

The study by researchers at the University of Basel in Switzerland found that even in the absence of moonlight, participants slept less deeply and for shorter periods during the full moon than at other lunar phases. It is a phenomenon already known in other organisms as the "circalunar rhythm", but has never before been shown in humans.

Christian Cajochen, who was the lead researcher on the study, said: "A lot of people complain about bad sleep during moon stages, or they claim that 'it was the moon', and there's a lot of myth involved. We decided to go back in our old data to see whether we could effectively quantify such an effect."

Previous research has found no association between the phases of the moon and human physiology or behaviour. "While I'm quite cautious and sceptical about the data myself, I have to say after a proper statistical analysis that, to our surprise, we found something there," said Cajochen. "There is a circalunar influence."

The brain pattern, eye movements and hormone secretion of volunteers were studied while they slept. Participants were also asked for subjective assessments of their sleep quality.

The results, published in Current Biology, showed that around the full moon, subjects' brain activity associated with deep sleep decreased by 30%, they took 5 minutes longer to fall asleep, had 20 minutes less sleep overall and lower levels of melatonin - a hormone known to regulate sleep. These findings correlated with the volunteers' own perception that sleep quality was poorer during the full moon.

"I think one issue in the past was that they compared a lot of people by mixing different laboratories, different devices, and including data from patients, so the entire thing was not standardised," Cajochen said. "The advantage here is that we really had a standardised protocol."

The data was taken from a previous study that was not originally looking at the moon's influence. Participants were kept in a very controlled environment, with artificial lighting, regulated temperature and no way of checking the time. This ensured that internal body rhythms could be investigated independently of external influences.

"The only disadvantage with such a standardised procedure is that we could only investigate 33 people," said Cajochen. "What I would like to do in the future is to increase the number of subjects and then to follow up each person through the entire moon cycle."

But such a study would have problems of its own, he added. "If you're actually going to tell people you're investigating the influence of the moon, then you may trigger some expectation or sensitivity in them. Sleep is also a psychological thing, of course."

If true, the mechanisms responsible for the phenomenon are unknown. Malcolm von Schantz, a molecular neurobiologist at Surrey University, said: "Essentially it could be either two things: the moon itself has a gravitational pull which somehow affects our physiology. I find that very unlikely as the gravitational pull of the moon is fairly weak. It doesn't cause tides in lakes for example, only in large oceans. In fact, if you're sitting within 15 inches of the wall right now then the wall has a stronger gravitational pull on you than the moon does. So I don't think we have a sort of mini-tide in ourselves.

"The alternative is that there is a 'counter', a mechanism which keeps track somehow of the phases of the moon."

Marine animals are already known to follow a circalunar rhythm and some believe it is tightly intertwined with the circadian rhythm - the other internal clock that many organisms, humans included, have which is entrained to the sun. "In worms, at least, there is a crossover between these two clocks," said Cajochen. "But we are not worms any more."

Other researchers have wondered why a human circalunar clock should exist in the first place. Michael Hastings, a neuroscientist studying circadian rhythms at Cambridge University, said: "In evolutionary terms, it sounds plausible to me at least. If you were a hunter gatherer, you'd want to be out there on a full moon, not a new moon. It might be that there's something about suppression of sleep under those circumstances because you should be out hunting.

"I think at best it's intriguing. There's a biological plausibility, if we take the hunter gatherer scenario, with regard to the mechanisms ... It is such a striking and unexpected finding that replication by other sleep labs is absolutely critical."

Not everyone is concerned that there were only 33 subjects - von Schantz even said these numbers are "fairly sizeable" for such a study.

"It's true, the body of negative data on the effects of the moon on a huge number of parameters is fairly impressive," he added. "It's entirely conceivable that all those previous studies are correct, but that there is also an effect in a limited number of other parameters, one of them being sleep, for reasons we don't yet understand."

Somali woman is jailed for a year after claiming she was raped

Human rights groups attack 'terrible miscarriage of justice' as woman and journalist who interviewed her are sentenced

A Somali woman who said she was raped by state security forces, and a journalist who interviewed her, were each sentenced on Tuesday to a year in jail in a trial that human rights advocates called "a terrible miscarriage of justice".

The 27-year-old woman was accused of insulting a government body and making false claims. The court in the capital, Mogadishu, said it based its decision on medical evidence that she was not raped, but the judge deferred her sentence until she has weaned her child.

The freelance reporter Abdiaziz Abdinur Ibrahim, who interviewed the woman in early January but never filed a story, was also charged with insulting state institutions. The two defendants are expected to appeal.

"The court's decision to convict an alleged rape victim and the journalist who interviewed her is a terrible miscarriage of justice, and sends a chilling signal to victims of sexual assault in Somalia," said Daniel Bekele, Africa director at Human Rights Watch.

"The case was built on groundless charges and serious due-process violations, and should have been thrown out. The government should swiftly move to exonerate and release the defendants."

The US state department has said the case is "a litmus test" for the future of Somalia. Human Rights Watch said last week that the case was politically motivated and designed to silence those who report on the pervasive problem of sexual violence by state security forces.

The international outcry surrounding the case is an embarrassment for the Somali president, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, whose election last year was described by the international community as the start of a new era for Somalia after decades of instability and conflict.

The trial started as the Mohamud toured Europe to garner international support to rebuild Somalia.

He was in Britain on Monday where he met the international development secretary, Justine Greening.

The foreign secretary, William Hague, said he had discussed the case with Mohamud. He tweeted: "Raised current rape case of concern in Somalia with the President, including the importance of victims feeling able to speak out."

The judge in the case, Ahmed Aden Farah, said on Tuesday that the woman was sentenced for offending state institutions by claiming she was raped, the AFP news agency reported.

"She will spend one year in prison after finishing the breastfeeding of her baby," the agency quoted him as saying. The woman's husband and two others who were also detained over the case have been released.

The woman was arrested on 10 January, two days after she was interviewed by Abdinur Ibrahim and told him she had been raped by government forces last year. Police interrogated her over two days without legal counsel and released after saying she had retracted her story.

There have been some signs of official discomfort over the progress of the case. On Sunday, Somalia's prime minister, Abdi Farah Shirdon Saaid, said authorities would do more to protect rape victims, and he promised to reform the armed forces and judiciary once the trial had concluded.

"We recognise the concerns of our international partners and we are only too aware of the enormous challenges our nation faces," he said in a statement.

The international community, especially Britain and the US, have enthusiastically backed Somalia's new government, which emerged last September after a UN-backed peace process to replace a corrupt and inefficient transitional authority. International donors have pledged millions of dollars to rebuild the country, including money destined for the security forces.

Somalia has been enjoying a period of relative stability since African Union forces pushed the Islamic militants of al-Shabaab out of most of their urban strongholds, including the capital. The rebels still control some rural areas and carry out sporadic bomb attacks in Mogadishu

Afghan rape victim 'attacked again by government workers protecting her'

Girl aged 15 says she was raped by employees and security guard at provincial women's affairs department

A teenage Afghan rape victim who secured a rare conviction of her attacker has said she was assaulted this month for a second time, by a group of government employees tasked with protecting her.

The 15-year-old schoolgirl, from Daikundi province in Afghanistan's freezing, poor central highlands, was first raped four months ago while she was on her way to school, said Nowruz Ali Ataee, head of the provincial criminal investigation department.

In an unusual move for a young girl in conservative rural Afghanistan, where a rape is often considered to bring shame on an entire family, she reported the attack. Equally unusually, for a country that passed a law banning violence against women four years ago but has been slow to implement it, police found and arrested her rapist. He was recently jailed for 16 years and an accomplice was given a five-year sentence.

But the girl had to travel to the provincial capital for the case, and was temporarily living in an "education reform" centre that Daikundi officials said shelters women and children with no family.

After four months, and with her attackers in prison, judges last week ordered that the victim should be sent to a shelter or back to her family, Ataee said.

Her home was not really an option, however. She comes from a remote district, where the roads are now blocked by heavy snows, and it was not even clear if her family wanted her back. The girl's father had died when she was young, and her mother remarried, to a man who one government source said did not treat his stepdaughter well, forcing her to spend long hours herding sheep.

And in Daikundi town there were no suitable shelters, said Ataee, so she was sent to spend the night in the provincial women's affairs department. "The next morning she made an accusation. When the acting chairman of the women's department went to her office and asked her if it was OK, she said some employees and one security guard raped her," Qurban Ali Uruzgani, governor of Daikundi province, told the Guardian.

The victim was not sure how many men had raped her, one source said, because she had lost consciousness at the start of her ordeal, but several men have already been detained.

"We arrested four employees and one security guard of the building and put them in jail," Uruzgani said. The acting chairman of the women's department was briefly held but then released, he added.

After details of the case leaked to the Afghan media, the president, Hamid Karzai, sent a delegation to investigate, something he has done before in cases of extreme violence against women, contested civilian casualties or other cases that catch public attention.

The team, which included representatives from the ministry of women's affairs and the attorney general's office, has now returned to Kabul and is likely to report back within weeks. But regardless of the outcome, the case has already raised fears that a trend of rising violence against women, recorded last year, is continuing into 2013.

Additional reporting by Mokhtar Amiri