At Nobel Prize time, journalists tend to celebrate the ingenuity of scientists. This year, let’s show some appreciation for the ingenuity of evolution and the human body instead.
The 2017 Nobel for medicine went to three researchers who uncovered the workings of tiny clocks inside your cells — clocks that tell you when to eat, when to stop eating, and when to shut off that computer and get some sleep. The prize-winning work was done on fruit flies, but its findings are relevant to us humans, since once evolution invents something useful, it often spreads far and wide. In humans, mice, insects and a multitude of other creatures, circadian clocks use chemical reactions and feedback loops to keep time and connect living things to the astronomical world — a pas de deux between our planet and the sun.
