The Full Moon: Is It Messing With Us?

10:46Charlotte Helfrich-Förster:Yip, yip, yip, yip, yip, yip, yip.

10:50Horacio de la Iglesia:Are you the coyote? Yeah. Well, everything inside of me wanted to go, oh, and then I realized that's no longer factually acceptable.

10:59Kristin Teßmar-Raible:But those are during a new moon show where we have to rebrand the coyote. Oh, that's right. Corals don't make any noise. Okay.

11:09Horacio de la Iglesia:So, Wendy, all her superiors believe this to be true. What happens next?

11:15Kristin Teßmar-Raible:Well, so then she decides to do like a proper study on this. So worked with her advisor and they got the records from her trauma center for a year over 1400 people all together and she looked to see like how many people were admitted how bad are people's injuries whether or not they died and then they took the day of the full moon and also the day before that and the day after it to kind of look at all those nights around the full moon and then compare those nights to every other night of the month to see like okay is there any difference here was Is this night different to all other nights? Yeah.

11:54Yeah.

11:55Kristin Teßmar-Raible:Here's what she saw.

11:56Wendy Coates:It was pretty funny because we're like, hmm, it looks like there's no difference. Oh, no difference. Yeah.

12:05Kristin Teßmar-Raible:There was no increase in how many people were admitted, how bad their traumas were, or how many of these patients died around the full moon.

12:14Wendy Coates:And in fact, well, maybe there are fewer traumas and less severe traumas on the actual full moon days than the other days.

12:27Horacio de la Iglesia:Less, less severe traumas, she said.

12:31Kristin Teßmar-Raible:Yeah, a little bit. Which she thought about it and was like, oh, maybe this makes sense. Because on those nights.

12:39Wendy Coates:It's brighter. So maybe it's easier to drive on dark country roads where lots of motor vehicle accidents occur. Maybe you're not quite as likely to go stab somebody because you'd be more visible to more eyewitnesses.

12:58Kristin Teßmar-Raible:And since Wendy's study, others have come out looking at the same thing across the world. Like a couple studies from the Netherlands did see a tiny decrease in traumas on a full moon. Decrease again. Yeah, yeah. It was like better. Okay. And overall, a review of these studies said that there's no increase in how busy emergency departments are during a full moon.

13:25Horacio de la Iglesia:All right. So, Wendy, does she worry when there's a full moon these days?

13:33Kristin Teßmar-Raible:No. Oh, yeah, I asked her because she actually still works in an ER. Now, when you hear people mention this idea that, oh, it's a full moon tonight. Get ready. Do you say anything?

13:45Wendy Coates:Nope. No? I never do because, you know, like, you don't want to be that person. And you're like, actually, we studied this and we found the blah, blah, blah. Like, you just don't want to be that person.

14:01Horacio de la Iglesia:Do you know, I feel like this will really land the point, hashtag not all Wendy's, you know? Or not well actually Wendy's. Yeah.

14:11Kristin Teßmar-Raible:Some of us are well actually Wendy's.

14:13Horacio de la Iglesia:Some of us are not.

14:16Kristin Teßmar-Raible:And Wendy had this really lovely theory as to like why this idea sticks around the ER despite the lack of evidence.

14:24Wendy Coates:You know, like if you have a group of people and they're united against some sort of assault. So, you know, you're going to have this night that's crazy busy. You're not going to get to eat. You're not going to get to go to the bathroom. But yeah, we can all unite on the reason. Yeah. And just like, yeah, yeah. It's like bonding. It's bonding time. And we can't predict who's coming. We can't predict how busy it's going to be. But what we can predict is that we're all there for each other. And that sometimes something like talking about a full moon or the little look you give up to the sky as you're walking past one another gives you a little bit more encouragement to help you do your job well and be together with your team to take care of all the patients who come in.

15:13Horacio de la Iglesia:Isn't that nice? It is nice. If only we could all be united by the full moon. Yeah. So where do we go to here?

15:22Kristin Teßmar-Raible:Okay, well, so, yeah, it doesn't seem like the full moon makes ER as busier. By the way, I also looked into this idea that there's more crime on a full moon. A couple studies looked at that and did not see anything there either. Okay. But, Wendy, this does not put the kibosh on the whole idea that the moon can affect our behavior. Actually, after doing all of this research, I am more of a true believer.

15:50Horacio de la Iglesia:Merrill Haunt. Never thought I'd see the day. Merrill Haunt, PhD. I know. What did you find?

15:58Kristin Teßmar-Raible:Okay, so there's this one super interesting study that I want to tell you about. Okay. All right, so it was done by Professor Horacio de la Iglesia at the University of Washington in Seattle. Have you ever howled at the moon?

16:10Charlotte Helfrich-Förster:Not really, not yet. But maybe, you know, if I keep doing research on it, I might end up doing that.

16:18Horacio de la Iglesia:Well, I think if he keeps doing research on it, he'll know that that's a myth, Mara. That's true.

16:26Kristin Teßmar-Raible:So he's done fieldwork in Argentina, where he's from, with a group of indigenous people, the Toba Combe, who are living in a really remote area with no electricity. And he was curious whether, living in these conditions, the moon might be affecting their sleep. Their sleep? Yeah.

16:46Charlotte Helfrich-Förster:Essentially, they live very much in tune with the natural daylight and the natural light-dark cycle.

16:53Kristin Teßmar-Raible:So there is no streetlights, no...

16:55Charlotte Helfrich-Förster:No, no streetlights, no lights in the houses.

16:59Kristin Teßmar-Raible:So he asks people to wear a device on their wrist, sort of like a Fitbit, but fancier, that tracks their sleep. 25 people agreed to do this. And then he plotted out all of this sleep data next to the lunar cycle. to see if there were any patterns.

17:18Horacio de la Iglesia:So if on a full moon people slept more or less.

17:24Kristin Teßmar-Raible:Yeah. And he did see that on the days leading up to a full moon, people were sleeping less.

17:31Charlotte Helfrich-Förster:People were going to bed much later, up to an hour later, and sleeping by about an hour less.

17:37Kristin Teßmar-Raible:Huh. That's a pretty big effect.

17:39Charlotte Helfrich-Förster:Yeah, that's a huge effect in sleep terms, right?

17:42Kristin Teßmar-Raible:On average, it was about a 45-minute difference. And Horacio thought that it was probably the brightness of the moon that was doing this. Yeah, right. Pretty clearly for this community.

17:53Charlotte Helfrich-Förster:We don't realize how bright the moon is, particularly when you are under totally natural light conditions, right? Because suddenly the sunset gets very dark. And if the moon happens to come up just before, you know, you're about to go to bed, it's nearly impossible to go to bed, right? You see the moon there.

18:14Kristin Teßmar-Raible:It's that bright out there.

18:16Charlotte Helfrich-Förster:Exactly. You know, you could even read under full moonlight.

18:19Kristin Teßmar-Raible:Oh, wow. So then Horacio decides to look at places that weren't rural, like cities. He starts with a group of Tobocone people who are living in a more urban area. Okay. And weirdly, he found that their sleep was still affected by the moon.

18:38Horacio de la Iglesia:Hmm.

18:38Kristin Teßmar-Raible:So now Orecio is like, OK, let's run the experiment again where he lives in the U.S., in Seattle, in Washington state. He gets sleep data from about 120 people there, mostly young adults. And he still sees the same pattern. So these people living in Seattle were also sleeping less on the nights leading up to a full moon by like 20 to 40 minutes.

19:06Horacio de la Iglesia:And so now he's sure it's not the brightness of the moon anymore.

19:11Kristin Teßmar-Raible:Well, yeah, because this is Seattle. Like, it's cloudy most of the time in the winter there. And Horacio is still seeing this pattern, even in the winter. And then the moonlight is also competing with other forms of light in a city. Like, apparently, the moon, even when it's full, is still something like 50 times less bright than a single street light.

19:32Charlotte Helfrich-Förster:The fact is that we see very clear lunar rhythms in people living in a place where light pollution is way above the intensity of full moon nights. And we cannot explain that by moonlight. So what's going on?

19:51Horacio de la Iglesia:Was it just that they were partying more on a full moon? Yeah. You mean like going to full moon parties? I guess so. Well, you know, sitting out in the park, watching the full moon.

20:03Kristin Teßmar-Raible:I don't think so, because when you look at the data, it's not like people were like suddenly sleeping less just on the night where there is a full moon. What you actually see is this pattern where you kind of like sleep less and less gradually in the days leading up to the full moon. And then it kind of peaks and then you start sleeping more and more and more. and then the full moon happens and you keep sleeping more and more and kind of goes like up and down, up and down in this like wave pattern. And Horatio saw this across all his data. By now, I have no doubt that there's a lunar month modulation of sleep,

20:41Charlotte Helfrich-Förster:particularly when you see single people doing this beautiful sinusoidal oscillation in their sleep.

20:49Kristin Teßmar-Raible:Would you want to see the wave pattern?

20:50Horacio de la Iglesia:Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, there's a very nice wave pattern. there. Very intriguing.

20:58Kristin Teßmar-Raible:It's a beautiful sinusoidal pattern. It is a beautiful sinusoidal pattern. So yeah, it really doesn't feel like you could like create that pattern of sleep, even if you tried, right? It's not like people party a little bit more. Yeah. And if the moon affects our sleep, then that kind of opens the door to it maybe affecting us in other ways too, because we know that sleep can affect our mood and our mental health. And in fact, like there are actually studies on bipolar disorder, specifically this thing called rapid cycling bipolar disorder. And what the researchers are seeing there is that these patients seem to like be switching between mania and depression in a timing that kind of lines up with the cycles of the moon.

21:49Kristin Teßmar-Raible:And those researchers also think this could be related to sleep. Like maybe if you're losing sleep around the full moon, it might kind of trigger a manic state. What? And so now Horacio and some other scientists believe that like, yeah, it does seem like the moon is doing something strange here. That it's like somehow changing our bodies and our brains and affecting our sleep. and it's not just about how bright it is or partying more or whatever. It's like there's something else. What, though? How is it doing it? Well, exactly right. That's what we'll look at after the break.

22:39Horacio de la Iglesia:Welcome back. Like Meryl has promised to tell us why the lunar cycles might be getting into our body and somehow affecting our sleep. I don't know what's going on here, Meryl. This is strange.

22:53Kristin Teßmar-Raible:Well, I mean, this is where things get exciting, right? Because now we have this thing that the moon is doing to us and we just need to figure out how. And, you know, when I talk to people on the streets about this, about how the full moon could be affecting us, they had all sorts of ideas. I definitely think this is an energy thing.

23:13Horacio de la Iglesia:It's because all of us are really here in a sea of energy. It's that energy.

23:17Charlotte Helfrich-Förster:I feel like energy, like different types of energy, like that you, I don't know.

23:23Wendy Coates:I feel like it is. We're made of like 70 % water and like the moon controls the tide. So it would make sense that it has an effect on us too. Humans are 70 % water. So the moon is going to automatically influence us if we are water.

23:38Kristin Teßmar-Raible:its ults are actually only like 55 percent water but anyway let's let's look at this because like the general idea is that we know the moon creates tides in the oceans yes uh through like the pull of its gravity on water so what if it's doing something similar to us right okay and is there any evidence for that well first my question actually was just like okay sure it's like pulling on us a little bit, but like how much, like, is it realistic that it's a big enough force to do anything? So I asked an astronomer and a tidal expert and they didn't like laugh it off completely, but they did the calculations on like how big the forces were and they were tiny, like minuscule.

24:22Kristin Teßmar-Raible:One of them found that the force of the moon's gravity on our bodies is less than if you were just like walking by a tall building. Like that building next to you would have a bigger force on our bodies than the moon because it's like a lot closer. Yes.

24:39Horacio de la Iglesia:Okay.

24:41Kristin Teßmar-Raible:But still, like just because the force is small doesn't mean that it's not doing anything to anybody. Like I wondered if we knew of any animal that can sense this pull from the moon and thought of the animals that like live in the tidal zone, because those animals are really affected by the moon's gravitational pull. How big the tides are has this huge impact on their day-to-day life.

25:09Horacio de la Iglesia:Right. And so how are they detecting those changes? Is it just, you know, through the water or gravitational changes directly from the moon? Yeah.

25:21Kristin Teßmar-Raible:Yeah. So to find out, I called Professor Kristen Tesmer Reble at the University of Vienna in Austria, since she wrote a review about how animals are affected by the moon in different ways. So I asked her, do we know of any organism that can directly sense the changes from the

25:40Charlotte Helfrich-Förster:moon's gravity oh i don't know no um who uses it i mean not i mean you mean not obviously tidal

25:52Kristin Teßmar-Raible:changes not being jostled by the tides yeah but like directly sensing the moon's gravity sensing it uh i i am not aware of something like this so yeah the case for gravity i'd say is pretty weak Much like the gravitational force of the moon on us. Yeah, exactly.

26:11Horacio de la Iglesia:Okay, so it's probably not gravity. What else is there?

26:15Kristin Teßmar-Raible:Well, there's one other thing. So the Earth has this super cool magnetic field around it. And as the moon revolves around the Earth, it seems to like mess with this field. And we do know that some animals can sense the Earth's magnetic field.

26:34Charlotte Helfrich-Förster:We know organisms like migratory birds that use that for their long distance flights. And it's actually not only birds, also butterflies sense the magnetic field, right?

26:48Kristin Teßmar-Raible:And the way we think that they're doing this is through this protein called cryptochrome.

26:55Horacio de la Iglesia:Uh-huh. Sounds like something I should have invested in 10 years ago. What is it?

27:00Kristin Teßmar-Raible:Um, okay. So yeah, cryptochrome is a protein in our bodies that can interact with the magnetic fields. And it seems to be helping the birds know which direction to fly.

27:12Horacio de la Iglesia:Uh-huh. And do humans have cryptochrome?

27:17Kristin Teßmar-Raible:We do. We do have a version of cryptochrome. It's not the exact same protein that the birds have. but we actually do have a little evidence that our cryptochrome can sense the magnetic fields too and so maybe that's how the moon's affecting us because like okay what we would be looking for if you know the earth's magnetic field is the missing link right it maybe it should have a similar kind of wave pattern like that sinusoidal curve that we saw in Horacio's sleep data and then I stumbled on this graph where I was like, whoa. All right, let me show this to you.

27:55Horacio de la Iglesia:Show me the whoa graph. Is it the sinusoidal again? Because I don't know if I can handle that, Meryl. I don't know if I can handle it.

28:03Kristin Teßmar-Raible:So scroll down in the script.

28:06Wendy Coates:Whoa!

28:09Wendy Coates:Is it sinusoidal again? Is it sinusoidal?

28:17Horacio de la Iglesia:Yeah. If you didn't think you were listening to a nerdy podcast, you do now. That is, okay, so what is this magnetic field?

28:28Kristin Teßmar-Raible:Yeah, this is the change in magnetic fields over a lunar cycle. So the line in the middle is the full moon. The magnetic field is apparently lower in the days leading up to a full moon, just like Horacio saw, and then it gets like higher after the full moon. But I don't know if I've gone off the deep end. Like this paper is from like the 1960s. Yeah, it's hand-drawn. It's hand-drawn, that's for sure. I love these.

28:56Horacio de la Iglesia:Like someone used a ruler to make those lines. Okay, so what this shows us is that the moon affects the magnetic field in this sinusoidal pattern that is similar to the way that the moon seems to affect our sleep, step one. But then step two, has anyone figured out if the cryptochrome in us is actually detecting those changes to the magnetic field and that that is then affecting asleep?

29:34Kristin Teßmar-Raible:No, like nobody's actually like connected all the dots here to find out, okay, can we really sense the magnetic fields at all? And can that mess with their sleep? When Kristen was explaining this to me, there was lots of like hand waving going on and like emphasis that it's like all kind of just theoretical. So it's really unclear still. But this is a lot of wild speculation. Should I have to emphasize? Yeah, she said that this question of whether the moon is having like a subconscious effect on us is at the frontiers of our knowledge. It's like a black hole. But that doesn't mean that it's impossible or like a silly idea.

30:20Charlotte Helfrich-Förster:Just because it is a subconscious phenomenon, it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. I think people tend to say, oh, I cannot feel it and therefore it doesn't exist. But we usually don't feel our liver, at least hopefully not. But it's very existing, right?

30:38Kristin Teßmar-Raible:Yeah, it's doing all sorts of stuff to us. Exactly, exactly.

30:42Charlotte Helfrich-Förster:So, I mean, the fact that we are not consciously aware of something is true for a lot of our physiology.

30:49Kristin Teßmar-Raible:Do you think that the moon for sure is influencing people? I think yes. The reason why I think yes is that I'm a biologist. For me as a biologist, humans are just another type of animal. We're made of the same stuff as the worms. Exactly. At the end, exactly. Like this. With some few specifications that are a bit different. Yeah. From the larger perspective, it's martial.

31:21Horacio de la Iglesia:Okay, so here is where we are at. The cycles of the moon do seem to affect our sleep. somehow. We're not sure how. Last question. Can it affect blood coming out of our vaginas? You mean our menstrual cycles? Yes.

31:42Kristin Teßmar-Raible:Yeah, let's look at that. It comes up all the time. I've heard from a lot of people who think there's something there. So yeah, I called up a scientist who did a pretty wild study on this.

31:54Horacio de la Iglesia:Do you know describing a period-based study as a wild study is immediately making me think of just a scientist throwing around dirty tampons for some reason. I don't know why.

32:13Kristin Teßmar-Raible:I mean, it doesn't go that carnal, but it's, you know, it's wild in its own way. All right, let me tell you about it. Okay, okay. So the idea first came to her when she had this commute where she was walking a lot at night.

32:30Charlotte Helfrich-Förster:I was walking from the train station to my home, family home.

32:35Kristin Teßmar-Raible:And what did it look like on a night when there was a moon?

32:38Charlotte Helfrich-Förster:Oh, fantastic, because you could see everything. You don't need lights in the street. So I always loved the moon to be out.

32:45Kristin Teßmar-Raible:This is Charlotte Helphreik-Forster, senior professor at the University of Würzburg in Germany. And she noticed something about her period around this time.

32:55Charlotte Helfrich-Förster:My first day of menses was always around the full moon. And then I was really astonished. Oh, that's interesting.

33:03Horacio de la Iglesia:Do you know, Meryl, I'm the exact opposite. That I will ovulate around a full moon and get my period, I guess, in a new moon. but I just assumed it was because I'm a pretty regular cycle and that's just what a month is you know around 28 days or whatever sure but like if you think about it even that's pretty weird

33:27Kristin Teßmar-Raible:right like that for a lot of us our periods just happen to be 29 days long which is the same length as the lunar cycle? I guess so, right.

33:39Horacio de la Iglesia:Yeah, why are our cycles the same as the cycles of the moon? Okay, yeah.

33:47Kristin Teßmar-Raible:I mean, yeah, it could just be a coincidence, but maybe something else is going on here. And so, like, for Charlotte, she started wondering, how long have I been getting my periods at the full moon? Right. And luckily enough, she had actually been keeping track of when she was getting her period for basically her entire life. Oh, wow. When she started, when she first started getting her period.

34:13Charlotte Helfrich-Förster:My mother told me to make always a cross in my calendar at the first day of my menses. So I did it without thinking.

34:20Kristin Teßmar-Raible:And kept all these little calendars at her home in a cabinet. And so now she went back to check, like, has this always been a thing for me? Amazing. And just by eye, she could tell that, like, oh yeah, for like many years of my life, I've either been synced with the full moon or sometimes it was the new moon. And so she starts wondering, all right, how many people is this like true for? So she asks her mom and her sister if they kept their calendars and they did. And she looked at their data and saw similar stuff.

34:53Charlotte Helfrich-Förster:But of course, as a scientist, you know that three examples are not enough. And then I started to ask colleagues, friends, whether they by chance had kept any recordings of her menses.

35:05Kristin Teßmar-Raible:And so it took her about 10 years to collect this data from 22 women who had kept track of their cycles for an average of 15 years of their life. Wow. And so now we can find out, do people on average get their periods more often around the time of a full moon? Great.

35:23Horacio de la Iglesia:So what did she find?

35:24Kristin Teßmar-Raible:She saw that, yeah, there was something there. So in this group of 22 women, they were more likely to start their periods either around the time of a full moon, like especially the days leading up to a full moon, or the new moon. Oh, how curious. But like, I'm one of these people who does not think this is true for me. So I asked, how strong of an effect was it? Since I was curious, I looked at my data for the past few months, and it definitely was not sinking to the full moon. That is very important.

35:59Charlotte Helfrich-Förster:The effect is really very small. And to be honest, when you look at your entire cycle, it's only a small part during a cycle that is synchronous to the moon.

36:10Kristin Teßmar-Raible:So, yeah, I mean, obviously, it's not like everyone's getting their periods on the full moon.

36:15Charlotte Helfrich-Förster:Yeah, right.

36:15Kristin Teßmar-Raible:It's more like it upped your chances a little bit that you'd get your period on either a full moon or a new moon.

36:22Horacio de la Iglesia:Okay.

36:23Kristin Teßmar-Raible:But there's something else that I need to tell you about her study. So after it came out in 2021, all these other women start sending Charlotte of their calendars. They're like when they got their period. So then she got data from more than 100 other people and she tried crunching the numbers again. And here's what happened.

36:45Charlotte Helfrich-Förster:I was absolutely disappointed. when I pulled all the data, the new data that I had, I didn't see any synchronization to the moon anymore. So it was very different from my first study with the 22 women.

37:00Horacio de la Iglesia:Ah, that classic thing where you study something in a few people, get very exciting results, and then you study it in more and more people and realize it's not generalizable. We've seen this countless times before. Charlotte and I are the anecdote in the room that gets the headlines. Okay.

37:21Kristin Teßmar-Raible:I mean, Charlotte still thinks there could be something here. Like, she's been looking into whether light pollution is a factor. But she also pointed me to some other data. Like, okay, so there's an analysis that came out recently from a period tracking app. And it looked at seven and a half million cycles. And they didn't see any sinking to the moon whatsoever. This has actually made me feel more like a witch, you know,

37:49Horacio de la Iglesia:because obviously we couldn't.

37:50Kristin Teßmar-Raible:Because it's so rare.

37:51Horacio de la Iglesia:Yeah, we couldn't all be witches, you know.

37:54Kristin Teßmar-Raible:Well, I'm glad you feel special now. That's what I'm here for.

37:58Horacio de la Iglesia:But I guess we're all a bit witchy because the moon is affecting all of our sleep in this mysterious way.

38:08Kristin Teßmar-Raible:Don't patronize me just because I have sleep still. I don't feel like a witch.

38:18Kristin Teßmar-Raible:It's okay.

38:23Kristin Teßmar-Raible:Do you think that the moon is affecting you?

38:28Horacio de la Iglesia:I really love the moon. I love a big full moon. I like looking at it. I like thinking how small I am in this big universe. Reminds me of that. I love when you see it rising and it's just huge. I love it for all those reasons. I don't know if it's having some deeper subconscious effect on my body. What about you, Meryl? You've been researching this for a while. Has it changed your view of the moon?

39:04Kristin Teßmar-Raible:Yeah, I think it, I don't know. I feel like now I am less skeptical. Like when I was in the park and everybody was telling me about how they felt like the moon was just changing the energy and like they could feel it and that they knew there was like something there. I was just like rolling my eyes and like, sure, it's like changing the energy. But now I'm like, oh, actually, maybe it is. It's a magnetic field, which is like a kind of energy. It's just so mysterious. There is an effect, at least on our sleep, that we don't understand yet. I feel like I'm more humble now about like what's possible with our bodies and the moon.

39:46Horacio de la Iglesia:Do you want to yip with me? Yip, yip, yip, yip, yip, yip, yip, yip, yip, yip, yip, yip.

39:50Kristin Teßmar-Raible:Thanks, Meryl. Thanks, Wendy. All right, Meryl, how many citations in this week's episode? This week we have 52 citations. And if you go to our show notes, you can find links to the transcripts where you can see all of them and read more about the moon.

40:04Horacio de la Iglesia:Excellent. If you want to tell us what you thought of this episode, we'd love to hear from you. We are at science underscore VS on Instagram. I'm at TikTok, at Wendy Zook. Thanks, Meryl. Have a happy full moon.

40:17Kristin Teßmar-Raible:Oh, yeah. Be careful.

40:27Kristin Teßmar-Raible:This episode was produced by me, Meryl Horn, with help from Wendy Zuckerman, Rose Rimler, Michelle Dang, and Akedi Foster Keys. were edited by Blythe Sorrell. Mix and sound design by Bumi Hidaka. Fact-checking by Marlo Starling. Music written by Bumi Hidaka, Bobby Lord, Emma Munger, So Wiley, and Peter Leonard. Thanks to all the researchers we spoke to for this episode, including Dr. Ron Flick, Dr. Michael Smolenski, Michael Bevington, Dr. Laurel Sims, Professor Laura Prug, and Dr. Martin Neistin. Special thanks to Kevin Walsh and all the folks who chatted with me about the full moon. Science Versus is a Spotify Studios original Listen for free on Spotify Or wherever you get your podcasts And if you do listen on Spotify Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications We'll fact you soon