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by Stefano Arlaud - December 10, 2025in Cognitive Science, Sleep [Adobe Stock] Most animals, including humans, carry an internal lunar clock, tuned to the 29.5-day rhythm of the Moon. It guides sleep, reproduction and migration of many species. But in the age of...

For tens of thousands of years, our ancestors have used the stars to foretell future events. When people come out to view the stars at Stonehenge Aotearoa, we identify important constellations in the sky. A constellation is a group of stars forming a pattern in the...

If you are up before dawn and the sky is clear, you will see a brilliant star in the east. This is the ‘Morning Star’. Actually, it is not a star (a star is a Sun), it is the planet Venus. Venus is the brightest star-like object in the sky. At maximum brightness, if...

The Earth is the jewel of the Solar System, the only world orbiting the sun that is teeming with life. This comes as no surprise when you examine the nature of life. All life on Earth, from microbes to human beings, is based on the carbon atom. It is difficult to...

Matariki, which means ‘Little Eyes’, is a cluster of stars also known as the Pleiades and the Seven Sisters. On a clear dark night you can see, with good eyesight, about seven stars. However, these are just the brighter members of a cluster of more than 1,000 stars....

The most brilliant region of the Milky Way comes directly overhead on a winter’s evening. Looking up you will notice that there is a dark, almost black rift running along the centre of the brightest region. Today we know that this dark rift is formed by vast clouds of...

The Pleiades, also known as The Seven Sisters, is the brightest and most celebrated cluster of stars in the sky. The cluster contains more than 400 stars but only six are easily seen with the unaided eye. The individual cluster stars are not particularly bright, but...

Near the center of Stonehenge Aotearoa is a five meter tall needle of stone called an obelisk. Near noon on a sunny day it casts a shadow on a structure on the ground called an Analemma. The point of the shadow tells us the date and the true length of the day, which...