Season 3 – Episode 2: City lights, country nights – Circadian rhythms in urban and rural life

How does life in cities versus rural areas shape our circadian rhythms? How does access to electricity — or the lack of it — impact sleep timing? And what happens to our circadian rhythms when we move from an urban setting to camping outside? Our guest Luísa Klaus Pilz (Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin) comments on field studies carried out when she was a PhD student and postdoc at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Laboratório de Cronobiologia e Sono - HCPA/UFRGS). Links and resources related to the episode’s content https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-29494-4 https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/physiology/articles/10.3389/fphys.2021.773969/full https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)31522-6 Timestamps (00:00) Intro (00:44) Questions from a Londoner (03:07) Guest introduction (03:57) Why care about rural vs urban light? (07:28) Sleep changes with urbanization (09:40) The effects of electricity and artificial light (10:49) Quilombola communities (16:38) Metabolic health differences (20:53) Rural occupations and light exposure (24:00) Other differences in behaviour (25:22) Adapting to a different environment (28:27) Future research questions (31:49) Outro For feedback and questions, you can contact us at: [email protected] Follow us on social media to stay up to date with our episodes and discover related content: Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/lightoclock.bsky.social Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lightoclockpodcast/ Website: https://www.tscnlab.org/podcast