Are Environmental Toxins Causing Disease by Disrupting Our Circadian Rhythms?

Disruption to our innate circadian rhythms, or biological clocks, has been linked with a wide range of human disorders. New studies with the tiny aquatic zooplankton Daphnia raise the question of whether human circadian rhythms might be affected by the environmental toxins to which we are exposed every day. The research, by a team at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, found that circadian rhythms were significantly disrupted in Daphnia that had adapted to environmental pollution from road salt an