You've been wondering about that, too, haven't you? Prepare to be disappointed again, because the source of this bit of egregious misinformation is none other than that raving nutcase, Mike Adams of NaturalNews. He claims that astrology has a scientific basis:
Skeptics must be further bewildered by the new research published in Nature Neuroscience and conducted at Vanderbilt University which unintentionally provides scientific support for the fundamental principle of astrology -- namely, that the position of the planets at your time of birth influences your personality.
Hey, Vanderbilt is a good and respectable university. I wonder how they studied the effects of planets on personality. Short answer: they didn't. And Mike Adams explains it himself.
This study, conducted on mice, showed that mice born in the winter showed a "consistent slowing" of their daytime activity. They were also more susceptible to symptoms that we might call "Seasonal Affective Disorder."
That's old news. We've known about seasonal rhythms in physiology for a long, long time, and it's completely unsurprising. It's also unsurprising that Mike Adams somehow thinks seasons are correlated with the positions of any of the planets other than Earth itself. Because he's a moron.
Hey, Mike. Think. This is a study from Vanderbilt that shows that known seasonal phenomena, day length, dietary changes (oh, that should get him excited), even temperature can affect one's metabolism, and that maternal metabolism during pregnancy can have enduring effects on children. This is not the same as saying that the position of Jupiter in the sky or where Pisces is on the horizon can have any effect on your personality.
Oh, but this is Mike Adams, the kook who starts off talking about astrology and then goes into a rant about how cold fusion really works. Thinking isn't what he does.
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