Feature

Full Moon Sends More Dogs and Cats to Emergency Room

By Robert Roy Britt, LiveScience Managing Editor

Injuries and illness among dogs and cats seems to be higher during full moon than at other times of the month, a new study finds. But researchers don't know why.

The study, reported in the July 15 issue of the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, finds emergency room visits for these pets increases during or near the full moon. In studying 11,940 cases at the Colorado State University Veterinary Medical Center, the researchers found the risk of emergency room visits to be 23 percent higher for cats and 28 percent higher for dogs on days surrounding full moons.

The types of emergencies ranged from cardiac arrest to trauma.

"If you talk to any person, from kennel help, nurse, front-desk person to doctor, you frequently hear the comment on a busy night, 'Gee is it a full moon?'" said study leader Raegan Wells of the university's College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. "There is the belief that things are busier on full-moon nights."

Belief does not make for good science, however. And despite the newfound numbers, Wells doesn't know what sort of lunacy is at play.

"It is difficult to interpret the clinical significance of these findings," she said.

Research into mysterious lunar connections has a long history of baffling and mixed results. A pair of studies in 2001 looked into how many humans are bitten by animals during full moons. British researchers found a lunar link, while the separate study in Australia uncovered no connection.

More recently, scientists found that beach pollution is worse during the full moon. That discovery, however, is linked to real variations in tides related to the lunar cycle.

Pinning animal and human behavior to the moon's movements has proved elusive. One suggestion for some observed changes is simply that more people (and pets) are out during the full moon because the night is bright and good for walking. This could lead to more mischief, too, and could explain the recent decision by some British police departments to increase patrols during full moon.

New Device Turns Waste Heat into Electricity

By LiveScience Staff

Physicists have developed a way to turn heat into sound and then electricity, suggesting a new way to effectively recycle waste energy.

“We are converting waste heat to electricity in an efficient, simple way by using sound,” said the scientist who led the effort, Orest Symko of the University of Utah. “It is a new source of renewable energy from waste heat.”

Symko's recycling devices are cylinder-shaped “resonators” that fit in the palm of your hand. Each cylinder contains a stack of material with a large surface areasuch as metal or plastic plates, or fibers made of glass, cotton or steel woolplaced between cold and hot heat exchangers.

When heat is applied, the heat builds to a particular threshold where hot, moving air produces sound at a single frequencylike air blown into a flute.

“You have heat, which is so disorderly and chaotic, and all of a sudden you have sound coming out at one frequency,” Symko said.

The sound waves then squeeze what is called a piezoelectric device (“piezo” means pressure or squeezing). The pressure created produces an electric voltage. Symko says it is similar to when you hit your "funnybone" or the nerve on outside of your elbow, thereby generating that weird, painful pinch, which is actually an electrical nerve impulse.

Symko plans to test the devices within a year at a military radar facility and the University of Utah's hot-water-generating plant. (The U.S. Army funded the study in hopes the technology can be used to create a portable source of energy.)

Symko expects these devices could be used within two years as an alternative to the photovoltaic cells that currently convert sunlight into electricity, and could also provide a new way to cool laptops and other computers, and a to generate electricity from the heat released by nuclear power plant cooling towers.