A blood test can now estimate your internal clock time using just 60 proteins

Key Findings

Night Shifts Are Quietly Damaging Coal Miners' Lungs 🫁

• In a cross-sectional study of 9,464 coal miners, greater cumulative night-shift exposure was linked to lower lung function — even after accounting for dust exposure.
• Lower expression of the clock gene PER1 partially explained the connection, with public data pointing to NF-κB-driven inflammation as a likely mechanism.

Eating in a Timed Window Blocked Weight Gain From a Disrupted Light Cycle 🍽️

• Male mice on a chronically shifting light schedule gained significantly more body fat than controls — despite eating the same number of calories — when allowed to eat freely.
• Restricting food access to a 12-hour window aligned with the dark phase erased that weight gain, suggesting meal timing, not light alone, is the primary driver of metabolic alignment.

Social Jetlag Hits Mental Health, Physical Symptoms, and Work All at Once

• A nationwide Japanese survey found that social jetlag — the mismatch between your biological clock and your work schedule — was simultaneously associated with worse mental health, more somatic complaints, and reduced work functioning.
• Most prior studies examined these outcomes separately; this one captured all three in the same population-based sample.

Evening Chronotype Linked to ADHD Symptoms — With Sleep as the Bridge

• In 100 adults seeking evaluation for attention complaints, being an evening type was associated with poorer sleep quality, which in turn was linked to higher cognitive disengagement — and that disengagement tracked strongly with both inattention and hyperactivity scores.
• The serial pathway through sleep and cognitive disengagement explained variance in symptoms that chronotype alone did not.

Bedroom Light at Night Is Linked to Depression in Kids — Especially Girls 💡

• Among 628 Shanghai students aged 10–12, those exposed to the highest levels of bedroom light between 9 p.m. and midnight had roughly 43% higher prevalence of depressive symptoms compared to those in the lowest exposure group.
• The association was significant on school nights and in girls, but not on weekends or in boys — suggesting the interaction of timing, biology, and routine matters.

Circadian Disruption in Colorectal Cancer Goes Deeper Than Clock Genes 🔬

• A systematic review of 43 studies found consistent links between dysregulation of clock genes — including PER1, BMAL1, and TIMELESS — and tumor proliferation, immune evasion, metabolic reprogramming, and treatment resistance in colorectal cancer.
• The authors frame this as a "Tumor Temporal State": a systems-level condition, not just a gene expression quirk, that touches nearly every dimension of how the cancer behaves.