Magnetic Fields May (Just May) Make Us Suicidal

Given that the ability to sense the Earth's magnetic field comes in pretty handy for pigeons, it's worth asking: Can humans sense it too? Oleg Shumilov of Russia's Institute of North Industrial Ecology Problems set out to answer this question, as Catherine Brahic reports in the New Scientist. After examining the planet's geomagnetic field activity from 1948 to 1997, he found that it peaked consistently three times a year: March through May, July, and October. A little cross-checking on the data revealed that those time periods coincided with the peaks in the number of suicides in Kirovsk, a city of around 30,000 people in the cold depths of northern Russia. Thanks to the handy rule of correlation vs. causation, Shumilov's discovery is a long way from providing definitive evidence that human sensitivity to magnetic field activity equals greater numbers of suicides at certain times. Still, it helps that his theory ...