Solar Silliness: The Heart-Sun Connection

, I learned about a curious new paper in Scientific Reports: Long-Term Study of Heart Rate Variability Responses to Changes in the Solar and Geomagnetic Environment by Abdullah Alabdulgader and colleagues. According to this article, the human heart "responds to changes in geomagnetic and solar activity". This paper claims that things like solar flares, cosmic rays and sunspots affect the beating of our hearts. Spoiler warning: I don't think this is true. In fact, I think the whole paper is based on a simple statistical error. But more on that later. Here's how the study worked. The authors - an international team including researchers from Saudi Arabia, Lithuania, NASA, and the HeartMath Institute (no, really) - recorded the heartbeats of 16 female volunteers. Data collection spanned a period of five months, with the cardiac recordings running for up to 72 hours at a stretch. These ECG recordings were then used ...