THE crocodile in Peter Pan had a ticking belly. We’ve got one too, except our ticking comes from the adrenal glands above our kidneys and not from a swallowed alarm clock.
The mammalian body clock was thought to be set exclusively by a part of the hypothalamus in the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). Now Henryk Urbanski and his colleagues at the Oregon National Primate Research Center in Beaverton, Oregon, have discovered a second clock – in the adrenal glands.
Urbanski and his team discovered rhythmic 24-hour fluctuations in gene activity in at least 322 genes in the adrenal…
