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An impeccable time series, published in 1930, consisting of hourly observations on colony advance in a fluid culture of E. coli, was analyzed by a periodogram and power spectrum in 1961. While the original senior author had emphasized specifically periodicity with no estimate of period length, he welcomed further analyses. After consulting his technician, he knew of no environmental periodicity related to human schedules other than an hourly photography. A periodogram analysis in 1961 showed a 20.75-h period. It was emphasized that "... the circadian period disclosed is not of exactly 24-h length." Confirmations notwithstanding, a committee ruled out microbial circadian rhythms based on grounds that could have led to a different conclusion, namely first, the inability of some committee members to see (presumably by eyeballing) the rhythms in their own data, and second, what hardly follows, that there were "too many analyses" in the published papers. Our point in dealing with microbes and humans is that analyses are indispensable for quantification and for discovering a biologically novel spectrum of cyclicities, matching physical ones. The scope of circadian organization estimated in 1961 has become broader, including about 7-day, about half-yearly, about-yearly and ex-yearly and decadal periodisms, among others. Microbial circadians have become a field of their own with eyeballing, yet time-microscopy can quantify characteristics with their uncertainties and can assess broad chronomes (time structures) with features beyond circadians. As yet only suggestive differences between eukaryotes and prokaryotes further broaden the perspective and may lead to life's sites of origin and to new temporal aspects of life's development as a chronomic tree by eventual rhythm dating in ontogeny and phylogeny.

A scientific optimization may become possible in ethics to the extent to which any reproducible since cyclic features of spirituality and of criminality become measurable. Should either or both the 'good' or the 'bad' be found to be at least passively influenced by cyclic physical environmental factors, as is putatively the case, these aspects of behavior may eventually become actively manipulable, perhaps utilizable for human survival. Toward this goal, chronomics has already mapped time structures in religious behavior that can lead to a study of underlying geographic/geomagnetic latitude-associated mechanisms. This paper, with further but clearly insufficient data, revealing the hurdle of relative brevity of the available time series constitutes a plea for much longer and denser worldwide time series, for further endeavors in various methods of analyses, some of which are promisingly available.

Half-hourly systolic (S) and diastolic (D) blood pressure (BP) and heart rate (HR) monitoring with gaps demonstrates transient elevations of unknown origin of the chronome (time structure)-adjusted mean, the MESOR, M, of BP, and of the circadian double amplitude of BP of TS, a clinically healthy-appearing engineering student who was 27 years of age at the start of the study. An assessment of large and small arterial vessel elasticity was in keeping with no detection of functional or structural alteration in her vasculature. The recovery of normality in BP endpoints at the time of this report is speculatively associated with a weight loss of 40 pounds and the formation of a friendship by correspondence. Whatever the underlying mechanisms of a long series of abnormal records may be, a 'baseline' can include weeklong spans of abnormality and is best replaced by comparisons with chronomic reference values.

Taking the heart rate (HR) for one cycle, whether to examine behavior in the region of periods of 1 s, 1 day, 1 week, 1.3 or 10.5 years, etc., is hazardous. Replications, when possible are mandatory for examining altered variability, whatever the period(s) involved may be. This replication in the individual, and across individuals when the periods are long, measured in decades, may serve for diagnosis and treatment. This rule applies in particular to a seemingly transient circadian hyper-amplitude-tension (CHAT), an over peer-threshold variability in blood pressure (BP), based on the fit of a 24-h cosine curve to time series of appropriate length, rather than to a mere snapshot covering just a single day or week. Transient CHAT may turn into intermittent CHAT, as determined in two cases presented herein. One case of transient CHAT could be so named after a successful treatment (Rx) change eliminated CHAT as an effect validated by monitoring at 30-min intervals for a 7-day span on a new treatment. CHAT disappeared for over 300 consecutive half-hourly measurements, but thereafter it reappeared. During the ensuing nearly continuously monitored 5 years, CHAT continued to appear and disappear sometimes without a treatment change. In another case, which was responsive to a change in the timing of medication, CHAT also disappeared and thereafter reappeared. In a short-term perspective of weeks or months of monitoring, CHAT seemed to be transient, but further monitoring again revealed it to be intermittent. Cases of intermittent CHAT require follow-up for outcomes by comparison with the population at large. Miniaturized instrumentation for their detection should be a high priority, but it must be realized that the automatic ambulatorily functioning monitors, available at 10% of the regular price through a BIOCOS project (corne001@umn.edu), already signify great progress, as compared to previously used manual measurements made around the clock by hypertensive opinion leaders in medicine from diagnosis to death. On automatically collected time series of BP and HR, gliding pergressive spectral windows as such, or such pergressive windows aligned further with global spectral windows, visualize the changing dynamics involved in health and disease, in the steps of Werner Menzel and Paolo Scarpelli.

In order to re-examine the extent to which secular circulatory variation can be resolved into possibly accountable, if not yet predictable behavior, the 15-year record of blood pressure and heart rate of an adult male cardiologist (Y.W.) is reanalyzed. Gliding spectral windows with an interval of 4 years progressively displaced throughout the data series examine monthly means from August 1987 to August 2002. A circannual variation is only intermittent and appears to drift for years. A circasemiannual variation is consistent and prominent, yet only for a fraction of the record examined. By contrast to the circadian rhythm in blood pressure and heart rate, which is reliably detectable in most subjects in clinical health, the circannual variation in the human circulation is inconsistent and hence should be monitored, as in this case for its assessment as one goes, a conclusion that also applies to the circasemiannual variation, prominent for years but not detected thereafter. The results prompt the search for interactions between the photic, thermic and societal effects of the seasons that, if solely pertinent, should yield a consistent 1-year spectral component. That non-photic effects may also play an important role may point to modulation by solar cycle stage and solar cycle number, perhaps mediated by the solar wind. This conclusion is extended in proof to the role played by the most recently discovered transannual component in human blood pressure and heart rate, which is a probable further signature of the solar wind. The beating of the transannual and circannual components documented on another data series may contribute to the lack of a consistent 1-year synchronized circannual variation in this case and many others.

Gliding spectral windows illustrate the changes as a function of time in the relative prominence of signals in a given frequency range, viewed in 3D or as surface charts. As an example, the method is applied to a 2,189-year series of averages of ring measurements on 11 sequoia trees published by Douglass. Analyses of the original data and after filtering reveal, among others, components with periods of about 10.5 and 21 years similar to the Schwabe and Hale solar activity cycles. An alignment of gliding spectra with a global spectrum serves to define, by minima, the ranges of variability around the anticipated Schwabe and Hale cycles. This procedure may have more general applicability when dealing with ranges of only transiently synchronized, wobbly, and perhaps sometimes free-running periodicities. Solar activity is known to affect climate and changes in climate are reflected to some extent in tree growth. The spectral structure in tree rings could serve not only to check any relations of climate with sunspots, auroras and more modern measures of solar activity, but also to check any purely mathematical extrapolations from the much shorter available actual data on solar activity. With such extrapolated series and the data analyzed herein, the task remains to align physical and physiological variables to further study the influence of natural environmental factors near and far on biota, including international battles, which cover an even longer span of 2,556 years.

Self-experimentation concerns not only scientists, but also each individual for the sake of his/her chronobiologic health and science literacy, eventually to be acquired in primary and secondary education. Public education ensures that everybody who knows how to read or write can dispense with the service of a costly scribe. At all ages, public education can teach equally well how to find out whether one's blood pressure (BP) and heart rate (HR) responds to an increase in sodium intake with a rise, with no change or with a decrease in BP. This task and many others could become a matter of informed self-surveillance. Whenever there are inter-individual, sometimes opposite differences in response, government-sponsored trials on groups that do not consider such differences cannot solve what only the individual can do, at first by help from schools. Eventually special institutions may be designed for chronomics, the monitoring, interpretation and archivization of chronomes (time structures; from chronos = time and nomos = rule) of biological variables, also charged with a demographic analyzing and reporting system. Each individual's properly coded record, to guard confidentiality, becomes part of a promptly accessible database for one's own needs and for society's requirements. What individuals and small groups started as chronobiology, what is immediately available on back burners, as a service by an international project on the biosphere and the cosmos (BIOCOS) (corne001@umn.edu) could become a public system of planned surveillance archivization of one's rhythms from womb to tomb. Alterations of a rhythm's amplitude or acrophase or of a deterministic or other chaotic endpoint, such as a correlation dimension and approximate entropy, or of a standard deviation, among a multitude of other endpoints, can signal (in the otherwise neglected normal range) reversible risk elevations. If these elevated risks are detected and prompt the institution of countermeasures, such prehabilitation can save the cost of rehabilitation or of long-term care after morbid events; suffering also can be prevented such as that by those who are unlucky enough to helplessly survive a massive brain, heart or societal "stroke". As an equally important dividend, science gains in basic and applied terms, as illustrated herein by the demonstration of a trans-year, an approximately 1.3 to 1.6-year, heretofore unknown component of the human BP and HR spectrum, beating with the circannual component and characterizing the same data. Chronomically interpreted self-monitoring is a civic duty for both one's health and everybody's science.

System time is defined as the duration (T) and sampling density (deltat) of a given study. A time horizon is obtained by combining analytical results on endpoints of time structures (chronomes), usually on control groups, from accumulating diverse studies carried out with drastically different values of T and deltat. These two design considerations depend upon and are limited by resources. The desideratum of a small At e.g., for studies of chaotic endpoints, limits T, e.g., has thus far precluded a continuous mapping of decadal cycles in endpoints such as the approximate entropy or the correlation dimension. Time horizons are being documented for an increasing number of variables that undergo cycles with infra-annual frequencies - with one cycle in about one, two and/or five decades - in the biosphere as in the environment. These infra-annuals, in and around us, modulate ultra-annuals, including circadians, as well as about 7-day (circaseptan) and about half-yearly (circasemiannual) cycles, all prominent, e.g., in geophysical and biospheric specta. Neglect of infra-annual chronomics can lead to blunders. A statistically highly significant decrease in the excretion of steroidal metabolites (or in heart rate variability) may be misinterpreted as premature aging if it lasts for several years, and may be unnecessarily acted upon, e.g., by drugs. The decrease, however, may only be transient, occurring only during a given stage of a circadecadal cycle, and it may be followed for the next several years by an also spurious "rejuvenation", possibly misinterpreted as a drug effect. When recognized as the alternating stages of decadal cycles and assessed with an affordable deltat, infra-annuals of variables involved in major problems of our day, including homicides and wars, may lead us to manipulable internal or external mechanisms, and thus, eventually, possibly to countermeasures to crime and terror as well as to the optimization of aims such as spirituality.

During the past half-century, the differences found in the spectral element of marriages vs. divorces in Tokyo reveal a half-year aspect which increasingly dominates in marriages, probably as a result of a mix of socio-economic, climatic and/or geomagnetic, as well as human affection-related factors, On the other hand, a decadal component is prominent in divorces, possibly in association with non-photic solar activity. Sparser (yearly, not monthly) records, obtained over a century at different latitudes in Japan, demonstrate that the decadal components are not consistent in moving spectra of original (as yet not detrended) data. Longer and denser series over much greater differences in latitudes and longitudes will have to be subjected to a much more thorough scrutiny, in conjunction with a series of possibly pertinent variables, to assess the contributions of different sources of variation in different areas of Japan and world wide, preferably in democratic, non-combatant areas, where the socio-economical, political and other war-associated conditions are mostly in the background.