Today’s Visualized examines a bizarre, stormy phenomenon in forests. But first, catch up on the latest science news, including the Moon’s magnetic mood swings and the mysterious silencing of some of the world’s most pristine habitats.
PHYSIOLOGY | CELL METABOLISM
Why living the high life reduces the risk of diabetes
Living in the mountains isn’t just good for skiing and hiking—diabetes rates are lower in people who live at high altitudes. The explanation behind this curious correlation has remained unclear. Now, researchers report that the credit likely goes to red blood cells, which suck up glucose to help the body adapt to low oxygen conditions.
A team of researchers had previously found that when mice adapt to high altitudes, the amount of sugar in their blood drops. To find out why, they examined red blood cells, which increase in number when the animals are in low-oxygen conditions. They discovered that the red blood cells from mice born and raised in hypoxic conditions sucked up glucose like a sponge compared to ones from mice kept in normal levels of oxygen. All that extra glucose got converted into molecules that aid in the release of oxygen to tissues, helping the animals survive when there’s little oxygen to spare.
To apply their findings to diabetes treatment, the researchers tested a drug called HypoxyStat that mimics low-oxygen conditions by making the hemoglobin in red blood cells hang on more tightly to oxygen. When the drug was administered to diabetic mice, their blood sugar levels dropped, suggesting the strategy has potential. “There’s a lot of work to do before any of this reaches patients, but the biology is genuinely encouraging ,” senior author Isha Jain told BBC Science Focus.
Apollo samples suggest the Moon once produced magnetic fields comparable in strength to Earth’s today. New research finds that the magnetism was fleeting. NASA
The origins of the Moon’s ancient magnetic field have long been a mystery. Some of the rock samples taken from its surface during the Apollo missions suggest that the field was powerful for several million years of its history, but the Moon’s core, the part often responsible for generating a field, is tiny. For decades, scientists have wondered how such a strong field could be formed and maintained by such a small core. To complicate the picture, some rocks from the same time period showed a contrastingly weak field, leaving planetary scientists baffled.
“It’s a creative idea from an observation that someone hasn’t made before , and it makes testable predictions that we can now go and assess,” said planetary scientist Benjamin Weiss. Experts don’t think this new theory explains the whole history of lunar magnetism, but it serves as an intriguing and possible explanation for hundreds of millions of years during which these episodes took place.
Species that inhabit lowland tropical rainforests had once seemed relatively sheltered from climate change. Temperatures have crept up more slowly in the tropics than at higher latitudes. Dense canopies shield the forest floor from the worst heat.
But at research sites across the tropical Americas, birds are vanishing from surprising places—expanses of forest untouched by fires, chainsaws, or bulldozers. And these aren’t migratory species in decline because of habitat loss on distant continents; many spend their entire lives in a single patch of trees.
These enigmatic declines have received little publicity. But they are setting off alarm bells among scientists who monitor birds in places as far flung as Panama, Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil. “It’s a big story ,” said Bette Loiselle, an ornithologist who has spent more than two decades studying birds in Ecuador’s Yasuní Biosphere Reserve, a part of the Amazon harboring some of the world’s richest biodiversity. In the seemingly healthy forest there, she’s watched sightings of once-familiar birds dwindle. “It’s someplace that you think, ‘This should not be happening.’”
Much as Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring warned that vanishing birds and insects signaled a pesticide-induced ecological collapse, researchers fear the disappearance of these birds is a sign that climate change is now reaching deep into intact tropical jungles and upending entire ecosystems. Now, they’re on a mission to pinpoint exactly what is going on, and why.
It won’t be easy to trace how climate change or other forces might be unraveling complex tropical ecosystems and harming the birds. But in the Brazilian Amazon, scientists have embarked on an experiment they hope will provide some clues. It is both ambitious and, at first glance, quixotic: They are watering a rainforest.
A new wood product called mass timber could help meet the demand for environmentally conscious building materials. The University of Arkansas Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design is educating the next generation in mass-timber innovation.
During thunderstorms, electrical fields at the tips of a tree’s needles create a corona, or a faintly glowing plasma. WILLIAM BRUNE
The movie Avatar mesmerizes with its bluish-purple, glowing trees. New research shows Pandora isn’t so special: Earth’s trees glow, too.
The glow is more accurately called a corona, and scientists have theorized for a half-century that it happens during thunderstorms. When an electrically charged, passing storm cloud induces an opposite charge in the ground below it, the ground charge seeks to close the gap and finds the best conduit to the sky: tree trunks. At the tippy top leaves, the electric charge concentrates, then discharges into a brief outburst that shimmers in ultraviolet (UV) wavelengths. But while coronae had been seen in the lab, they had never been found in real trees.
To hunt for coronae, meteorologists outfitted a 2013 Toyota Sienna with a special UV camera and a periscope, then drove from Florida to Pennsylvania. They got especially lucky in North Carolina, where a long storm enabled them to observe a sweetgum and pine tree , both of which displayed pinpricks of UV light that flitted between leaves and branches. It’s proof that glowing trees are real, though scientists still don’t know if all that sparking damages them.
Coronae are “some of the other stuff that thunderstorms do, that maybe are not as spectacular [as lightning] but still have an important impact on our environment,” physicist Joseph Dwyer told ScienceAdviser.
The U.S. Census Bureau spent 6 years preparing for a test this spring of ways to make the 2030 decennial census both more accurate and less expensive. But this month, the Trump administration discarded many of those changes and replaced them with an approach researchers warn will likely do the opposite. “It’s no longer a test of how to conduct the decennial census,” explained one expert. “The changes make no sense and are not something the Census Bureau would have done on its own.”
Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) can significantly reduce the incidence of HIV. But where the virus is most prevalent, people have to travel—sometimes far distances—to be tested before receiving the preventative drug. Now, a large-scale study in Kenya and Uganda finds new infection rates can be cut by 70% by simply delivering the tests and medications, using a smartphone app to coordinate care. “I think the results will be a game changer for control of HIV and other diseases,” one expert said.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the world’s largest research institution, has told its researchers it plans to stop paying to publish their papers in dozens of international free-to-read journals it regards as too expensive, including Nature Communications, Cell Reports, and Science Advances. In 2025, approximately 10% of papers in Nature Communications and Science Advances had a CAS-affiliated author, and about 40% of papers in each had an author at any institution in China.
It’s insane that you would pick the world’s largest prison for journalists to hold a science journalism conference.
—Jackson Ryan, The Science Journalists Association of Australia
The 2029 World Conference of Science Journalists (WCSJ) will take place in Beijing, following a decision by the board of the World Federation of Science Journalists (WFSJ) in December 2025—a move that has sparked controversy.
With contributions from Hannah Richter, Perri Thaler, and Warren Cornwall
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