Tag: Moon’s magnetic mood swings

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.

Now, based on composition analysis of lunar samples, researchers are proposing a new hypothesis to solve the puzzle: Between 3.5 and 4 billion years ago, the Moon underwent repeated episodes in which dense, titanium-rich rocks near its core-mantle boundary heated up, melted, and rose toward the surface as volcanic lava . A new paper describing this process explains how these events intermittently boosted the flow of heat from the Moon’s core, switching on short, powerful bursts of magnetic field strength around the Moon.

“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.

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.

With contributions from Hannah Richter, Perri Thaler, and Warren Cornwall

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