Moon genes
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Science journalist Rebecca Boyle says her life revolves around the moon. I think about it more than most people. Her award-winning work has been featured in Nature, Science, The Atlantic, The New York Times, talking to astrophysicists and astronomers from around the world. Rebecca's thought so much about the moon that...

sometimes she gets a little protective. I've always loved the moon, so I kind of feel partial to it and like defensive about it. Who's dissing on the moon? Well, you'd be surprised. Astronomers are like, oh, it's like so bright. Like it can be really frustrating for people

people who study deep sky objects, which is like most astrophysicists. Right, right, right. They like diss the moon sometimes and I'm always like, but no, the moon is like really cool. It's the near sky object. It's the nearest thing and it's the most important thing, really. I've been following her writing on the moon for a long time. I've interviewed her on this show before, Noam Tu. She's kind of our go-to moon expert for Unexplainable. Yeah.

So I was excited when her first full-length book came out just last year. It lays out her big thesis, that the moon made us who we are.

My book is a story about the shared history between humanity and the moon. I think there's a lot that we still don't actually understand about that relationship. And the more I learned about how many questions we still have about the moon, that made me think about what else we don't know about it and its connection to us. Like, there probably is a literally molecular connection to the moon inside all life on Earth.

The moon is so much of a stabilizing force on this planet in so many ways. It's responsible for more than half of the mixing of the entire ocean through the tide. You know, if life originated in the deep ocean, which is the sort of more prevailing modern theory, the moon probably dredged it up and maybe exposed life to the sun for the first time.

Basically, life as we know it would not be possible without the moon. I definitely don't think so. This is Unexplainable. I'm Meredith Hognott. And for today's Unexplainable Book Club, we launch into Rebecca Boyle's book, Our Moon, where she explores the ways the moon continues to shape our world. Like, the moon doesn't get any credit for that, usually. ♪

The moon does not orbit the earth. Part of what I learned in Rebecca's book is that both earth and moon actually circle each other. They share a center of gravity. It's closer to the earth because the earth is way bigger. Together they spin through space, two parts of the same whole. That intimate relationship is what makes the moon

extends to the life on Earth, too, where the moon drives Earth's creatures on a molecular level. There is evidence that there are lunar genes that drive certain behaviors. And this is more obvious in marine animals, which makes sense because they rely on the tide. They really need to know what the moon phase is. And there's evidence that they have a genetic mechanism to do that.

So what are some of the coolest examples that you came across in your research of creatures in the ocean responding to the moon? One of my favorite ones is coral. You know, almost every species of coral responds to moonlight.

at least to the lunar cycle. And, you know, moonlight probably is the primary thing that they're responding to, but they don't even sense light. You know, most corals don't even have eyes. So what are they doing? Like, how are they seeing the moon, you know? And so it probably isn't quite as simple as that they're seeing it. It's probably that its gravitational presence overhead, you know, is also playing some kind of role.

But when the moon is full, corals will release their sperm and eggs at the same time. Like the scientists that study this, you know, joke about it. One of them calls it the greatest orgy on Earth. And we know that moonlight is a primary driver of that process. Like if the moon is not visible, if it's cloudy or something, they won't, they will wait. So they're like waiting to sync up.

To make sure that they're all deploying this hoppin' coral orgy at the same time. Yeah. And it's one of those things, again, that seems like logical when you think about it. Because how else are you going to coordinate that? Right. You know, like corals don't travel. They're not mobile. They don't have wristwatches. Yeah. And they don't meet up at certain places. Like they don't have migratory patterns like other animals that mate. So you have to have some other kind of cue that you all use. And in the ocean...

The moon is king. It makes sense that sea creatures, obviously, depending on the tide, would need to be really dialed in to moon cycles. But what about on land? Do plants and animals respond to the moon? They do. And I don't think we really understand why. Yeah.

Especially for plants. Like why would a little seedling need to be sensitive to the moon? But it is. And the movement of leaves and the growth of roots, they respond to lunar gravity. There's a Scottish botanist who...

who devoted a lot of his career to showing this connection between the moon and plant life. And before he died, he got an experiment flown on the space station where astronauts were looking at gene expression in Arabidopsis stelliana, which is the model plant. It's Thalecress. It's this little tiny, little watery plant. And

It's like the white mouse of botany. It's been thoroughly studied for decades. It's the plant you look at when you want to understand gene expression generally in plants. And they grew them on the space station and found the same lunar cycle that they find on Earth. Wow.

even when they're in space, in microgravity. So that suggests that there's some gravitational influence there, that the moon's presence in the sky is somehow altering the genes of plants.

So even when these plants weren't on Earth, they still respond to the moon's gravity? Yeah. There's some math you have to do to figure out where the moon is, where you are, because the space station orbits every 90 minutes. And so in his experiment, they showed that the plants changed their root movements every 45 and 90 and 135 minutes, which shows that they followed the rhythms of the moon, even when they were off-world movements.

Is it possible that we as humans have the moon also written into our DNA? I definitely think so. And I think this is one of these things that's been dismissed for the last century or so in medicine because...

It's hard to prove. You know, it sounds woo. It sounds like silly or witchcraft. And, you know, it's sort of easy to dismiss. Yeah. In part because this was thought to be the case for millennia. Like for almost all of written medical history, people believe that the planets and the moon, you know, astrology...

played a huge role in our health. I mean, the word lunacy and lunatic comes from the moon, like lunar. And people really believed for a long time. And there probably is some truth to the fact that the moon plays a

this role in our psychology, it changes how we behave and how we feel when the moon is full. There's evidence that people who have bipolar disorder experience heightened episodes of mania during full moons. So like lunatic asylum, like it's not, it's not, it's not crazy, you know? I mean, there probably is something going on there. And, you know, the issue is that

People are complicated. Society is complicated. And we can't really blame behaviors or activities on like one thing. And so it is simplistic to say the moon is like great, you know, driving people wild or whatever. But there's interesting correlations in various fields of human health.

And physiology and psychology, mental health and physical health, there's this possible connection that the full moon can increase the number of people having hemorrhages or undergoing a stroke or heart attack. What? Yeah. It's very thorny. But again, we don't know if it has a gravitational influence. And if that's the case...

How are we responding to that? Is there some physical change in the flow of our blood? Maybe. Looking at what happens to plants, it's not impossible. Like almost like a tide in our blood, in our veins? Exactly. That's crazy. Yeah. Is there a blood tide, you know? I mean, I don't know. And this, again, would be really difficult to study in a meaningful way, but like,

There's something, there's some cue that people seem to be responding to. After the break, why you might have felt a little different under the full moon last weekend.

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The moon haunts you. Is the moon influencing our bodies? Our biology? According to science writer and moon defender Rebecca Boyle, some of the most interesting research she's seen is from scientists actually trying to disprove the moon's effects. Like this 2021 paper from a German biologist looking into the connection between the moon and fertility.

She set out to disprove this. She was like, I don't think this is real. I think that, you know, we should be able to show looking at records that there's not really a strong enough connection between lunar cycles and human menstruation. So she went through people who had used an app and also taken diary entries of

The oldest record was like 42 years or something. Like it was the person's entire life. Yeah. Like their entire fertile life. And she went back and overlaid that on lunar cycles.

And it was such a strong correlation that she was like, oh, I think that's a real thing. And this was published in Science Advances. Pretty well regarded and I think super interesting. The main qualms people had with this study was that it wasn't a large population. So it was like a few dozen people. So it's not a population level statistic. But there are population level studies that have looked at reproductive health and

And in all those studies, the length of an average human menstrual cycle is the same as a lunar cycle. And like, there are people, of course, on both ends of that spectrum. There are people with much shorter menstrual cycles, people with much longer ones. And those are all considered normal and healthy. Like there's not a right or wrong number. Right. But if you

If you look at the statistical averages of people over long periods of time that are tracking these things, the numbers are the same. Like, it's 29 and a half days. And that's the length of a lunar cycle. And, like, that could totally be a coincidence. Right? Or not. We don't know. And we're never going to know. Right. But I think it's just really worth keeping it in mind that, like, there probably is some really profound ancestral connection here.

that we have on like a literally molecular basis to the presence of the moon. Yeah. One thing that we haven't touched on yet is sleep and how the moon or the moon phases might influence sleep. Is that something you came across in your research? Yeah, that's one of the more profound effects. Probably that impact, like the effect on sleep is

is one of the things that drives these knock-on effects. So yeah, sleep probably is one of the things that has a dramatic effect on our entire physiology. And so any changes in sleep are going to have effects on mental health and physical health, stress, your gut, your microbiome, all these things cascade from disruption to sleep. And we know for a fact the moon does disrupt sleep.

There was a study looking at grad students in Seattle measuring their sleep and relating it to full moon. But it was a really interesting study, and it showed people living in dorms, even when there's lots of artificial light at night, still had their sleep affected by the moon. Sleep decreases by several minutes on full moon nights. And my favorite study about this

went into a sleep lab. This was another scientist who was like, this sounds fishy to me. Like, I don't think this is real. I'm going to rule it out. And ran a study in a sleep lab. So windowless basement lab. And the participants were not told the real purpose of the study. They were told it was something else. And again, it was like a very profound change in the number of minutes of sleep and the length of their REM cycles and

The quality of their sleep, all these things showed this pretty dramatic change from dark moon cycles to when the moon was full. But the fact that even if you can't see it, this is happening is sort of weird. And like there's got to be some gravitational force at play here, too, because the people didn't even see the moon. Like, how are they going to know? Right. It's not like it's like shining in through their window or something disrupting their sleep. Right. Yeah.

So what are some of the next steps in pursuing this journey? Like, what are scientists still trying to figure out about the relationship of the moon and our bodies? I think, you know, doing more studies like the ones on marine organisms to understand better this circulunar rhythm and isolate the genes that might be responsible for that, because we're not sure yet what they are. And...

On just a broader level, I think just trying to understand what made Earth Earth and what made us who we are is sort of the goal. And if we can come to understand the influences that played a role in our evolution...

In the, you know, distant past, that's valuable just for our own knowledge and to understand better who we are and how we got here. And I think the moon plays a role in that story that has not been told very much. Yeah. Especially in modern medical science and health science and just even how to frame those questions. Yeah. Yeah.

What makes it so hard to study the moon's impact on our bodies? I mean, it's almost impossible to separate it from any other signal or pressure that you would be looking at. You know, you can't knock out people's genes to see, like, would this change this? Yeah. You can't do, like, controlled studies. But you can do population-level studies. You can do retrospective studies. There's been a lot of that. But...

It's also really hard to divorce human health from other things that mess us up, like our diet and air quality and artificial light at night affecting our circadian rhythms. There's so many confounding factors that...

It makes it really difficult. And I mean, any epidemiology is hard for that reason. But that doesn't mean it's not real. And that's the thing. I don't think when people think about overall health and environmental effects on health that they're thinking about the moon. But maybe they should. Maybe there's something going on there that we should think about.

And why do you think it's important to better understand the role of the moon in our lives or like appreciate that relationship? I mean, it's one of the primary features of Earth. And I don't think it's really thought about in that way, but it's as much a part of Earth as the ocean and the atmosphere and plate tectonics, you know, the things that make Earth what it is. And I think we need to really consider that

When we think about the origins of this planet and the origins of life on this planet and how we all live on this planet, but also just in terms of the moon, like, it doesn't really warrant a lot of attention from us in modern life. Like, once we went there, you know, and walked on it. Been there, done that. Yeah, it was like, cool. You know, we did that. Some white dudes flounced around for a while and, like, came home with rocks and, like, cool. Yeah.

And like, I love Apollo. You know, I think that's, it's the pinnacle of human achievement. Like I will never diss the Apollo missions, but to me, they were sort of lacking something, which was that's, that's not all there is. The moon is a world. The moon is a place that is very special and unique. There's no other place like it in our solar system or anywhere else we've ever looked. And, and,

That has to mean something. We need to keep in mind what the moon actually is and what it represents to us and what we owe it. What do we owe the moon now after all this history and all the things it's done for life on earth? When I see it sometimes in my window and it's full, I'm like,

Hope I did right by you, Moon. I hope people care a little more now. That's the most success I can imagine for this book is like if it makes people think about the moon in a different way and appreciate it in a different way, then I have done my job. This one's for you, Moon. Exactly. You can learn more about this and so much more about the moon in Rebecca Boyle's book,

Our Moon. How Earth's celestial companion transformed the planet, guided evolution, and made us who we are. This episode was produced by me, Meredith Hodnot. I also run the show. We had editing from Julia Longoria, with help from Jorge Just.

mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala, music from Noam Hassenfeld, production support from Thomas Liu and Mandy Nguyen, and fact-checking from Melissa Hirsch. Bird Pinkerton bent over to read the note when the floor started to shake, and then a sudden crash. The ceiling had collapsed in around her, but the control panel and the note hadn't been touched.

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