Why Daylight Boosts Immunity
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You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey Shore Wavers, Regina Barber here. And Burleigh McCoy. With our bi-weekly science news roundup featuring the hosts of All Things Considered. And today we have one of our favorites, Ari Shapiro.
Only one of your favorites? It's always an honor to be here.
One of our five favorites.
Well, let's get to the stories. I hear today we've got one on the immune system telling time.
Contact lenses that allow you to see infrared light.
And a hawk they may be using traffic to hunt for prey.
All that on this episode of Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
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All right, Ari, where do you want to start?
It sounds to me like your immune system may be in overdrive right now, Gina. So out of solidarity and sympathy, you want to tell us about the immune system telling time?
Yes. I'm going to let Burley start though, but yes, that's sweet.
Yeah. So scientists have known that our immune responses are different depending on what time it is and that we're actually better at mounting an immune response in the daytime. And this makes sense since we evolve to be more active in the day and so more likely to get an injury or infection. So by day, the immune system is primed to fight potential invaders, which it does by causing inflammation and And at night, it goes anti-inflammatory to recover.
Wild. How does the immune system know whether it's day or nighttime?
Yeah, many immune cells have a built-in circadian clock, like a lot of cells in our body. But there's some immune cells that don't even live a full day. Scientists wanted to know if they could tell time.
They're the frontline responders, right? They show up with all the energy. They try and kill off everything that they can, and then they book it out of here. And then they die.
This is immunologist Jennifer Hurley at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She's talking about a special immune cell called a neutrophil that's really important at fighting off infections. And she says scientists hadn't really studied circadian rhythms in neutrophils because they die so fast.
Why even bother having neutrophils? a circadian rhythm and something that's not going to be very long lived.
Fascinating question. How did scientists go about trying to answer it?
Well, a different group of researchers used baby zebrafish, which are transparent, to watch how fluorescent bacteria interacted with fluorescent neutrophils. And they found that neutrophils can indeed tell whether it's day or night. We talked to immunologist Chris Hall, who was part of that research team.
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