The Earth’s magnetic field could influence how quickly we age, a new study has suggested.
According to research on fruit flies by scientists at the University of Nottingham, being shielded from the effects of the Earth’s magnetic field could increase lifespan by up to 20 per cent.
Escaping its effects, however, isn’t as simple as stepping indoors: the Earth’s magnetic field passes through buildings – and through our bodies.
“We live our entire lives within the Earth’s magnetic field,” said Prof Lisa Chakrabarti, who co-led the study.
“It passes through our bodies, our cells and every living organism on the planet, yet we know surprisingly little about whether and how this invisible force affects the way our cells work.”
To investigate this, researchers kept some fruit flies inside a magnetic shield (a nickel-iron box that blocks almost all of the Earth’s magnetic field) and compared them with flies kept outside.
Because previous research suggested magnetic fields can affect mitochondria – the tiny structures that provide cells with energy – they tested two types of fly: healthy ones, and others with a faulty gene called Pink1, which causes their mitochondria to malfunction.
The results were striking. The Pink1 flies lived around 20 per cent longer inside the shield, although their ability to move and climb declined. Healthy flies, meanwhile, became better climbers when shielded from the Earth’s magnetic field, but did not live longer.
The findings suggest the Earth’s magnetic field could play a role in ageing, but its effects may depend on the health of an organism’s mitochondria.
Exactly why remains unclear, and the researchers caution that much more work is needed to establish whether anything similar happens in humans.
A shield for life on Earth
Earth’s magnetic field is generated largely by molten iron moving around in the planet’s outer core. This magnetism extends far out into space, where it helps deflect the solar wind – a stream of charged particles from the Sun – as well as harmful radiation.
This protective shield is thought to have played an important role in making Earth hospitable to life.
Scientists already know that some animals, including migratory birds, can detect the Earth’s magnetic field and use it to navigate. But much less is known about whether this ever-present force also affects the basic processes taking place inside cells.
“Research in this area is sparse, focusing mainly on how migrating animals sense magnetic fields,” said doctoral candidate Jacob Reed, a co-author of the study. “Yet we still know very little about why all living organisms need or don’t need a magnetic field to function normally in the first place.”
Understanding how the Earth’s magnetic field affects living things could be particularly important as astronauts spend longer away from our planet.
Explorers travelling to the Moon or Mars, for example, would spend prolonged periods beyond the Earth’s protective magnetic field, exposing their bodies to a very different magnetic environment from the one in which life evolved.
The new research was published in the journal Aging.
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