Your Breathing Pattern Is Like A Fingerprint
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Hey, short wavers, Regina Barber here. And Rachel Carlson. With our biweekly science news roundup featuring the hosts of All Things Considered. And today we have the great, the legendary Mary Louise Kelly. Way to lay on the pressure. Lots and lots of pressure. So I am told we are going to get to a story about how humans have unique nasal fingerprints. Looking forward to that. Plus what's really in a dinosaur's stomach.

and an unexpected reason why droughts are getting worse. All that on this episode of Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.

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All right, Mary Louise, where do you want to start? I got to go straight to the nasal fingerprints. What do you have? Yeah, okay. Mary Louise, Gina, I want you both to take a big breath through your noses. Yeah, let's breathe. Pfft.

So that sniff you just took. Can we breathe out? You can breathe out. Okay, we're ready. Okay. That sniff you just took is giving your brain information about your environment, the studio you're in. We view the world through the nose.

When you inhale, namely sniff, then you have information. And if you're not sniffing, you don't have information, period. That's Noam Sobel. He's a neurobiologist and one of the study authors for this paper that came out this week in the journal Current Biology. He told me the olfactory system, like our noses, nasal breathing, our sense of smell, is really important for how the human brain functions. Every breath we take is linked to how we interpret and move through the world. Like, for one example, when we're planning out our language, our

or even during this conversation we're having now, our noses are involved. We have to figure out when to breathe. Or when we're doing things like working out, our noses are important, basically. So Noam says since people's brains are unique, he and other researchers wondered if human nasal breathing patterns were, like, also unique. So he and his team developed this device that monitored 100 people's airflow for 24 hours.

And participants wore it while they went through their daily activities. It kind of looked like those small oxygen tubes that go in your nose. I am picturing this. Okay. But I am struggling to wrap my head around the idea that we humans all have unique nasal fingerprints. Explain that. Yeah. So they saw that just based on people's breathing patterns, they could tell how participants were likely to score things.

on levels of depression, the kind of sleep they were getting, anxiety. So, for example, people who scored higher on anxiety questionnaires also had shorter inhales than people who scored lower on those questionnaires.

even though none of the participants had actually been diagnosed with anxiety. So Noam says he wonders if this tool could be used to help identify mental or physical health problems in the future. Well, and I'm wondering about what's cause and what's effect here. If we can change the way we breathe, could that change our health?

So this study can't tell researchers that, but Noam says hopefully with more research and new tools, we can learn more about whether breathing could make a difference for things like anxiety or depression. All right. My yoga instructor and I will be paying close attention to the future studies. All right. Breathing deeply through my nose. Moving on. Dinosaurs...

Yeah. Regina, what we got? Yeah. Specifically, we're going to talk about a sauropod's last meal. So sauropods are huge dinosaurs, like over 50 feet tall with long necks, small heads. They also eat plants. Think Littlefoot from Land Before Time or like the Sinclair oil logo. This is like your stereotypical classic brontosaurus-looking dinosaur. Yes. Go on. Yeah. And paleontologists have labeled them herbivores, vegetarians, based on educated guesses from things like their teeth and their body shape. Yeah.

There's a reason every kid knows that sauropod dinosaurs ate plants. It's because, first of all, it's hard to imagine them eating anything else, but also because scientists have thought about exactly how they were able to do that. They don't chew. They snip and swallow, and then they ferment. That's paleontologist Stephen Poropat, who's the lead author on a study published in the journal Current Biology.

For the first time, Stephen and a team of paleontologists and volunteers in Queensland, Australia, found the preserved gut contents of a sauropod. The preserved gut contents. What were they? Yeah. So once they confirmed that these fossils were truly just from the stomach, they saw a variety of plants, even conifers, like pine trees we have today. We know from other fossils what kind of plants were available.

But we wouldn't necessarily expect all of them to be on the menu. So Stephen says he was surprised to see flowering plants in the gut, which had just shown up during the Cretaceous period when this dinosaur lived. So he says the evolution of flowering plants might have affected the evolution of sauropods, too. And vice versa. By the way, they named the dinosaur Judy after one of the founders of the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum in Winton, Queensland.

And we should say that Judy the dino is like one data point. It's what Judy last ate. So Stephen and other paleontologists are like cautious about generalizing all sauropod diets based on this like one finding. But it's a good start. All right. Topic three. Let's move on to our last one. This is why droughts are getting worse. I'm going to go out on a limb here and venture this might be linked to climate change. Yeah.

Yes, but it's not only because there's less rain. So recent work published in the journal Nature found that one reason droughts could be getting worse is because the atmosphere is getting thirstier. Thirstier. Explain that. Yeah, one climate scientist who worked on the study, Chris Funk, says it has to do with the chemistry of the atmosphere. As nitrogen and oxygen molecules heat up,

They bounce around more, and that leaves more space in between them for water vapor. So when the air is warmer, like with climate change, the atmosphere can hold more moisture. It can pull water from rivers, lakes, and soil. Scientists have known that both of these things happen. But since with climate change, extreme rainfall events are also increasing, they didn't know how big of an effect it was having. So how did they figure that out? Which effect was the more powerful?

They used a big computer model, which is something lots of other climate studies do. The scientists fed it both rainfall and evaporation data from a 40-year span, 1981 to 2022. And then they looked at drought trends, and they found that the global drought area jumped from 10 to 30 percent, with drought levels really accelerating in the last five years of the study.

And because of the warmer and thus like thirstier atmosphere, droughts got 40 percent worse in the period they studied. And in some places, droughts were 60 percent worse because of it, like in Africa, South America, Australia and the southwest U.S. OK, so let me try to just get this in layman's terms. You're telling me droughts are getting worse and we think this is because the atmosphere is warmer so it can suck up water faster than rainfall can replace it.

Yes, which means dry areas are getting drier, but wet areas are also getting drier. We talked to hydrologist Yadu Pekrel, who wasn't involved in the work, and he says because this effect has gotten worse in the last five years of the study. It indicates that this may further intensify in the coming five years, ten years, and we may have a dire situation.

He also mentioned that future work could include looking at different categories of drought other than atmospheric drought. So like water availability in streams, aquifers or soil. Well, it does sound dire now that they've figured this out or think they figured it out. What can scientists actually do with this information? Yeah. Understanding how this atmospheric thirst affects drought can help people anticipate when it could cause famine, which will give people a heads up to prepare for impacts to their crops and livestock. Crops and livestock. OK, love it.

Mary Louise, thank you so much for coming to hang out with us and talking about science stories. And breathing deeply for the rest of the day. You can hear more of Mary Louise Kelly on Consider This, NPR's afternoon podcast about what the news means for you. Also, make sure you never miss a new episode of our podcast, Shortwave, by following us on the NPR app,

or your podcasting platform of choice. It really helps the show out, just like sharing it with a friend. This episode was produced by Jeff Pierre and Burleigh McCoy. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez, Justine Kennan, and Christopher Antaleata. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Tiffany Vera Castro was the audio engineer. I'm Rachel Carlson. And I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.

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