Mary Louise Kelly, host:
It is time, once again, for our short vague scientists. It is the scientific podcast of NPR. Reporting this time, Regina Barber and Rachel Carlson. Welcome, you two.
Rachel Carlson, Byline: Hey, Mary Louise.
Regina Barber, Byline: Hi.
Kelly: Hey. So you brought us three scientific stories that attracted your attention this week. I must say that there are real benders this time.
Carlson: Yes, we have a little of everything for you, from a device that shows that people have unique respiratory fingerprints …
Barber: … to what is really in the stomach of a dinosaur …
Carlson: … and an unexpected reason for which droughts were getting worse.
Kelly: OK, let’s take them in order. Humans with unique respiratory fingerprints? Explain.
Carlson: Yeah. Ok, Mary Louise, Gina, I want you both to take a big breath through your nose.
Kelly: by the nose.
Barber: I was, like, holding my breath.
Kelly: OK.
(Soundbit of inhalation)
Carlson: So this sniff you just took …
Kelly: Can we expire?
(LAUGH)
Carlson: You can expire. You can expire.
(LAUGH)
Kelly: OK, we are ready.
Carlson: OK. This sniff that you have just taken gives your brain information on your environment – the studio in which you are.
Noam Sobel: We see the world by the nose. When you inspire – namely sniff …
(SoundBite of Sniffing)
Sobel: … So you have any information, and if you don’t sniff, you don’t have any information.
Barber: (laughs).
Carlson: It’s Noam Sobel. He is a neurobiologist and one of the authors of the study for this article which was released this week in the current journal in biology. He told me that the olfactory system – like our nose, nasal breathing, our smell – is really important for the functioning of the human brain. Each breath we take is linked to the way we interpret and pass through the world. For example, for an example, when we plan our language, or even during this conversation that we have now, our noses are involved. We must understand when to breathe. Or when we do things like training. Our noses are important, fundamentally.
Barber: So Noam says that since people’s brains are unique, he and other researchers wondered if the human nasal breathing models were also unique. Thus, he and his team developed this device which watched an air flow of a hundred people for 24 hours, and the participants carried it while they were crossing their daily activities. It looked like these small oxygen tubes that go to your nose.
Kelly: I imagine it. ALL RIGHT. But I find it hard to wrap my head around the idea that we, humans, all have unique nasal fingerprints. Explain this.
Carlson: Yeah. They therefore saw that simply on the basis of people’s breathing models, they could say how participants were likely to mark at levels of depression, the type of sleep they received, anxiety.
Kelly: Wow.
Carlson: Thus, for example, people who obtained a higher score on anxiety questionnaires also had shorter inhales than people who obtained a lower score than these questionnaires, even if none of the participants had really been diagnosed with anxiety. Noam therefore says he wonders if this tool could be used to help identify mental or physical health problems in the future.
Kelly: Well – and I wonder what is the cause and what is the effect here. For example, if we can change our way of breathing, could that change our health?
Barber: This study cannot therefore tell the researchers that, but Noam says that hope with more research and new tools, we can know more about it, as, if breathing could make a difference for things like anxiety or depression.
Kelly: Very good. My yoga instructor and I will pay particular attention to …
(LAUGH)
Barber: I think many people will do, yes.
Kelly: … Future studies. All right. Breathable deeply by the nose.
(Soundbit of inhalation)
Kelly: Continue.
Barber: (laughs).
Kelly: eating dinosaurs.
Barber: Yeah.
Kelly: Regina, what do we have?
Barber: Yeah. More specifically, we are going to talk about the last meal of a sauropod. The Sauropods are therefore huge dinosaurs, like more than 50 feet high, with long necks, small heads. They also eat plants. Think of Littlefoot of “Land Before Time”, or, like the Oil Sinclair logo.
Kelly: It is, like your stereotypical and your classic Brontosaurus appearance …
Barber: Exactly.
Kelly: … dinosaur.
Barber: Yes.
Kelly: Continue.
Carlson: Yes, and paleontologists labeled them to herbivores – vegetarians – based on educated assumptions of things like their teeth and their body shape.
Stephen Poropat: There is a reason why each child knows that the dinosaurs of the Sauropod have eaten plants. This is because, first of all, it is difficult to imagine them to eat something else, but also because scientists have thought exactly how they could do it. They don’t chew. They shoot and swallow, then they close.
Carlson: It is the paleontologist Stephen Poropat, who is the main author of 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 intestinal content of a sauropod.
Kelly: The contents of the preserved intestine.
Carlson: Yeah.
Kelly: What were they?
Barber: Yeah. So, once they have confirmed that, as, these fossils were really, like, just stomach, they saw a variety of plants, like, even conifers, like, pines that we have today.
Poropat: We know among other fossils what type of plants was available, but we would not necessarily touch on everyone that they are on the menu.
Carlson: Then Stephen says he was surprised to see flower plants in the intestine that had just manifested during the Cretaceous period when this dinosaur lived. He therefore says that the evolution of flower plants could also affect the evolution of sauropods.
Barber: and vice versa. By the way, they named the Judy dinosaur, after one of the founders of the Australian museum of the age of the dinosaurs in Winton, Queensland. And we must say that Judy Le Dino is, like a data point. This is what Judy ate for the last time. Stephen and other paleontologists are therefore prudent to generalize all the regimes of Sauropod according to that, like a discovery, but it is a good start.
Kelly: Very good. Subject three. Let’s move on to our last. This is why droughts get worse. I’m going to go out on a member here and venture that it could be linked to climate change?
Carlson: Yes, but it is not only because there is less rain. So recent work published in the journal Nature has revealed that one of the reasons why droughts could get worse is that the atmosphere is thirsty.
Kelly: Thitier – Explain this.
Barber: Yeah. A climatologist who worked on this study, Chris Funk, says that it has to do with the chemistry of the atmosphere.
Chris Funk: While the nitrogen and oxygen molecules heat up, they bounce more, and this leaves more space between them for water vapor.
Barber: So when the air is warmer, as with climate change, the atmosphere may contain more humidity. It can draw water, like rivers, lakes and the soil. Scientists have known that these two things happen, but as with climate change, extreme precipitation events are also increasing, they did not know how much it had an effect.
Kelly: So how did they understand that, what effect was the most powerful?
Carlson: They used a large computer model, which many other climate studies do. Scientists have nourished it both precipitation and evaporation data from a period of 40 years – 1981 to 2022 – then they examined the trends in drought. And they found that the global drought area increased from 10 to 30%, drought levels really accelerating in the last five years of the study.
Barber: And because of the warmer atmosphere and, as, as thirsty, droughts worsened 40% during the period they studied. And in some places, droughts were 60% worse because of this, as in Africa, South America, Australia and the southwest of the United States
Kelly: OK, so let me try to get it in terms of lay people. You tell me that droughts are getting worse, and we think it is because the atmosphere is warmer, so it can suck water faster than precipitation can not replace it?
Carlson: Yes.
Kelly: OK.
Carlson: which means that dry areas are becoming dry, but wet areas also become dry. We spoke to the hydrologist Yadu Pokhrel, who was not involved in work, and he says, because this effect has worsened in the last five years of the study …
Yadu Pokhrel: This indicates that it can still intensify over the next five years, 10 years, and we could have a disastrous situation.
Carlson: He also mentioned that future work could include the search for different categories of drought other than atmospheric drought, therefore, such as the availability of water in streams, aquifers or the soil.
Kelly: Well, it seems disastrous. Now that they have understood this, or think they have understood it, what can scientists really do with this information?
Barber: Yes, understanding how this atmospheric thirst affects drought can help people anticipate when it could cause famine, which could give people downstream to prepare for impacts on their cultures and livestock.
Kelly: It is Regina Barber and Rachel Carlson of the Podcast Science of NPR, that you can follow for new discoveries and everyday mysteries and all the science behind the headlines. Thank you both.
Carlson: Thank you.
Barber: Thank you.
(Soundbite of Music)
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