Your Breathing Pattern Is Like A Fingerprint

Take a big inhale through your nose. Now, exhale. Breathing may seem simple, but it's controlled by a complex brain network. Each inhale gives the human brain information about the external world. And now, a new research paper in the journal Current Biology https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(25)00583-4?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0960982225005834%3Fshowall%3Dtrue suggests that humans have unique breathing patterns, almost like nasal "fingerprints." Not only that: These unique breathing patterns seem to say a lot about people's physical and mental health. Questions about the science behind your brain and body? Email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected] – we'd love to hear your ideas! Listen to Short Wave on Spotify https://n.pr/3HOQKeK and Apple Podcasts https://n.pr/3WA9vqh. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:19Regina Barber?

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR. Hey, Short Wavers. Regina Barber here.

• 0:25Speaker 02

  And Rachel Carlson.

• 0:26Regina Barber?

  With our biweekly Science News roundup, featuring the hosts of All Things Considered. And today, we have the great, the legendary Mary Louise Kelly.

• 0:35Speaker 03

  Way to lay on the pressure there.

• 0:37Regina Barber?

  Yeah, lots and lots of pressure.

• 0:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I am told we are going to get to a story about how humans have unique nasal fingerprints. Looking forward to that.

• 0:47Speaker 02

  Plus, what's really in a dinosaur's stomach.

• 0:50Regina Barber?

  And an unexpected reason why droughts are getting worse.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  All that on this episode of Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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• 2:23Regina Barber?

  All right, Mary Louise, where do you want to start?

• 2:25Speaker 03

  I gotta go straight to the nasal fingerprints. What do you have?

• 2:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay, Mary Louise, Gina, I want you both to take a big breath through your noses.

• 2:34Regina Barber?

  Yeah, let's breathe.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  So that sniff you just took-

• 2:40Speaker 03

  Can we breathe out?

• 2:41Speaker 02

  You can breathe out. You can breathe out.

• 2:44Speaker 03

  Okay, we're ready.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  Okay, that sniff you just took is giving your brain information about your environment, the studio you're in.

• 2:52Speaker 05

  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.

• 3:01Speaker 02

  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, 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.

• 3:34Regina Barber?

  So Noam says since people's brains are unique, he and other researchers wondered if human nasal breathing patterns were 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.

• 3:52Speaker 03

  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.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, so they saw that just based on people's breathing patterns, they could tell how participants were likely to score-

• 4:08Regina Barber?

  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.

• 4:29Speaker 03

  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?

• 4:39Regina Barber?

  So this study can't tell researchers that, but Noam says hopefully with more research and new tools, we can learn more about like whether breathing could make a difference for things like anxiety or depression.

• 4:48Speaker 03

  All right, my yoga instructor and I will be paying close attention

• 4:51Regina Barber?

  I think many people will.

• 4:52Speaker 03

  to future studies. All right, breathing deeply through my nose. Moving on. Dinosaurs eating.

• 5:02Regina Barber?

  Yeah.

• 5:02Speaker 03

  Gina, what we got?

• 5:03Regina Barber?

  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.

• 5:17Speaker 03

  This is like your stereotypical, classic Brontosaurus looking dinosaur. Go on.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, and paleontologists have labeled them herbivores, vegetarians, based on educated guesses from things like their teeth and their body shape.

• 5:30Speaker 06

  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.

• 5:45Speaker 02

  That's paleontologist Stephen Porapat, 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.

• 6:00Speaker 03

  The preserved gut contents. What were they?

• 6:03Regina Barber?

  Yeah, so once they confirmed that like these fossils were truly like just from the stomach, and they saw a variety of plants, like even conifers, like pine trees we have today.

• 6:12Speaker 06

  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.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  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 saurapods, too.

• 6:31Regina Barber?

  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 cautious about generalizing all saurapod diets based on this like one finding, but it's a good start.

• 6:52Speaker 03

  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?

• 7:03Speaker 02

  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.

• 7:14Speaker 03

  Thirstier. Explain that.

• 7:16Regina Barber?

  Yeah, one climate scientist who worked on the study, Chris Fox, says it has to do with the chemistry of the atmosphere.

• 7:22Speaker 07

  As nitrogen and oxygen molecules heat up, they bounce around more and that leaves more space in between them for water vapor.

• 7:31Regina Barber?

  So when the air is warmer, like with climate change, the atmosphere can hold more moisture. It can pull water from like 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.

• 7:47Speaker 03

  So how did they figure that out? Which effect was the more powerful?

• 7:51Speaker 02

  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%, with drought levels really accelerating in the last five years of the study.

• 8:12Regina Barber?

  And because of the warmer and thus like thirstier atmosphere, droughts got 40% worse in the period they studied. And in some places droughts were 60% worse because of it, like in Africa, South America, Australia and the southwest US.

• 8:26Speaker 03

  Okay, 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?

• 8:40Speaker 02

  Yes, which means dry areas are getting drier, but wet areas are also getting drier. We talked to hydrologist Yadu Pakrell, who wasn't involved in the work.

• 8:50Regina Barber?

  And he says because this effect has gotten worse in the last five years of the study.

• 8:54Speaker 08

  It indicates that this may further intensify in the coming five years, 10 years, and we may have a dire situation.

• 9:02Regina Barber?

  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.

• 9:11Speaker 03

  Well, it does sound dire. Now that they've figured this out or think they've figured it out, what can scientists actually do with this information?

• 9:18Regina Barber?

  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.

• 9:28Speaker 03

  Crops and livestock. OK, love it.

• 9:30Regina Barber?

  Mary Louise, thank you so much for coming to hang out with us and talking about science stories.

• 9:36Speaker 03

  And breathing deeply for the rest of the day.

• 9:39Regina Barber?

  You can hear more of Mary Louise Kelly on Consider This, NPR's afternoon podcast about what the news means for you.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  Also, make sure you never miss a new episode of our podcast, Short Wave, 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.

• 9:59Regina Barber?

  This episode was produced by Jeff Pierre and Burleigh McCoy. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez, Justine Kennon, and Christopher Entaliata.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  Tyler Jones checked the facts. Tiffany Vera Castro was the audio engineer. I'm Rachel Carlson.

• 10:12Regina Barber?

  And I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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