Science Friday - Blood, Spatial Memory, Gerrymandering. Oct 26, 2018, Part 1

Episode Date: October 26, 2018

Blood is essential to human life—it runs through all of our bodies, keeping us alive—but the life-giving liquid can also have a mysterious, almost magical quality. As journalist Rose George points out, this association goes back to thousands of years, even showing up in “The Odyssey.“ Odysseus, while traveling in Hades, comes across his mother Anticlea, who will not speak to him. At least, she says, “Not until she drinks the blood that Odysseus has taken from reluctant sheep. For Homer, blood had a power as fierce and invisible as electricity: a mouthful of blood, a switch flicked, and Anticlea could now speak to her son.” George’s new book, “Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood,” traces the cultural significance and business of blood. She talks about how we’ve tried to harness blood through the idea of the blood banking happened in 1937 at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital and the search for possible synthetic substitutes. Take a deep breath in. With one single inhalation, the human nose takes in a bunch of information about your environment. And unlike vision and hearing, that information goes straight to the limbic system, the part of the brain that controls emotion and memory. Recent studies suggest that rhythmic breathing through the nose (as opposed to mouth breathing) can have a have a positive impact on these brain regions.  On November 6th, millions of Americans will cast their votes in districts that have been declared unconstitutional by a federal court. A panel of three judges ruled that North Carolina’s congressional districts had been unfairly gerrymandered to favor Republicans over Democrats—and the key evidence in the case? Math. Annie Minoff and Elah Feder tell the story of that case—now waiting to be considered by the Supreme Court—in the next episode of Undiscovered. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Microplastics. You know, it seems like just yesterday that environmental scientists were raising the alarm about the tiny beads of plastics in facewash. And now these tiny invisible polymer particles seem to have warmed their way into everything else on Earth. Our water, our shellfish, even our beer. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before we found them in ourselves. That's right. are full of microplastics. And here to explain more and chat about other selected subjects in science,

its popular science senior editor, Sophie Bushwick. Nice to have you back. Nice to be here. So let's talk about this. Where exactly did researchers find these microplastics? So researchers, they had a group of eight subjects from countries all over Europe and Asia, and they essentially had these subjects keep a food diary for a week, and then at the end of the week, they took a stool sample from themselves and sent it to the researchers.

And then the researchers had the fun job of picking through that. They were looking for 10 different types of plastic, and they found these plastic types. They found nine of them, and they were in all of the samples. Stool samples. So they're going right for our bodies. Yep. We eat them, and then we send them out the other end. Only a matter of time, right, with all the microplastics that are around us.

Right. Researchers have found microplastics in tap water, in beer. it's in seafood because a lot of these plastic fragments get into the waterways and then the fish eat them and we eat the fish. The other thing is that a lot of us drink water from plastic bottles or food out of plastic takeout containers or that's been wrapped in plastic. And there's all sorts of chances for fragments to come off. So the definition of a microplastic is that it's smaller than five millimeters, but it can be much, much smaller than that. Some of these fragments are on the nanometer scale. And we suspect that there's no harm coming from these.

Well, it's very difficult to tell because it's hard to sort of parse out. You can't really feed people, some people, plastic samples and not feed other people plastic samples at this point. It's just not ethically feasible. But it's hard to tell. Maybe they're just passing theirs harmlessly. It's also possible that they could be accumulating and that a lot of these plastics carry chemicals that they might leach into the human body. So it's, I wouldn't tell people, I would say don't panic because it could be, yes, it could be that they're harmless, but it's very difficult to tell at this point. Those of us of a certain age always thought that asbestos was harmless also back in the day.

So let's keep our eyes open. Some good news, though, maybe eating organic vegetables is linked to less cancer. That's right. A study in France, they looked at almost 70,000 people. They had them answer a survey how often they had organic food. whether they had cancer, and then the researchers followed up in five years to check in again on whether they had developed cancer. And they also took a lot of other information, such as how often they drink or smoke,

whether how often they eat fruits and veggies, how much they exercise, and also their income level. And what they found is with a couple specific types of cancer, like non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and postmenopausal breast cancer, people who eat organic did have less of a risk of developing those cancers. So was it actually tied to the vegetables themselves, or could have been the kind of lifestyle you live if you eat organic vegetable? It's really

difficult to say because organic produce is more expensive in the United States. It's about 45% more expensive than conventional. It's also people who do eat organic tend to have other healthy lifestyle factors. They eat a lot of fruits and veggies. They exercise more often.

And because they're wealthier, being wealthy just comes with a whole bunch of health benefits. You're more likely to afford health care and to go to the hospital for more frequent screenings. So that means if you do get cancer, they can catch it earlier and treat it. Sounds to me like you would need a better design study to sort of eliminate those other factors if you were going to do it. They did take the subject's income level and they tried to sort of factor out some of these other confounding factors,

but it's just incredibly difficult to peel apart all the different things that go into human health. Yeah. We've been talking about that for ever since I've been doing this. Yes, no, maybe, whatever. Well, that's why nutritional studies are so tricky because it's, It's possible that there's so many other factors involved than just the one that they're studying. All right. Let's move on to a factor that's made the weather terrible for some people.

Hurricane Willa made landfall on Mexico's Pacific Coast last week. And what was really interesting about this, the last minute shifts in intensity, right? Right. Over the course of just two days, Willa went from a tropical depression to a category five hurricane. We're talking from 40-mile-per-hour winds to 160-mile-per-hour winds. And do we know how that or why that could happen so suddenly? Conditions were just perfect for it. It was going over an area with warm water and heat fuels hurricanes.

It was also in an area with a lot of moisture. And there wasn't a lot of wind shear. Wind shear is just when you've got wind at different speeds at different altitudes. And that kind of thing can really dissipate a storm. And Willa didn't encounter any of that as it was building to a category five. But after that it did. It actually went back down to a category three before it made landfall. Very quickly also.

Yes, again, that was a really quick change. So is this sort of a new pattern then for hurricanes to be expected? It's hard to say. I think that it's part of a pattern of more hurricane intensity, definitely. So Will is actually the 10th hurricane this season to reach category four or five in the Pacific Northeast. It's the most intense season that area has had ever on record. So it's definitely, I mean, researchers have warned that in a warming planet, the hotter it gets the more intense we can expect hurricane season to be. And, you know, with all the water that these hurricanes drop now, maybe we need a new classification.

People have been talking about, well, you know, the wind speed may not just be adequate enough to describe. I completely agree. As a matter of fact, most people who die in hurricanes, they die from freshwater flooding, not from wind damage. And the category system only really talks about wind damage. So I think it is important to talk about flooding. So Willa has made landfall, moved from Mexico to Texas, and apparently the moisture is going to be affecting the mid-Atlantic. states over this weekend, we could be in for our first Nor'easter of the season, and it's getting fuel from this hurricane.

So it's just affecting, in terms of precipitation, a big chunk of the U.S. I'm going to get out of here early today. Talking about water, we're learning more about what kind of life Mars could support. Talking about water on Mars, we're always talking about water there. It's very exciting that there's water there. So researchers, when they found liquid water on Mars, they knew that water had to be really salty because Mars can get very, very cold, and in order for that water to not freeze, it must have a high salt concentration. So they didn't really look at whether life might have enough oxygen.

But a new study has done just that. They said, well, if we have this very salty water at this range of temperatures and at these different pressures, how much oxygen would dissolve in that water? Would it be enough to support microbes that could breathe it? And they found it would be. It would have enough oxygen to support not only microbes, but certain types of sponges. Sponges? Sponges on Mars. Wow, not the cellulose.

No, so sponges are this model organism, and researchers like to, it's very simple. It's a filter feeder. It's probably one of the first animals to have evolved. So it's a great thing for researchers to look at and be like, huh, I wonder if this could survive there. Maybe in those moons of Jupiter, we find sponges. That would be really amazing. It's amazing. It's always amazing to have you, Sophie.

Thank you. Sophie Bushwick, senior editor at Popular Science. Now it's time to play, good thing, bad thing. Because every story has a flip side. It's become a common site on social media. You're scrolling along and you see a post asking for donations to support some kind of medical treatment, often because a person doesn't have insurance or they've exhausted their resources. These crowdfunding campaigns can raise a substantial amount of money, but are there ethical concerns?

Joining me now to talk about the good and bad of crowdfunding medical treatment is Dr. Ford Vivalry. He's Medical Director of the Disorders of Consciousness Program and chair of the Medical Ethics Committee at the Shepard Center in Atlanta, Georgia, and co-authored of a short research letter on medical crowdfunding published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association. He joins me by Skype. Welcome to Science Friday. Hey, good afternoon, Aram.

Good afternoon to you. These crowdfunding campaigns can help bridge the gap financially for people facing expensive medical treatment. but what's the downside to this? That's right. So the downside is what are people going to be raising money for? We certainly hope that it's true insurance gaps, of which there are a lot. There's a lot that insurance doesn't cover, that maybe it should, extra added costs

and people are off work and important equipment and so forth. But what's potentially dangerous is what you're raising that money for. It might be something that's not evidence-based that could be dangerous. I mean, some sketchy kind of treatment? Something like that? That's right. And that's what we focused in on this paper. We looked at five diverse different so-called sketchy treatments,

some of the most dangerous ones being stem cells implanted into the central nervous system. People raising money to get this done down in Mexico, fly to China, some procedures here in the United States as well, and a variety of other things also that are not FDA-approved, potentially highly dangerous. And people in their generosity are donating to these campaigns because folks are desperate and they want to help out individuals, but not really realizing that you could be causing them some real harm. You could be. How much money are we talking about here? So crowdfunding in of itself is just $8 billion has been raised so far on GoFundMe alone. And medical crowdfunding is the single largest segment of that.

As far as the problematic campaigns, I can't say for sure because we just selected kind of a representative sample of five and took a snapshot of the activity. we found folks trying to raise about $27 million for five of these shady treatments, and they raised us over $6 million. You know, some people would say, what's the problem here? These patients have a right to try and seek their own cure, as trying new treatments of others have not worked for them. You're right, and that's kind of the libertarian point of view, and it does exist. However, this is a little bit different transaction than you're kind of pulling that out of your own bank account or just your own. own close family or friends. Now a third party is involved in you potentially causing harm to yourself. And that is largely GoFundMe, but the other platforms as well. And so they do now have an ethical duty in that transaction. Is there any way to know if you see one, how to find out on your own, whether this thing is worth crowdfunding for you? There's not, and there should be.

And that's part of the critique that we outline. We think that it's the duty of the sites to perhaps out some of these campaigns, refer them on up to humans to interpret a bit. They could have, for example, kind of a medical panel to look at it. They could refer people with certain keywords to the appropriate information on the NIH website or other reputable websites, for example. But you really just have to be an educated consumer, and that's part of what's the danger of these campaigns is they represent people going around kind of standard hospitals and clinics and physicians who are trying to help people and prevent them from harm and access the treatments that they need balancing the evidence.

Well, we're right out of time. Well, thank you for making us an educated consumer, Dr. Vox, Dr. Ford Vox, chair of the Medical Ethics Committee at the Shepard Center in Atlanta, Georgia. After the break, we're going to talk about blood on Halloween. You know, I didn't do that too well, did I? Not, no. What does it have to be so spooky all the time? Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break.

I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYAC Studios. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Halloween is right around the corner. And when you think of the spooky holiday, what comes to mind, right? Ghost, goblums, and of course, blood. Even though blood runs through all of our veins, it somehow has gained a mysterious, sometimes magical reputation. Writers have been fascinated by the substance.

It revived Odysseus' mother, and he gives vampires their immortality. And doctors have been trying to harness blood by banking it, having leeches suck it from our veins, even searching for synthetic substitutes. My next guest is here to tell us all about that. Rose George is a journalist based out of Leeds, England. Her new book is Nine Pints, A Journey Through the Money, Medicine and Mysteries of Blood. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. I guess being from the UK, a pint is the right measurement you would be using from blood.

I believe that's something we share with you, though. So it's the one thing we have in common along with Miles. There are all these different connotations about the Romans drank it, Homer used it in the Odyssey to allow the dead to speak. Why are there so many almost mystical ideas about blood? I think because for such a long time it wasn't really understood. and the only thing that was understood was that when you saw it, it was probably a very bad thing, because it was usually followed by injury and death.

So obviously it was a really powerful substance, but it wasn't really understood very well until like the last 100, 150 years. So it was given this power, because if it could kill you so easily when you lost it, then obviously if you drank it or if you were home as mother, you drank a bit of sheep's blood. because the sheep happened to be handy in hell.

Then it could probably revive you. So I think that's how we got to the idea of blood is this life-giving substance. Of course, medically, it is a life-giving substance. I want to ask our listeners to join in. 844724-8255 is our number. You can also tweet us at SciFRI. You know, right from the beginning of the book, I had an affinity for it because you mentioned HEMO the Magnificent,

which I remember seeing. No way. You're the first person who's ever heard of it. I remember that in the 50s. And I remember seeing it. I remember a part where they were squeezing. I think the spurting blood out of a pipe like it would be in an artery. And it has stuck with me ever since. And I'm so happy that you mentioned that

because it really put it on the radar screen for me. Yeah. I mean, I can't even remember how I came across a bit. I was a much, much happier person once I had. It's slightly eccentric, should we call it, as a film, but it's just wonderful. And it's got poetry, it's got medicine, it's got science, it's got everything, and it's got, yeah, it's very hard to describe, though. I mean, once you've seen vascular Sincters being compared to Railroad Switchmen, yeah, it's quite an indescribable film, but really worth looking up. It's like the early days of television, quite indescribable and pretty good in some of the things that it did.

Let's talk about the taboos about blood. You visited India where there's a man trying to break this taboo. Tell us about that. This is a guy called his short name is Maruga. He's got a long Tamil name. He's from South India. And a lot of Indians will know him better as Padman because there's been a Bollywood film about him. But his story is extraordinary.

He was a very poorly educated young man, and his wife came home one day, hiding something behind her back. And he thought she was teasing, and they had a bit of a tussle. And she eventually showed him that she was carrying her bloody menstrual rags. So a lot of Indian women use cloth. They can't afford sanitary pads, commercial sandwich pads. So shanty, like millions of other Indian women and across the developing world, was using cloth. There's nothing wrong with that if you can clean it and wash it hygienically, but because of taboos, that often doesn't happen. Anyway, Maruga asked Shanti why she couldn't afford

commercial sanitary pads because he'd seen them in the market. And she said, well, it's either a sandwich pad or milk, and we need milk. And from that, Maruga, because he's a bit of an extraordinary fellow, spent 12 years coming up with a low-cost sanitary pad machine that can be manually operated, so it can be operated by illiterate women. And there are now 4,000 of them all over the world. But the way he got to understanding, he had to do reverse engineering to understand what was in commercial sanitary pads, because he thought it was just cotton. So he decided that the best way to do that, obviously, was to rig up his own uterus in the form of a goat's bladder filled with goat's blood. And sorry, he had, sorry, it was a football that he filled with goat's blood

and he attached it to his clothing and had a little pump and went around all day and every so often pumped it and so tried to simulate the experience of a menstruating woman. And he learned a lot, as I think a lot of men would if they did that. And also, because he lived in South India where it's hot, he was wearing white, so which is pretty much every woman's nightmare, no matter what Sandhry Pad advertising has told us over the years. So, you know, there were stains and leaks, and he spent a lot of time checking behind himself, like women do a lot. And he eventually understood what was in Sanitary Prads and has revolutionized Sanitary Prads in India, quite in amazing fellow. It is amazing fellow. You know, more men should try that to figure out the trials

and tribulations of what women go through. That's multitasking with football. I think there's so many great little moments in your book, little statistics that just jump out. Let me go through a few of them. You have a stat that every three seconds someone receives a blood transfusion. Wow. You know, the joke behind that is they ought to find that guy. and stop him. In the States, it's actually every two seconds. Is that right? Yeah, and I was given the breakdown of those figures, and it all makes sense.

How did this idea of banking blood first come about? Well, when, I mean, we haven't been, the system that we're all used to, which is the mass donation and supply and transfusion of blood, it's really not very very, old at all, it's about 120 years old. And in the beginning, in the US and the UK, they started in pretty similar fashion that people were selling their blood. They had this product that they could sell, and so they did. And there was even a union of blood sellers in New York. And there were people who men, usually, who traveled around the country selling their blood, so they were their own kind of blood market. But eventually, in the 1930s, a doctor in

Chicago called Bernard Fantos tried to organize things a bit better. And he was convinced that the best thing to do was to treat blood as a commodity, really. So he thought that what went in must come out. And if you use blood, you should supply blood. So he set up a blood bank. And eventually, that transformed in the 1970s in the US, the notion of paying for blood died out and it's now all donated. It's not actually illegal to sell your blood in the U.S., but it's just frowned upon and not done. Well, you know, when I was in college, I knew lots of college students who were selling their blood for money, just, you know, to have some spending cash. Well, you can still do that, but what you're doing is selling blood plasma. So you're selling

the yellow stuff, 55% of liquid in your blood. And And, yeah, you can do that. The U.S. has got very, very generous regulations about how often you can do that. You can do it twice a week if you want to. Other countries only let plasma donors do it every couple of weeks. But, yeah, you can earn $30, $50 a pop selling your plasma in the U.S. So, yeah, it's a good income stream for a lot of people. Now, you're right that the U.S. is seen as the OPEC of plasma.

Like there's a cartel of plasma. Well, that wasn't my phrase. That came from someone in the plasma industry, but it's certainly a global giant in the selling of plasma. It's applies 70% of plasma in Europe for plasma products. So what happens to plasma, it can either be used for transfusions or it can be refined and fractionated and become medicinal products. So what the US does is it exports a lot of,

plasma, which is turned into plasma products around the world, because it takes so much plasma to get a single product, and other countries just don't have enough of it. Right. Because we're not paying people to donate it twice a week, probably. Now, we know that blood comes in many different types, but I never realized how many types of blood? Couple of dozen types? I think the International Society for Blood Transfusion, I think, currently lists 37 blood types. So we all know about the main four, which is A, B, O, and A, B.

And then, of course, we all know positive and negative. So that's another four. So most people think there are probably eight, but there are a lot more rarer and rarer blood types. I mean, there are probably far more than 37, but those are the ones that have been established. And they have pretty cool names. I like the one that's called OK. And then there's one named after Karl Landstiner, who was the Austrian biologist, who discovered that blood was different, and that that's why if you gave blood to someone and they fared very badly and possibly died,

it was probably because you shouldn't mix certain types of blood, it reacts. I have a who's on first joke on my head with the blood type OK going, but that brings up a point I was always interested in. When did we first discover that you needed to have the right type of blood for the right person? How did we discover that there were types and that needed to be matched? Well, it was a slow process. So when people first started experimenting with removing blood from one creature and putting it in another creature, it was in the 16th, 17th century, and it generally tended to be two different types of creatures.

So because at that point, again, blood was thought to have this spiritual, mysterious quality, it was thought that if you transfuse someone with blood you would get the quality, the characteristics of the creature. So sheep's blood was very popular because they were thought to be mild and nice. Cows were popular too because they were thought to be gentle. Dogs, dog blood was experimented with a lot. With various results, some people, some experiments died.

And these were transfused into humans. But the first real experimented, with human blood going into another human was an obstetrician called James Blundell in the 19th century, and he had about a 50% success rate. And there were other people who tried throughout the 19th century, but because it wasn't understood that there were these blood types, and that obviously you could have a hematic reaction, you could die. So it was not really until Karl Landstainer in the 1901, more or less discovered blood types.

But even he didn't really think his discovery was massively important. He kind of ignored it for about 10 years. Talking with Rose, Georgia journalist based in Leeds, England. Her new book is Nine Pints, a journey through the money, medicine, and mysteries of blood on Science Friday from WNYC Studios. There have been attempts to create synthetic blood. I've been following it for years, but Why is it so hard to do that?

Because blood is so amazing and because we cannot replicate it, even though so much money and so much effort and so many great minds have been trying, as you say, for decades to try to do it, we still haven't done it, and we still cannot reproduce something that does everything that blood does in the body. Because it's very, very busy. It's transporting oxygen. It's removing carbon dioxide. It's keeping us warm.

It's transporting nutrients. And we just haven't come up with a synthetic alternative yet. There has been really good progress, and there have been synthetic red blood cells, which have been used and transfused, in fact. But the trouble is that at the moment they would be so expensive. They're just not a meaningful alternative except in perhaps in rare cases. So for now, even despite all the effort, there is nothing better. than the stuff that comes out of summer's arm.

Tell us about hemoglobin, how that works in the blood cells. I do not have a medical background, so I don't want to get anything wrong, but I can tell you that when I give blood, my heboglomies takes about three weeks to recover, and I am a runner, and I run up hills. So I can tell you what I know about hemoglobin is it makes running up hills extremely difficult for about three weeks.

So it's transport. thing, it's just helping your muscles out. It's your fuel. And if you give a pint of blood, which I encourage anyone who can should do, but you will notice the difference for a couple of days or up to a few weeks. So those people who give two pints a week, they must be quite lethargic. Well, they're giving plasma. Plasma is different. So plasma is not cellular. And you can, you can replenish, your body replenishes your plasma within 24 to 48 hours. So you're not going to notice that for very long, but your red blood cells take longer to recover. You visited a leaching center, and modern day leaching is a big industry.

They're still doing it very, very, I mean, it's thriving according to your book. It is. I'm so pleased you ask me about leeches. I'm very fond of them, although I don't really like picking them up. So leaching came back into you. So it was widely done. throughout the 19th century to the point where the native medicinal leech in Europe was pushed to extinction and they were widely abused really and there was a French doctor who was one of Napoleon's doctors who was known as the leecher and he he used it almost as preventive medicine so he would prescribe 60 leeches even before he'd seen his patient but then they fell out of fashion once we understood things like germ theory and disease

And because they were used for bloodletting, and bloodletting was thought to balance the humors in the body. Once the humoral theory went out the window, so did leeches. But then about 50 years ago, some Slovenian doctors used them again and found that they were still the best thing available if you have blood that's congested because leeches have a really astonishing anticoagulant in their saliva. So when they bite, they give you this anticoagulant, and it can keep blood flowing for up to 10 hours. So if you, for example, you've had something amputated or torn off, and it's somewhere where there are lots of tiny blood vessels,

they're extremely difficult to stitch together again, to knit together, really, and to get the blood flowing. So if it doesn't, what you need is a leech. And so they're still widely used by plastic surgeons and microsurgeons. Thank you, Rose George. Fascinating. It's a great book. Rose George is a journalist in Leads.

Her new book is Nine Pints, a Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood, and you can read an excerpt from that book on our website at ScienceFriety.com slash plasma. You will, really will enjoy it. We're going to take a break on when we come back. Of all our five cents, is why olfaction has VIP access to parts of our brain

associated with memory. It's got a special point. pathway right into the brain. We'll talk about it after the break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Take a deep breath in through your nose. Shortcut deep into your brain. Hmm. Notice anything different other than maybe how the room smells? Recent studies suggest that breathing through your nose can be linked to improved memory. And that's a note to all of you mouth breathers out there. Here to untrue. Tangle how olfaction is linked a deeper part to the brain, controlling emotion and memory, is Christina Zalano, assistant to professor at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Dr. Zalano, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thank you. I'm happy to be here. We're happy to have you. So what is so special about breathing through your nose? Well, nose breathing is special because it's how we smell. and smell is a fascinating and really unique sensory system. So evolutionarily, smell is our oldest sense. It's also arguably the least understood of our sensory systems.

And there are several key aspects of smell that make it particularly interesting and that make nose breathing really different from mouth breathing. So for one thing, the smell neurons, which live up way up at the very top of our nasal cavities, they actually touch the air as it flows in and out of our noses just during natural breathing. And this is really unusual because these olfactory neurons are the only part of our central nervous system that makes direct contact with our external world. And the way that this information gets from these neurons inside of our noses into the brain is different from all other sensory systems.

So all other sensory systems, information relays through a structure called the thalamus before it reaches the cortex and higher order brain areas. But in the olfactory system, information flows straight from the nose into the cortex and higher order brain areas as well without going through the thalamus. And what's special is that these olfactory structures are located in a part of the brain called the limbic system, which is involved in emotion and feeling. fear, learning, and memory. So this gives olfaction a sort of privileged access to emotion and memory areas in the brain.

And because nose breathing is smelling, nasal inhalation provides a sort of entry point by which breathing rhythms can modulate brain activity in these structures. So just the act of breathing in through your nose, does your nose also sense that air is coming in and alert. this pathway and the end point in your brain to say, hey, something interesting is about to happen? Right. Yes, actually, it does. So the receptors inside of the nasal cavity are not only responsive to chemicals. So they're not only monitoring the chemicals in our environment, but they also are mechanoreceptors. So they can detect the air flowing in and out of the nose, yes.

And we found that these natural respiratory rhythms just, breathing, even in the absence of any smell, drives activity in olfactory areas. But interestingly, these respiratory-driven brain waves, they don't stop there. So we found that they also propagate to nearby limbic structures, the ones involved in emotion and memory. So what this means is that as we breathe, activity across the limbic system is rhythmically increasing and decreasing with with inhales and exhales. And this pattern, what we found is that it's only present when you're breathing through your nose. So if you breathe through your mouth, that rhythmic, limbic activity goes away.

You know, a lot of us believe maybe erroneously that you can suddenly smell something that you remember from 30 years ago. Right. Is that a real thing or why? Well, for me it's real, but is that something? special to that sensory organ? Yeah, you know, the evidence is not clear. The study is sort of conflicting on that. A couple of studies have found that perhaps olfactory memories tend to be earlier, not necessarily stronger. But I would say there's no clear consensus on whether or not that's true. What about breathing through your mouth? Does that do anything?

for you. I mean, as far as tasting food, we've always been told that you smell the food through your nose and it helps your taste buds, taste what you're actually doing. Is there a connection there? Right. That is true. That's a good point. And that's what's called retro nasal olfaction. So when we have food inside of our mouths, the air can get from our oral cavity into our nasal cavity, but it flows in the backwards direction. So it's going outward rather than inward. And it definitely impacts flavors and taste, yes. Let's talk about your study. How were you able to study this? I understand that you were able to test this with an fMRI? Oh, actually, no, and that's a very interesting point. We did not use fMRI because in the human brain, the olfactory

structures are actually located very, very deep, almost in the center of the brain, making them very hard to reach non-invasively. So we can't record from these areas from electrodes on the surface of the scalp. And functional neuroimaging, we cannot really measure brain oscillations with that technique. So to do this study, we worked in collaboration with brain surgeons who implant electrode wires directly into these limbic areas for patients who are undergoing brain surgery for epilepsy. And this provides a really rare opportunity to record this type of data from human, olfactory, and limbic structures.

If olfaction and memory are related, do you see people with memory problems also having issues with smell? Right. That's a really good point. A lot of neurodegenerative diseases actually do. present with early olfactory decline. And while I think these findings that we're discussing may not have direct implications for neurodegenerative disease, I think the impact of breathing on limbic activity certainly suggests

potential new avenues and directions of research on these diseases. For example, it would be interesting to know if these mechanisms may be altered in neurodegenerative disease. And I also think that our data point to the possibility that neurodegenerative disease could result in altered nasal breathing patterns. Breathing is so easy to measure, and this is something that we're looking into in the lab. So do patients with different neurological disorders, do they breathe differently? Do they have characteristic nasal breathing patterns? So that's something you're going to be following up with? Right, yes.

And any neurodegenerative disease in particular? We're currently collecting breathing data from patients with Alzheimer's disease and patients with Parkinson's disease to see if we can differentiate the two states just by analyzing the shapes of their breathing waveforms. Are we the only, I'm going to just throw this out because I'm really dumb? I mean, why do we need to breathe through our mouths if we have our noses, and are we the only animals that breathe through our mouths? Yeah, you know, I really think that's a great question, and I've spent a lot of time thinking about that, actually. I mean, I think the answer probably goes far beyond just the sort of immediate thought, which is that if your nose is congested, you have this alternate breathing route so that you can still. get air in and still live, right? My guess number one.

That was my guest number one. Yes. But we're finding that it really drastically changes our brain activity. So I think that the full answer to that question really remains to be seen. And I think it's a really interesting point. I know that, well, most mammals that I can think of do pant. And panting is typically something that involves mouth breathing. So dogs pant not only when they're hot, but I think also when they're strong.

dressed, cats as well. And I think that's something interesting about that because mouth breathing is altering activity in these emotion centers and fear centers of the brain. So there may be really something behind that. Wow, I actually asked an intelligent question. You'll come back when you have the answer to that, okay? Because this is really an interesting question. Christine Zalano, assistant professor at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thank you. Next up, the midterm elections are less than two weeks away, and on November 6th, millions of Americans will be casting their votes in districts that have been declared unconstitutional by a federal court. Districts that courts say have been unfairly gerrymandered to favor one political party over another. And some of these gerrymandered districts are at the center of a court case that's sitting in the queue at the Supreme Court

and some of the key evidence against the districts. What is that key evidence? It's math. How do you like that? That's the topic of the next episode of our undiscovered podcast on our co-host Annie Minoff and Ella Fedder are here to talk about. Welcome back. Thanks so much for having us. Give me a quick refresher on gerrymandering. Okay, I'll give you a really quick refresher.

The short answer is gerrymandering is when politicians basically mess with district maps, change the shapes of those districts to help their own party win more seats. So you've probably seen, you know, the snakey districts, the famous Salamander district. How gerrymandering got its name. Yep, the one that

Annie likes to call the leaping Pomeranian. Yes. Where was that? That's in North Carolina. I think I'm the only one who sees it, yeah. Yeah. But it's not illegal, right? Well, that's kind of the big question. I mean, the courts have been very clear that some kinds of gerrymandering

are unconstitutional. So if you're gerrymandering in a way that's going to disadvantage people of our particular race. That's unconstitutional, and we would hope that a court would strike down that map pretty quickly. But where it gets complicated is with political gerrymandering, which is where you're drawing the map to discriminate against Republicans or Democrats. And there, the courts have been really reticent to get involved. So the Supreme Court kind of hasn't given a clear answer to politicians about whether this is okay or not. And in the absence of that clarity, politicians are kind of having a field day.

So I wanted to play you a clip, Ira, that really took my breath away the first time that I heard it. And this is a state legislator from North Carolina, David Lewis. He's a Republican state rep. Talking about how Republican legislators in North Carolina, we're going to redraw the state's congressional map. I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats, because I do not believe it's possible to draw a map with 11. Republicans and two de-hemocrats.

He actually said this on camera. It wasn't entirely subtle. He would take them all if he could. Yes, yes. If I could gerrymander any better, I would have. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios talking about gerrymandering. Well, so those comments

by Representative Lewis actually prompted a lawsuit by some North Carolina voters and good government groups to try to get this gerrymandered congressional map. taken down by the court. So tell me about this case. How does the math fit in on this case? Okay. So traditionally in partisan gerrymandering cases, one of the things that they've had missing is this question of how do you prove a gerrymander? How do you actually quantify how much a particular map is hurting Republicans or Democrats? And that's where math can really help. Math is

pretty good at quantifying things. So in this North Carolina case, one of the experts is a Duke math professor named Jonathan Mattingly, and he came up with a way to actually quantify how skewed a map is. Yeah. And so that would, if he's a math professor, he'd made a calculation. It's probably straightforward, right? Straightforward might be pushing it, but the theory behind the calculation is quite straightforward, because the case he's making is, if you're going to call a particular map gerrymandered and say, this map is skewing election results, then it would help to know what a normal election result

would have been for that year. If you're going to say something's unusual and gerrymander, you'd better know what usual looks like. And so the way he figures that out is he takes the actual votes that people cast in an election. So like all the votes that North Carolinians cast in the congressional race in 2012. And then he calculates how many seats Democrats and Republicans would have won if the district maps had been just a little bit different. And he does this thousands of times with thousands of nonpartisan alternative redistricting schemes. And then sees, you know, well, how to. different is my, you know, quote-unquote average result from what we actually saw. And what he found,

for example, in that 2012 congressional race is North Carolina elected four Democrats to Congress in 2012. But Jonathan saw actually a more typical result would have been six or seven Democrats. So now he can look at that map and say, you know what, that map that elected four Democrats, it's unusual. It's atypical. And I'm able to quantify that. So that's what he set out to do is a really key finding. But it was actually something else that really surprised Jonathan when he did all of this. Let him explain it. I saw in my analysis that by never changing a single vote, by only redrawing the districts, I could change the number of Democrats elected from four to nine out of 13. And we would consider each of those, you know, we would call that a wave election, either of those,

right? And extremes. But with the same votes, you can create a wave election for the Republicans and a wave election for the Democrats. So that's kind of amazing. Jonathan is looking, at an election where the votes are unchanged, one set of votes, but depending on how he, you know, moves those district lines around, he can create an election that's a landslide for the Republicans or a landslide for the Democrats. That is how powerful gerrymandering is. So this mathematician is going to court with this stuff? That is correct. So last October, this mathematician, Jonathan Mattingley, was an expert witness in a court case. He actually took the stand on behalf of those North Carolina voters who were suing

the state over this map. And his goal was to try to convince the federal judges that, hey, this map is gerrymandered. And how did that go for him? Well, we're hoping that you'll listen to the episode. This is a shameless cliffhanger. Or you can check the news. Anyway, but it's a great, it's a great story. And an important one right now. Yeah. You can hear it next Tuesday. If you subscribe, you can get it straight to your device when it shows up on Tuesday morning. And just go anywhere where you get your podcast, search for undiscovered or visit our website, discoveredpodcast.org. This is just perfectly time.

Yeah. That's very nice. What a coincidence. What a coincidence. I'm sure. You guys work very hard. Fetter and Annie Me Enough are the co-hosts and producers of our Undiscovered Podcasts. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or as they say.

Check them out at Undiscoveredpod.org. Thank you guys. Hey, thank you. Charles Berkwist is our director. Our senior producers, Christopher and Talata. Our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, and Katie Heiler. Our technical engineering help today from Rich Kim, Sarah Fishman, and Kevin Wolfe. We're active all week on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all the social media,

and your smart speakers will play Science Friday whenever you ask them. So every day now is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato in New York.