Short Wave - The Scuba Diving Lizards Breathing By Bubble

Episode Date: September 20, 2024

What's scaly, striped and breathes underwater like a scuba diver? Water anoles! These lizards can form a bubble over their head to support breathing underwater. They're found in the tropical forests of southern Costa Rica. Want more critter stories? Email us at [e-mail] — we'd love to hear your thoughts!See 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

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Shortwaivers, Regina Barbara here and Emily Kwong with our biweekly science news roundup featuring the host of All Things Considered. And today we have the goat. Juana Summers! Hello. So I heard y'all that critters made quite a splash in the science news world this week. Is that right? They did. So herpetologists have been talking about a species of lizard with a special scuba diving ability.

That's lizard scientist. plus the science that validates me in using my fingers to count everything. And we answer a request from a listener, Tom Bartlett. He wanted us to cover a study looking at how an ingredient in Doritos may help scientists see through skin. I am intrigued, but this mention of Doritos is not exactly making me hungry. It's kind of weird. Yeah. It'll be interesting.

All that on this episode of Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. All right. So to start off, tell me about the... these lizards with scuba diving capabilities. Okay, so first, what's neat about lizards is that they breathe like we do through their lungs, including the water annoles. They're found in the tropical forests of southern Costa Rica. Water annoles are green-brown in color, and they have stripes to hide from predators.

Water annals are kind of like the chicken nuggets of the forest. They're less than the size of a pencil, and they're eaten by so many things in the forest. And several years ago, Lindsay Swerk, an assistant research professor at Bingham, University observed a water inol dive under the water to hide from predators for 16 minutes. That is such a long time. How did they do it? Okay. Yeah. So Lindsay and several researchers have learned that upon diving, these annoles exhaled a bubble of air around their head and kept it in place, Juana. So the bubble basically allows them to breathe. It appears as the annul exhales and disappears as it inhales. Okay, okay. I think I'm getting it. So was this bubble then helping them stay

underwater for longer, like, I don't know, a scuba diver in their oxygen tank? Yes. Okay. And to test this, Lindsay and her team covered the skin of a bunch of annals with this emollient, which prevented the bubble formation. The study published this week by the Royal Society found that untreated lizards that could still blow bubbles stayed underwater 32% longer than the ones with the anti-bubble coating on their skin. Okay, this is so interesting, but like, help me understand big picture why this matters. Yeah, so it's of real interest to herpetologists to lizard scientists like Aaron McGee. She is behind the hashtag Find That Lizard campaign on social media.

Erin said the last few years of bubble research have made her curious about whether annoles have underwater predators too. When the lizards dive in to avoid their terrestrial predators, do they at any point become fish food? And fundamental science like this is how a lot of cool discoveries get made. Lindsay says that maybe if we study annul skin or bubbles even more, it could inspire some like biomaterials or other innovations to help humans someday. Interesting.

Okay, I want to move on to your next topic, which is about how kids add up numbers. Gina, is it helpful to use our fingers? Yeah, and a new study suggests this, but that hasn't always been taken as fact. I talked to lead author Katrine Tivino. She's a cognitive developmental psychologist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. And she said in the past some instructors had frowned upon kids using their fingers to count. Did you know children? They used to hide their hands under the tables. Okay, I have to admit, this never really made a whole lot of sense to me, given that I, a full-grown adult, still sometimes use my fingers when I'm doing simple math.

So why was it discouraged to teach this method? Yeah, I do the same thing. I still use my fingers. Yeah, me too. Educators apparently were worried that if they taught kids to add with their fingers, one, two, three, that that would hold them back. And they wouldn't learn how to add without their fingers or they would take longer to add. But this new study suggests otherwise. Like, researchers recruited 328 kindergartners from all over France, and a little over half of them were trained in finger counting and the rest were not.

And they found that the kids who learned finger counting did better on the calculation problems than the kids who did not. And it seems, Juana, that finger counting gave these kids a deeper understanding of what numbers are. So, Katrina's advice for parents out there who see their kids counting on their fingers is... If you are a parent or a teacher, do not discourage them to do that. Seems a little definitive. So is that it then? Counting with your fingers is just a better way to teach arithmetic? Well, not entirely.

I talked to a cognitive psychologist who wasn't involved in this study, David Barner from the University of California at San Diego. And he says yes, this study does show finger counting helps kids solve math problems. But he's more cautious about what this means for class curriculums. This isn't grounds for changing what people are doing. This is evidence that finger counting is one way, but it's not evidence that it's the best way. He makes the point that in this study, finger counting doesn't differ significantly from wrote memorizations. So he suggested people teach kids both.

For our third topic, we've got an unexpected scientific use for the same dye used in Doritos. Okay, Gina, you've got to help me understand this one. Yeah, I love this. So, you know, when you eat Doritos and the dust just ends up everywhere? Uh-huh. Scientists have figured out how to make this annoyance, like a really cool tool. It turns out that the dye used in Doritos and other snacks like cannycorn and Mountain Dew can help mouse skin turn transparent. And just to give you an idea, it's not quite like seeing through glass, but you can definitely see the mouse's organs.

So researchers could study the mouse's insides all without harming it. Okay, listen to you explain this. I'm really curious. How did these researchers figure all of this out? It's so bizarre and cool. Okay, so we talked to one of the researchers, Zihau-O, he's a physics professor at the University of Texas in Dallas. He said, usually we can't see through skin because when light waves hit the skin, the tissue scatters the light, so the skin appears opaque. But when the researchers rubbed a solution of the same yellow dye used in Doritos on the skin of a mouse's belly, it reduced that light scattering and they could see through the skin.

Zeehaus says he's really excited about the potential applications of this. So tell us what those are. Well, you know, if you think about it, Zeehaus says, looking directly at tissue without removing it, as in the case with the mouse belly, could be medically significant. Like, this could help scientists study something like chronic illness. We think this can change a lot of the biomedical research. For example, developmental and disease studies, especially cancer and aging diseases, where you need to monitor the developmental process for a rather long time. We also spoke to Scott Coe, the director of the microscope facility at Johns Hopkins. He was not involved in the study, and he says that often scientists have to use invasive techniques for this kind of research, but this method could help avoid that.

Interesting. Okay, but what about use in, say, human Dorito lovers like us? Yeah, see how said they'd need to test this to see if it could be safe for humans or if it would work at all on human skin, which is much thicker. And Scott told us researchers would also need to figure out how to get this technique to work on more pigmented skin. But, Wana, who knows, maybe the future of science really does live in that Dorito dust on your fingers, your fingers that you will use to count things. Always do. Can't break the habit. Wana, thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me back. You can hear more of Wana on Consider This and P.R.'s afternoon podcast about what the news means for you. Before we head out, a reminder that shortwave turns five on October 15th.

And we're taking questions entirely from five-year-olds. So if you want to submit, record your name and question in a voice memo and email it to shortwave at npr.org and we may feature it in an upcoming episode. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and Gus Contreras. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Christopher in Taliatta. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Quasi Lee was the audio engineer. I'm Emily Kwong and I'm Regina Barber. Thank you so much for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.