Short Wave - These Penguins Take 10,000 Little Naps A Day — Seconds At A Time

Episode Date: December 1, 2023

Sleep. It's an essential biological function that has long intrigued scientists. Researchers have studied everything from mice to fruit flies in the lab to get a better understanding of what happens when animals sleep — and why so many do it. This week, scientists finally added one piece to the elusive sleep puzzle: How wild chinstrap penguins sleep amid their noisy colony. Turns out, they do it over 10,000 times in seconds-long bursts throughout the day — totaling 11 hours when all is said and done.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, shortwivers, Aaron Scott here. With me, Regina Barber. And for our regular roundup of science news, the one, the only Mary Louise Kelly, is here as well. Woo-hoo. Glad to be back with you. Thanks for letting me come by. Mary Louise, as always, we're going to share three science stories in the news that have caught our attention recently.

Yeah, we've got a story about microscopic robots made from human cells. We've got a story about one animal that takes micro-napse. like thousands of them each day. And finally, a story about another animal that was thought to be extinct, but is very much alive. Wow. You had me at micro-naps, which sounds great because I never get them. Go on. Yes, I totally understand. But you can catch a few links now. And we'll tell you more in just a minute on this episode of Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. All right, Mary Louise, you're our guest. Which topic would you like to start with?

Well, as I mentioned, I'm leaning toward the micro-naps, but I will be disciplined and start with robots. You told me these are tiny healing robots made from human cells, and I'm not sure I even understand what that means. Yeah. So it's one human cell that has been reprogrammed to grow into a little multicellular ball. And what's new about these balls is they can move around on their own and actually help heal human tissue. The researchers are calling them anthrobots. Anthrobots. Okay.

And how does this work? How do they make them? Yeah. So they started with cells from an adult trachea, you know, the windpipe, because these cells have these little hair-like things called cilia on one side. And that's what kind of waves around and pushes out particles and germs and ultimately allows us to expel the gunk of, you know, when we cough or clear our throats. And they figured out a way to grow single trachea cells into multicellular

balls with cilia on the outside. So the cilia acts like ores pushing them along. And some of these anthropots win in a straight line, others moved in circles, some wiggled in place. They wiggled? It's kind of cute. But more importantly, you said they can actually, they can heal cells. Yeah, that was the surprise. So just to explore, they took layers of neurons, which notoriously are cells that don't heal well. And they scratched a gap through it to mimic a wound. And then they put some of the anthobots in that gap. And some of the bots, simply just by bridging that gap actually help the neural tissue heal and the gap closed. The researchers don't quite understand why this happened, especially since these cells aren't

genetically modified to heal or anything. So this was really kind of an exciting, unexpected finding. Yeah. And how would this be used in medicine? Yeah, so I talked with the lead researcher, Gizam Gimushkaya, who published this study this week in the journal Advanced Science. And she says in the future, these anthrobots could be program to do everything from patrol the body, looking for tumors to treating arteries clogged with plaque. So maybe, you know, as the antibat is moving through, the artery, it encounters this plague, and then in return it turns on its filial sort of at a much faster rate to bulldoze through that plague and then clear it in that way. Yeah, and one of the key things is that the

anthropots could be made from the patient's own cells. So in theory, there's a lot fewer side effects than drugs or other forms of therapy. Got it. Okay. That's fascinating. Okay, from microscopic robots to the next story about micro-napping. This is a penguin that takes thousands of little naps every day. I love this story so much already. Yeah, actually 10,000 times. That's how many times they're kind of having this microsleep.

So a study published in science this past week found that chin-strap penguins during breeding season utilize microsleep, which is seconds long, to get over a little. 11 hours sleep a day. This is while living in a super noisy, hectic nesting colony. And this is the first time a species has been shown to have this extremely fragmented sleep over long periods of time, which is necessary for penguins, because one parent goes out feeding in the ocean for days and leaves the other parent to protect the eggs from predatory birds. And so that means that remaining parent needs to be constantly vigilant. And it seems like it does that by hacking naps.

Totally. I would love to do this. I would love to take thousands of micro-naps all day long. So what about humans? Can we learn anything from the chin-strap penguin? Yeah, so there is research in humans that shows that micro-naps can help with memory and that midday naps might be great for young, healthy people. But those human naps are all being measured in minutes. While these penguins, we are talking about just a few seconds.

Right. And I talked to one of the study researchers, Paul Antoine Liberale, and he wants us to be very cautious about making these human comparisons. This is not related to human physiology, and this won't tell us more about the function of sleep. Sorry, sorry, nodded off for a second. That little micro nap. Do not pull a penguin on us, Mary Louise. Back with you fully now.

And I do want to ask. We can't sustain those, you know? Indeed, sadly. How did they figure this out? How do you go about collecting data to figure out that penguins are napping so many times a day? So they built these little sleep logger devices that would make. measure the penguins brainwaves. And this was actually only supposed to be a trial run for the devices. But Paul Antoine said that catching the penguins and putting on the devices and

them retrieving them went so well that they were able to gather enough data to publish this paper. Yeah. And they did all of this in the penguin's natural habitat, which is a big deal because what little we know about sleep is from controlled settings. But how an animal sleeps in a lab doesn't tell us how it sleeps in the wild, like where sleep evolved. This study really advances sleep research, even if it doesn't help us humans with our sleep for now. Let's roll wide awake into the third and final story you have brought us. This is another animal, one that was thought to be extinct for decades by scientists. However, it was recently filmed for the first time by researchers at Oxford University. Tell all. Yeah, and the animal is,

drum roll, the Attenborough's long-beaked echidna. The Attenboroughs. Okay, I'm going to guess that's David Attenborough, the famous British naturalist. And then what was the rest of the name? Akidna. Yeah. And I would encourage you to Google one. They look like a cross between an anteater and a porcupine. And there's a few different types of echidnas. But this one, Attenborough's long beaked echidna, was rediscovered by scientists on an expedition this past summer in the Indonesian part of the island of New Guinea. Yeah. Our colleague Emma Bowman wrote about this discovery for NPR. It really is something like scientists on this expedition set up 80 different cameras for a month in an area

where they seen clues of the echidna. Here's the biologist who led the expedition James Kempton. It was the very last images from the final camera that we collected on the final day of the last ascent of the expedition. Those were the images of the echidna. And I ran into the living room of base camp and shouted, we found it, we found it. And that was the first proof of the animal anyone had seen since 1961. Since 1961. You can hear the excitement in his voice. I mean, I'm excited.

I've never heard of this animal, but I'm excited. Why is this so exciting for scientists? Yeah, well, to start out, I'm going to tell you why this is so exciting to me, and it's because a baby echidna is called a puggle. Oh, right, Louise, a puggle. Okay. Okay. But a big reason this animal is exciting to scientists is that this long beak echidna is part of a small

subgroup of mammals that include platypuses that lay eggs. So they represent this evolutionary split that occurred more than 200 million years ago when they diverge from the common ancestors of other mammals. Here's James Kempton again. And that's why it's so important because it's another guardian of this unique and fragile evolutionary history, which if it were to be lost would be an absolute tragedy. Mary Louise Kelly, thank you for hanging out as always. Thank you so much.

My total pleasure. Anytime. Before we head out, we want to take a minute to say thank you so much to our shortwave plus supporters and anyone listening who donates to public media. I mean, public media by definition means that you, the public, support it. Everything you hear from NPR Network really does depend on your contributions. And for anyone listening who isn't a supporter yet, right now is a great. time to get actively involved in creating a more informed public. That's our whole mission at NPR. It's why we're here. And if you like perks, Shortway Plus

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It was edited by Brent Bachman and Catherine Fox. Our showrunner is Rebecca Ramirez. Britt Hansen checked the facts and the audio engineers were Robert Rodriguez, as Quasi Lee and Maggie Luthar. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Anya Grundman is our senior vice president of programming. I'm Aaron Scott. And I'm Regina Barber.

Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR.