MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Time now for our science news roundup from Short Wave. That is NPR's science podcast. I'm joined by the show's two hosts, Regina Barber and Emily Kwong. Hi, you two.
EMILY KWONG, BYLINE: Hi, Mary Louise.
REGINA BARBER, BYLINE: Hey.
KELLY: So you have, as always, brought us three science stories that caught your attention this week. What are they?
BARBER: So quitting smoking at any age could be good for your memory.
KWONG: We have a new way to support the language development of preemies.
BARBER: Plus an urban animal mystery.
KELLY: Wow. OK, let's start with smoking and memory. I didn't know there was a link.
KWONG: Yeah.
KELLY: Gina, kick us off.
BARBER: Yeah. So the rate of smoking cigarettes has declined since the 1960s. That's when Congress required warnings on cigarette boxes. And researchers have found that people are more likely to try to quit smoking when they're under 40.
KWONG: However, a new study in the Lancet Health Longevity journal shows quitting later in life can still be beneficial, and it could possibly lower your risk for dementia.
KELLY: And that's the interesting thing. I didn't realize there was a link between our brains, our memory and smoking.
KWONG: Yeah. So for that, we spoke to Mikaela Bloomberg, an epidemiologist and lead author of the study. And Mikaela said that smoking can damage small blood vessels in the brain. That can restrict oxygen flow, which can affect cognitive decline and lead to possible strokes.
KELLY: And was her study looking at the question of even if you quit well into adulthood, it's still beneficial?
BARBER: Yeah. Mikaela and her team looked at survey data of over 9,000 smokers from 12 different countries for almost two decades. Half of them quit smoking, and the other half continued. These surveys included cognitive tests participants took over the years. And what the results showed is that people who quit smoking in middle age or even older age scored better than those who never quit.
KELLY: So even quitting later in life can help your brain. I - and I guess there's been research showing that quitting smoking can be beneficial for other parts of your health as well, even later in life.
BARBER: Yeah.
KWONG: Yes. Yeah, quitting smoking is better for your heart health later in life. A study in 2024 showed that even quitting around the age of 75 can extend life expectancy and reduce your risk of heart disease.
BARBER: And so Mikaela - she wasn't surprised that quitting smoking would help the brain, too.
MIKAELA BLOOMBERG: What's good for your heart is good for your brain. So it's not an overly surprising result, but it's surprising in that we didn't see that the effect kind of weakened with age.
BARBER: Meaning quitting at any age seems to show a benefit. Now, Mikaela points out that the study can't definitively say good cognitive scores mean lower risk of dementia. But I talked to a physician who didn't work on the study, Neal Benowitz (ph), and he's very optimistic about the findings, saying that the cognitive tests are a good predictor of dementia later on.
KELLY: Topic 2 - the far other extreme end of life.
KWONG: Yes.
(LAUGHTER)
KELLY: Tell me about language development in premature babies.
KWONG: Yeah. So a full pregnancy term is about 40 weeks, and in the womb, a lot happens. And hearing develops very early. The fetal auditory system actually starts to become functional at 24 weeks.
BARBER: And as the weeks go by, the fetus can hear the sounds of the person carrying them. Here's how Melissa Scala put it. She's at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford.
MELISSA SCALA: You can hear mom talking all day long - right? - (laughter) 'cause they're sort of a captive audience.
KELLY: Totally a captive audience - you're stuck in your mom's tum the whole day long. I mean, that's true of all babies. Is there something distinct here about preemies?
BARBER: Yeah. So preemie babies - those are born before 37 weeks - they're at a higher risk for delays in language development. Among very pre-term babies, up to one-third can have problems with reading or speaking later on.
KWONG: And scientists suspect that one of the reasons may be that because preemies come out earlier, they're in the NICU and not getting to constantly eavesdrop on the sounds of speech like they would in the womb. The NICU sounds nothing like the womb. And parents do visit - right? - to do skin-to-skin contact, but they can't be in the NICU around the clock.
BARBER: So Melissa and her colleagues tried an intervention using sound.
KELLY: Sound.
BARBER: (Laughter).
KELLY: As a sound person, as a radio person, I'm totally intrigued. What kind of sound?
KWONG: They played a recording of their moms reading the book "Paddington Bear."
KELLY: Oh.
KWONG: Yeah.
BARBER: I know.
KWONG: So how this experiment worked is that 46 preemies already in the hospital's care were signed up, and the intervention group heard their mom's recording for 160 minutes every night. The book starts, Mr. and Mrs. Brown first met Paddington on a railway platform.
KELLY: I love this. I want to listen to my mom for 160 minutes (laughter) reading me "Paddington Bear." How did the preemie babies react? How did it affect their language development?
BARBER: Yeah, so it did help, like, compared to the control group, who didn't get the recordings. The babies in the intervention group had more mature white matter in key language areas of the brain. And the researchers published these results in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience this week.
KWONG: Now, scientists don't know the effect of this intervention long term. The study wasn't designed for that. It was a small cohort, just 46 babies. So Melissa says the plan is to repeat this intervention with a larger cohort of children who are even more premature and with whom the hospital can follow up in a year, in two years, to see how their language develops.
BARBER: And research like this has changed preemie care at the hospital. They now give all preemie parents free books to read and the chance to record their voices.
KELLY: I've got to think that's beneficial for the parents, too. That's...
KWONG: Yeah.
BARBER: It's so sweet.
KELLY: That's a whole nother study we need to do. OK, last one. Let's wrap up the urban animal mystery.
BARBER: (Laughter) Yes.
KWONG: I'm so excited about this. OK, Mary Louise, do you remember the 2024 viral sensation the Chicago rat hole?
KELLY: I'm so happy to tell you I do not.
(LAUGHTER)
KWONG: You're living life offline. We love that for you. OK. All right. So you know when someone makes a handprint in wet concrete, it hardens into a shape?
KELLY: Yeah.
KWONG: Picture a Chicago sidewalk where there's a whole imprint shaped kind of like a rat.
KELLY: Eugh (ph).
KWONG: That's what it is. Comedian Winslow Dumaine posted about visiting this so-called rat hole on social media, and people started flocking to it, leaving offerings. And there was even a wedding.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: We are gathered here today to marry man and man in front of the honorable Chicago rat hole.
(LAUGHTER)
BARBER: Yeah. And all this caught the attention of zoologist Michael Granatosky at the University of Tennessee. He studies how animals evolve their movements. And in his scientific opinion...
MICHAEL GRANATOSKY: It looks a whole lot like a rat, and so it's a good guess.
KELLY: A good guess. Was it the right guess?
BARBER: (Laughter).
KWONG: Well, that's where this mystery comes in, right? Like, Michael was seeing posts on social media where people were guessing it could be a squirrel 'cause it was next to a tree. And he thought...
GRANATOSKY: What a great way to actually try and show the public that, you know, all of us are doing science when we take guesses.
KWONG: So Michael's team decided to turn this event into a research project whodunit.
KELLY: Which is my - blowing my mind 'cause I'm...
(LAUGHTER)
KELLY: How do you scientifically prove that this was a rat...
BARBER: Well...
KELLY: ...Imprinted in the Chicago cement?
BARBER: Right. Science is amazing, right? So they collected pictures of the rat hole from the internet, since the actual imprint was actually removed last year. And using these pictures, they took a bunch of, like, body measurements, and they compared these measurements to taxidermied animals from the American Museum of Natural History - from rats and squirrels to mice and muskrats. And they ran a bunch of statistics, and they found...
GRANATOSKY: It is not a rat. It's definitely not a rat.
KWONG: (Laughter).
BARBER: It was a squirrel.
KELLY: A squirrel?
BARBER: Yeah. Chicago squirrel hole.
KELLY: Yeah, OK.
(LAUGHTER)
KELLY: What are we supposed to take away from this mystery solved?
KWONG: (Laughter) What are we supposed to take away?
BARBER: Yeah. Yeah. There is science. There's something to take away here. So other scientists we talked to say it's, like, a really clever way of highlighting how science is done. And Michael hopes it will encourage more people to explore the natural world.
KELLY: Explore the natural world...
BARBER: Yeah.
KELLY: ...Just like Regina Barber and Emily Kwong...
BARBER: That's right.
KELLY: ...From NPR's science podcast Short Wave. Thanks, you two.
KWONG: Thank you, Mary Louise.
BARBER: Thank you.
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