Quitting Smoking May Reawaken Healthy Cells, Why You Yawn During Exercise, and Telling the Age of Crime Scene Fingerprints

Curiosity Weekly

Warner Bros. Discovery

Self-improvement, Science, Astronomy, Education

4.6 • 935 Ratings

🗓️ 28 February 2020

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Learn about how quitting smoking may reawaken healthy cells; how researchers figured out how to tell the age of crime scene fingerprints to help investigators; and why you sometimes yawn while exercising or singing.

Quitting smoking doesn’t just slow lung damage, but can also reawaken undamaged cells by Grant Currin

Gallagher, J. (2020, January 29). Lungs “magically” heal damage from smoking. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51279355
Pfeifer, G. P. (2020, January 29). Smoke signals in the DNA of normal lung cells. Nature, 578(7794), 224–226. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-00165-7
Yoshida, K., Gowers, K. H. C., Lee-Six, H., Chandrasekharan, D. P., Coorens, T., Maughan, E. F., Beal, K., Menzies, A., Millar, F. R., Anderson, E., Clarke, S. E., Pennycuick, A., Thakrar, R. M., Butler, C. R., Kakiuchi, N., Hirano, T., Hynds, R. E., Stratton, M. R., Martincorena, I., … Campbell, P. J. (2020, January 29). Tobacco smoking and somatic mutations in human bronchial epithelium. Nature, 578(7794), 266–272. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-1961-1

It's been impossible to tell the age of crime scene fingerprints — until now by Grant Currin

Determining Fingerprint Age with Mass Spectrometry Imaging via Ozonolysis of Triacylglycerols. (2020, January 3). Analytical Chemistry. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.analchem.9b04765
Residues in fingerprints hold clues to their age. (2020, January 22). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-01/acs-rif012220.php

Why we yawn during exercise by Ashley Hamer (Listener question from Kate in Pennsylvania)

Provine, R. R., Tate, B. C., & Geldmacher, L. L. (1987). Yawning: No effect of 3–5% CO2, 100% O2, and exercise. Behavioral and Neural Biology, 48(3), 382–393. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0163-1047(87)90944-7
Massen, J. J. M., Dusch, K., Eldakar, O. T., & Gallup, A. C. (2014). A thermal window for yawning in humans: Yawning as a brain cooling mechanism. Physiology & Behavior, 130, 145–148. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physbeh.2014.03.032
The science of the exercise yawn. (2017). Furthermore from Equinox. https://furthermore.equinox.com/articles/2017/09/yawning
McKinney, James C. The Diagnosis and Correction of Vocal Faults. (2005). Google Books. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=znaCDwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=singing+yawn&ots=DKpXxdwhGJ&sig=IjgkdxkqyENjWLoXJTDaYB94G30#v=onepage&q=yawn&f=false

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Curiosity.com.
0:05.9	I'm Cody Goff.
0:06.8	And I'm Ashley Hamer.
0:08.1	Today you learn about how quitting smoking may reawaken healthy lung cells and how researchers figured out how to tell the age of
0:15.3	crime scene fingerprints to help investigators.
0:18.2	We'll also answer a listener question about how normal it is to yawn when you're exercising
0:22.3	or singing?
0:24.0	Satisfies some curiosity.
0:26.0	If you or someone you know has been thinking about quitting smoking,
0:31.0	then I've got some good news.
0:33.2	An international team of researchers has discovered something surprising about the lungs of people
0:38.1	who have stopped smoking. It turns out they can partially regenerate themselves, thanks to certain lung cells that are somehow
0:45.1	protected from the cancer causing chemicals in tobacco smoke.
0:49.4	This means that quitting smoking doesn't just slow the accumulation of further damage, it can also reawaken cells that have not been damaged.
0:58.0	So here's the science behind this pretty compelling reason to quit cigarettes for good.
1:02.0	There are more than 60 chemicals in tobacco. compelling reason to quit cigarettes for good.
1:02.8	There are more than 60 chemicals in tobacco smoke that cause the DNA in lung cells
1:07.8	to mutate.
1:08.8	We're talking somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 mutations per cell.
1:14.9	Some of those mutations cause cells to grow uncontrollably, and that's what causes lung cancer.
1:21.1	Experts used to think these mutations lasted forever, but there's new evidence that
1:25.1	your lungs protect a few healthy cells that can replace cells with mutated DNA
	...

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